A Streetcar Named Desire 

Reviewed by Paul Birchall 
Boston Court Performing Arts Center 
Extended through April 1  

RECOMMENDED 

Blanche may have always depended on the kindness of strangers, but there’s very little strange about director Michael Michetti’s masterful production of Tennessee Williams’ ferocious perennial. Streetcar always strikes me as one of theater’s most dangerous works to present, as the fecund stew of lust, jealousy and mental illness requires a near-alchemical cleverness to perform. Too much subtext, the play becomes campy; too little, it’s just stale. 

Additionally, there’s also an issue with context: Even a modern classic like this one requires a reason to be presented or it comes across as recycled and tired. Michetti elegantly bypasses all these pitfalls by fashioning a production that’s fresh as a daisy and as powerful as a right hook from Stanley Kowalski. 

In the play, setting updated to contemporary New Orleans, prim Blanche (Jaimi Paige) shows up on the tenement doorstep of her pregnant sister Stella (Maya Lynne Robinson). Blanche, who has just lost the family plantation and has basically been run out of her home town, moves right into the tenement her sister shares with her husband, Stanley (Desean Kevin Terry) — and before long, tensions rise like the New Orleans humidity until fury and rage blast everywhere. 

Almost all aspects of the show seem tight and deliciously immediate. What is most interesting is that the play impacts with the same element of shock that audiences must have experienced when it premiered 70 years ago. This taut atmosphere is captured in several interesting ways: designer Efrem Delgadillo, Jr.’s set, with its two-story scaffolding, has a harrowingly claustrophobic yet down-market urban feel to it, while Sam Sewell’s urgent, live music echoes with tension, anger and energy. 

The casting is multiethnic, with Blanche played by a white performer and Stella and Stanley by African-American ones. The choice is not, I suspect, random, and adds a dynamic, almost disturbing tension to the interaction. It allows the play to hint at questions of privilege, and at the changing societal and racial dynamic in America. It’s not your mama’s Streetcar, but it has all the power and ferocity that the work should possess. 

The acting crackles. Robinson is an engaging, personable and oddly vulnerable Stella, and Terry makes a powerful, brooding Stanley, completely reinventing the Brando-esque paradigm. Paige imbues her Blanche with a collection of neurotic behaviors — nervous giggles, spiteful remarks she can’t help making, ejaculations of sheer terror — that brilliantly limn the portrait of Williams’ tragic, fallen Southern Belle. 

Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 N. Mentor Ave, Pasadena; Thurs.- Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; Extended through April 1.  (626) 683-6801(626) 683-6801 or www.bostoncourt.com. Running time: three hours with an intermission.