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A Streetcar Named Desire
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Live Arts Exchange at Bootleg Theater
Through October 25
RECOMMENDED:
It would be wildly hyperbolic to baldly declare Zoe Aja Moore as L.A.’s answer to Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte, at least based solely on the evidence of A Streetcar Named Desire, Moore’s somewhat pared but razor-smart and disarmingly disruptive revival of Tennessee Williams that is the centerpiece of this year’s Live Arts Exchange/LAX Festival at Bootleg Theater.
Yet with the memory of the 2011 LeCompte/Wooster Vieux Carré so fresh in mind, and given Moore’s similar predilections for meta-theatrics (albeit somewhat less baroque here than with LeCompte) and assemblage as dominant organizing principals in her mise-en-scène, it would be strange to not draw the comparison. Both women attack iconic texts and canonical playwrights less as revivals than as aggressive acts of recovery as they drill beneath the patina of cultural respectability to reclaim time-obscured or previously unexplored discourses.
In the case of Streetcar, Moore’s first coup comes via the simplicity of Liz Toonkel’s sleekly abstracted tenement apartment that is dominated by the steel-frame cage of a canopy double bed set in the middle of a boxing-ring styled square of audience seating. In Moore’s re-reading, sex is a decidedly martial, rather than marital, art.
Her second is to directly confront the play’s rather daunting cultural-elephant status by literally dragging the legacy and performances of Elia Kazan’s 1951 — and Hays Code-bowdlerized — film version onstage as actor Ryan Masson pulls out a MacBook to start the production by watching the film’s opening titles and sequence of Vivien Leigh’s arrival. It’s a gesture that both acknowledges Kazan’s ineradicable hold on the popular imagination even as it ingeniously sets up coup three: the inspired entrance of Andrea LeBlanc’s searing and rapturously full-fleshed Blanche. (The evening proves a marvel of dazzlingly emblematic, Moore-engineered entrances.)
The heart of any Streetcar, of course, beats in the indelible arias Williams penned for his most enduring and archetypal heroine. And LeBlanc’s rigorously nuanced delivery is on perfect pitch with the character’s brittle vulnerability even as the actress tempers Blanche’s emotional fragility with a surprising — and sizzling — undercurrent of feminine strength. This Blanche may be a somewhat battle-scarred Southern belle, but she’s not entirely out of Stanley’s weight class for the bruising, 11-round sexual prizefight to come.
To that end, Jesse Saler’s hulking, explicitly de-Brando-ized Stanley (all the performances of the strong supporting ensemble are carefully distanced from Kazan’s methody naturalism), who enters hooded like a boxer before a match, becomes an essay in brutally bigoted and brainless masculine force. Together with Cristina Fernandez’s deliriously submissive, almost masochistically hyper-sexualized Stella, they form a sort of tag team of patriarchal heteronormativity.
Likewise, Masson’s lanky and soft-spoken Mitch couldn’t be more physically or temperamentally removed from Karl Malden’s lumbering, middle-aged mama’s boy. Rather, in one of Moore’s more delicious ironies, it is quickly evident that, rather than Mitch, Masson is actually reincarnating Allan Grey, the “dead queer” from Blanche’s past whose suicide launches her tragic trajectory of unsatisfiable desire.
Buoyed by Katelan Braymer’s clever lights and Mikaal Sulaiman’s superbly atmospheric and iconoclastic sound design, Moore and her actors succeed in both a creditable homage to Williams even as they rehabilitate the relevance of his somewhat musty mid-century notions of gender for the post-Stonewall, third-wave feminism of the 21st century.
Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Westlake; Thurs. & Sat., 7 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through October 25. (213) 389-3856, liveartsexchange.org. Running time, One hour, 45 minutes.
