Tennessee Williams is a master of diffusely permeating the social consciousness and cultural lexicon. His inimitable style is why his works are held in the esteemed canon for theatre and film scholars alike, and the striking relatability of his stories has allowed for him to live on in popular culture memory. One could argue that works like Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were part of a movement that changed the tenor of popular dramaturgy, illuminating and excavating the unspoken ennui and displacement felt by a postwar generation that “had it all” and yet had nothing. I often like to think that had Septimus Warren Smith’s fate been different in Mrs. Dalloway, he would’ve found himself, a few years older and even more distraught, in a Tennessee Williams play.
In Williams’ impressive oeuvre, his 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire holds a coveted position, both for its prodigious writing and for its rich characters (that often lead to career-defining portrayals). The story is well-known: Blanche DuBois finds herself penniless and displaced and must move into a drab tenement with her younger sister, Stella, and her boorish, volatile husband, Stanley. As her dissatisfaction for her sister’s living conditions and spouse escalate, Blanche clashes with Stanley, ultimately resulting in a horrific assault and psychological undoing. Devastating yet sensationally popular in its era, Streetcar continues to be a go-to for theatre companies, but the multitudinous moral issues infused in the narrative (both intended and unintended) make Streetcar a unique challenge for modern depictions.
The trickiness of Streetcar did all but frighten away the extraordinary team assembled by Pittsburgh Classic Players for their upcoming adaptation of Williams’ classic. In a conversation with Pittsburgh Classic Players Co-Founder Brett Sullivan Santry (who will also take on the role Stanley) and Streetcar Director Shannon Knapp, we discussed the journey they’ve embarked on to bring their vision of Streetcar to life. Their journey began years ago, fittingly for the play, in a bar, where the idea to adapt Williams’ play was an excited post-curtain call discussion between friends and creative collaborators, Alyssa Herron, Knapp and Santry. After a long period of percolation, Herron reached out to Knapp with the express intent of Knapp directing her as she took on the iconic and fraught role of Blanche DuBois. Herron’s vision had a caveat: as Knapp recounted, that “[Alyssa] said ‘I want Brett to be Stanley,’…and I fell over.”
Knapp’s flabbergasted reaction echoed both the utter elation and subliminal terror of the core cast as Pittsburgh Classic Player’s version of Williams’ play materialized, and the reality of embodying prismatic and, in many ways, problematic characters. “Full disclosure,” Knapp remarked lovingly of her two leads, Herron and Santry, “both of them are scared to do these roles.” Gifted and seasoned actors, Herron and Santry’s trepidation over embodying Blanche and Stanley—and, as Santry added laughingly, Knapp’s shared fear about helming such a show—had nothing to do with their irrefutable talents and abilities to execute the roles, but rather the enormous weight the characters carry in a modern context.
As Santry astutely noted, “there is baggage anytime [that] anyone brings to a role,” but the infinity of sentiments attached to the characters of Streetcar and the preconceptions (and misconceptions) a performer harbors when delving into these roles can take a unique toll. Stanley and Blanche are solidified in the cultural memory as vexing caricatures: Stanley, as a brutish, chauvinistic, simple man who manages to captivate and arouse as a sex symbol; and Stella, a pitiful, faltered Southern belle whose deterioration and trauma is less about her anguish and more about a grand metaphor. What’s more, the two leads and the other characters Streetcar, are dictated and driven to disarray by impulses and ideals that at best are anachronistic, and at worst, the epitome of triggering to modern audiences.
In order to create the most viscerally engaging and authentic Streetcar that tackles the onerously problematic elements of Williams’ script, the creative team assembled by Pittsburgh Classic Players has worked under unique guiding principles. Primarily, as Knapp and Santry both pointed out, the team understands that “most interpretations of [Streetcar] have gotten it fundamentally wrong.” Most critically, the misconstrued paradigm that renders Blanche as pathetic and helpless.
The idea that Blanche is a “wilted flower” as Knapp described is a key issue, and Santry noted “Blanche is quite frankly at the prime of her life, but is crushed by the patriarchal conception of what she should be.” By emphasizing Blanche’s vitality and power that is tragically and traumatically stripped of her, Pittsburgh Classic Players’ Streetcar is an adaptation that exposes the inherent misogyny and routinized degradation of women, and female survivors of assault, that has always existed at the heart of Williams’ story. Herron’s impassioned connection to and portrayal of Blanche, which embraces Blanche’s unpleasantries as well as her oft-diminished strengths, is the astronomical first step to rectifying the fundamental errors of so many Streetcar iterations. Santry discussed his confrontation of the inherited privileges he and Stanley share as heterosexual, white, cis-men, and understanding that Stanley is a man who “walks through life with blinders on.” Stanley functions with the machine-like diligence of the soldier he was trained to be in WWII, and he has “come into what he’s fought for.” Anything that conflicts or exists outside of his blinders, or threatens his perfect job, perfect wife, perfect home etc. cannot be processed and must be attacked. Santry noted that understanding this quality of Stanley doesn’t necessarily humanize him, but provides a deeper context that is inaccessible in classic portrayals of Stanley.
Another crucial element to bringing Streetcar to modern audiences, and an element of preeminence to Knapp, Santry and Herron throughout every stage of actualizing their vision, was confronting the issues of race and trauma that riddle the story. Knapp made a conscious effort to have a cast and crew that reflected a diversity that is absent in the original script, written for an all-white cast. Some of the subtle changes were those like the addition of an original song written by Susana Garcia Barragan in Spanish (that is part of an original score composed by Nick Stamatakis) to highlight multiracial voices that are subjected to erasure or tokenization in the original. More profound, of course, was the need to have a multiracial cast. Pittsburgh theatre elite Jalina McClarin, cast as Stella, Blanche’s put-upon sister and Stanley’s beleaguered wife, and Chris Collier, cast as Mitch, Stanley’s poker buddy and Blanche’s suitor, have transcended the classic roles through their masterful performances and their distinct perspectives that help transform Streetcar into an acute observation of the racial and classist presumptions inherent to the script. Moreover, diversity in casting heightened the vigilance to and sensitivity around racially charged moments in the story that often are glossed over or bungled in insulated all-white renditions of Streetcar.
Intimacy direction and mental-health check-ins have been the biggest boon in Pittsburgh Classic Player’s adaption process. Elena Falgione serves as the primary Intimacy Assistant for the show, an invaluable position whose responsibilities center around touching base with cast and crew members individually, as well as in a group, to ensure that the extremely sensitive topics in the play—sexual assault and trauma; PTSD; mental illness; domestic violence and racial issues— were being handled and processed as appropriately as possible. Having an Intimacy Assistant actively involved in the rehearsals is tantamount to bringing Streetcar to life in a modern context, particularly where depictions of mental health and sexual trauma are concerned. Moreover, Knapp and Santry remarked that separating art and self was mandatory to authentically playing Williams’ characters. As humans, the actors could understand the abhorrence of characters actions or behaviors, but to live in the reality of the world Williams created, Knapp insisted that “you have to believe in your own good intentions.”
Knapp and Santry stated that if the audience is wildly uncomfortable by intermission, then the team of Streetcar will know they’re doing their job well. Streetcar, like so many of Williams’ works, was not designed to have an audience watch the characters dissolve, but feel as though they are excruciatingly participating in that dissolution. Pittsburgh Classic Players aims to honor that original Williams spirit while going the necessary step further to present a Streetcar that is self-reflexive and astutely analyzing certain systems of privilege. It won’t be so simple to rely on the kindness of strangers after witnessing this powerful reimagining.
Pittsburgh Classic Players’ Streetcar Named Desire runs July 19th-28th at the Spartan Community Center of Hazelwood. For ticket information and more, visit their site.