Review: The Rocky Yet Enduring Journey of Salindia's Trem Bernama Desire

All photos are by @sewaktumotret on Instagram, via Salindia Teater

On January 18, 2025, Salindia Teater performed Trem Bernama Desire – translated from Tennessee Williams’s quintessential A Streetcar Named Desire – for a one-show engagement at Graha Bhakti Budaya, Taman Ismail Marzuki. This performance was a highly anticipated one, owing to both A Streetcar Named Desire’s reputation and the history behind this particular production.

Trem Bernama Desire is directed by Nadine Nadilla and produced by Ira Paseban. Additionally, the show features scoring by music director Refo Trixy and his music team (Rico Alexander, Mario Gilbert, Gregorius Adi, Andreas Marcello, and Ridho Uffair), set design by Arya Putra, and lighting design by Mametz Slasov.

While I typically try to delve too deep into a show’s production history, I believe it is prudent to do so with this production in particular, especially on how it might have impacted the show.

Salindia Teater’s Trem Bernama Desire was first performed on Jumat, 6 September 2024 at Gedung Kesenian Miss Tjitjih as part of Festival Teater Jakarta’s Central Jakarta division. Festival Teater Jakarta (Jakarta Theater Festival) or FTJ is a longstanding theater festival held in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta.

This September production, featuring the same creative leads and main cast, earned 10 nominations and 5 awards, ensuring its qualification to the main FTJ competition, joining groups from the other divisions. Notably, Trem Bernama Desire won Best Group 1, Best Director, Best Music Arranger, Best Leading Actress, and Best Supporting Actress in the Central Jakarta division.

However, on October 9, 2024, according to a chronological account released by Salindia Teater, communication broke down between Salindia Teater and the FTJ committee. On that date, an audience was held between two female Salindia Teater representatives and members of the FTJ committee (who happened to be all males) regarding the scheduling of their show for the main FTJ competition.

An uninvited actor from another theater group made a sexually charged comment towards the director, followed by a series of personal attacks, and the committee failed to respond to the situation accordingly at first. On the same day, Salindia Teater pulled out from FTJ and released a statement on their Instagram account.

This incident incited many reactions from the theater and arts community, both from groups and individuals. Dewan Kesenian Jakarta (Jakarta Arts Council), the institute behind the festival, also released a statement condemning the offender’s actions and promising to take appropriate action.

After a period of uncertainty regarding the show’s fate, on November 23, 2024, Salindia Teater shared a poster of their next Trem Bernama Desire show, to be held on January 18, 2025. This review concerns said production.

As mentioned, Trem Bernama Desire is an Indonesian translation of A Streetcar Named Desire, translated by Litany Audrey Nainggolan and Nadine Nadilla.

It tells the story of Stella (Litany Audrey Nainggolan) and Stanley (Firqi Hidayatullah), a couple living in New Orleans. Their dysfunctional daily life is thrown into further disarray when Stella’s sister arrives: Blanche DuBois (Nadine Nadilla), an ex-socialite trying to hang on to her glory days.

Despite losing the family’s plantation, Blanche is in deep denial, seeing this new destitution as merely a phase. She even continuously mentions a supposed lover – the captain of a grand cruiser who will sweep her off her feet back to the lap of luxury. Meanwhile, Stella has to endure verbal and even physical abuse from Stanley, even as she’s bearing his child. This untenable tension between harsh reality and escapist fantasy eventually spirals everyone into a bleak, unforgiving ending with Blanche at the center.

A Streetcar Named Desire has earned a reputation of being a legendary, seminal American play for its depiction of the complex interplay between economic reality and personal relationships. Even now, more than 75 years after its premiere, its relevance is undoubtable, its message still just as relevant.

Therefore, Salindia Teater’s decision to bring this work is in itself worthy of praise. And the team took it further by translating the script to Bahasa Indonesia, making it accessible for a wider audience as language is still often a barrier for many local theatergoers.

Of course, the quality of the translation is always a source of concern, particularly for such a revered piece of theater. From what I can discern from the performance, the translation is of fine quality. The resulting script manages to balance keeping the lines natural-sounding while imbuing it with a heightened dramatic tension one would expect from a play.

Unfortunately, the delivery is marred by a few factors. First, one of the actors would often deliver their lines in English, making the conversations bilingual. Deliberate or not, this has the effect of making the performance sounds rather more modern than it should be. Most of the audience are likely to associate the simultaneous usage of Bahasa Indonesia and English with “Bahasa Jaksel”, a tendency of South Jakartan youths to mix the two aforementioned languages. Hence, it might bring a sense of disconnect with the show’s late 1940s setting.

Second, some of the actors have a tendency to say their lines very quickly – perhaps due to their heightened emotions – to the point of blurring their words. And thirdly, the classic problem of sound engineering. There were even a few times where an actor’s microphone wasn’t turned on on time.

All these problems combined made the performance difficult to follow at times. It is a shame too, since there are a lot of details about the characters’ thoughts, world view, and relationships expressed through the words they speak. Missing these likely lessened the impact of the play as a whole to the audience.

That being said, the actors made up for it in other areas. In particular, the interaction between Stella and Blanche feels authentic to the experience of adult siblings whose lives have drifted apart, yet bound together by lingering familial affection. The body language and pacing helped in conveying the relationships where the line delivery might have fallen short.

Watching the two actresses interact is the highlight of the play, as the contrasting personalities of their roles are truly compelling. Stella is conflicted and trying to convince herself that she’s satisfied with the life she lives, despite Blanche – perhaps inadvertently – showing her that it is less than ideal. Meanwhile, Blanche is deeply entrenched in her escapist fantasies, but having her head in the clouds lends her a perspective that things could be better. She might be delusional, but there is bittersweet optimism to be found there.

Then there is the matter about scenes involving Stanley. His interactions with the two women – Stella and Blanche – always involve some level of animosity and abuse. And when his temper flares up, which is often, his aggression is in full display with shouting and even physical confrontation. This is always harrowing to see and, indeed, it might be what the direction wants to convey – that some men are always on the verge of violent outburst. But the way his level of intensity stays at the same, excessive level on different scenes can make it a bit predictable, if not tiring.

At its heart, A Streetcar Named Desire (and thus Trem Bernama Desire) is a story of everyday, although deeply flawed, people. The plot concerns neither conspiracies nor wars, but personal secrets and conflicting worldviews. The decision to further push the theatricality by portraying these conflicts through big acting choices is interesting to see. It does make the tension more readily apparent in place of subtlety and subtext. This approach might connect better with some Indonesian audiences.

There might also be a physical factor to consider. Graha Bhakti Budaya is a much bigger venue than Gedung Kesenian Miss Tjitjih, seating 900 people compared to 300 people, respectively. The director and artistic team have surely made adjustments to the new space.

Other than the grandiose acting, the set in particular is noticeably vast, filling almost the whole stage. It portrays Stella and Stanley’s home as well as the neighboring houses. Similarly, the director employs ensemble members acting as the people of New Orleans, placing Trem Bernama Desire’s main story in the context of the society that the characters live in. It juxtaposes the main trio with the larger community, showing that their conflict is both unique (due to Blanche’s disruptive arrival) yet still not divorced from their cultural context at large. The other households are similarly explosive powder kegs and Blanche is just unfortunate enough to be the spark for her sister’s particular house.

Interestingly, this production also makes use of musical scoring. The music team plays live to highlight certain scenes and to tide the set changes over. The lively music might be a bit jarring at times compared to the play’s story, but it doesn’t get used often enough to be distracting.

What does stand out is the addition of a musical break scene where Stanley and his gang sing and dance along to Barry Manilow’s hit song Copacabana. The song was released in 1978, making it anachronistic with the show’s setting in the 1940s. To be fair, not everyone will be cognizant of both of these facts. But even disregarding that, a musical interlude feels rather incongruent within the play.

Trem Bernama Desire is truly a fascinating production. It had to weather a storm on its journey to the stage, and the show itself has its rough edges. But behind all of it is a story of perseverance, of Teater Salindia picking themselves up and adapting to the cards they’re dealt with. There surely were a lot of compromises that had to be made and a lot of lessons to learn, especially for a very new group (they were founded in 2021). With the resolve that the theater has shown through Trem Bernama Desire, I look forward to their next production. Hopefully, the road will be less bumpy.
 

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