A Streetcar Named Desire

There are some plays that cry out for reinvention, for some new angle of approach with which to breathe life into an over-familiar narrative. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, so deeply rooted in a specific time and place, is not one of them.

Director John Miller-Stephany concurs. “One of the things I pride myself on doing is getting out of the way of the play,” he says. “There’s not going to be some wild concept [in the Guthrie production]. I don’t think the play would be served by that.”

The steamy, tragic New Orleans story of Stanley and Stella Kowalski, and cousin Blanche DuBois, remains iconic because it is one of the 20th century’s most tempestuous, sophisticated works. The Guthrie has not done Streetcar since 1975, but Miller-Stephany acknowledges that more ghosts hover over this play “than just about any other contemporary play: Jessica Tandy’s ghost, Marlon Brando’s, Vivien Leigh’s. One has to acknowledge them, appreciate them—and then let them go away.”

Ricardo Antonio Chavira, from TV’s Desperate Housewives, is cast as the brutal, deeply ambiguous Stanley Kowalski, the post–World War II anti-hero whose collision with Blanche’s deceptions fuels a particularly American story.

“Tennessee Williams called the play a ‘tragedy of misunderstanding,’ and I wholeheartedly agree with that,” says Miller-Stephany. “There is no clear-cut hero or villain”—which is one of the reasons it retains its appeal after more than half a century. It also contains a deep aversion to moral proscription, volcanic roles for the leading actors, and the rhythm of Williams’s lyrical, melodic dialogue.

Streetcar may live in a specific time and place, but that location doesn’t lose its evocative power when the play is done well, straight up, without any extra adornment or invention. July 3–August 29. Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls., 612-377-2224, guthrietheater.org