Season Finale! Last chance to get your date night on! Hurry before tickets are gone!
So the first thing that greets us as we enter the Firehouse Theatre is a live jazz band and a bar, and I’m thinking this is my kind of theatre! Welcome to New Orleans!
That’s just one of the ways that director Tawnya Pettiford-Wates does a superb job of really taking us there to post-World War II French Quarter, with all of its noise (music, laughter, merchants calling, neighbors fighting and having raucous sex), celebration, suffering and chaos. It is the perfect setting for the joys and tragedies of the three main characters.
Joseph Carlson does a great job of capturing Stanley Kowalski’s energetic machismo, which can be sexy, intimidating or just plain hilarious depending on the context. Examples: Stanley’s “Raging Bull” moment when he drunkenly slaps his wife Stella during the poker game, soon followed by his comically loud and confused protesting when his buddies stick his head under cold water to try to sober him up, then a short while later, virile and sensual make-up love-making with Stella. (Too bad there were too few scenes where we also got to see the vulnerability and hurt beneath his bravado.)
The romantic chemistry between Stella (Lauren Marie Hafner) and Stanley seems so genuine that it hurts to see them fight. However, I must admit to finding Stella more feisty and sultry than self-effacing. This makes for a very different dynamic between both Stella and Stanley, and Stella and her sister Blanche Dubois (Bianca Bryan).
Blanche in this version comes across as such a broken, fragile, sympathetic character, that we almost completely forgive her blatant lying and constant boozing. We empathize with the heartache and loss that she had suffered. And this fragility really works in terms of the tender chemistry between her and her beau (Stanley’s best friend) Harold “Mitch” Mitchell (Charley Raintree). Even though I already knew how the play would end, I actually found myself hoping that they might actually wind up together! However, I did think that Blanche could use a little bit more… smolder, in order to really bring out the subtext of the sexual chemistry between her and her sister’s husband Stanley (which eventually leads up to their shocking confrontational bedroom scene).
But overall, the play cycles nicely between dramatic tension, sadness, regret and humor, just the way real life does. Well worth seeing!
Info: (804) 355-2001, http://www.firehousetheatre.org/a-streetcar-named-desire/
Tickets: https://www.boxofficetickets.com/bot/wa/event?id=226295
