BWW Reviews; A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Travels Straight to the Heart at APT

On a Wisconsin evening that resembed a humid New Orleans's summer, Tennessee Wiilliams' Pultizer-Prize winning play A Streetcar Named Desire produced a humbling reverence for the Southern drama on stage at American Players Theatre (APT). Two people traveled from Maryland to see family working at APT, and had already attended several productions at both theatres. Accustomed to East Coat entertainment, which included New York, the couple concluded APT's weekend performance of Streetcar, "Amazing.. We've never seen a good one [production]."

Perhaps Williams' iconic play written in 1947 brings New Orleans directly to Sping Green at the Up the Hill Theatre. Director William Brown moved the original setting to the early 1960's, a time when Blanche DuBois could resemble a downtrodden Jackie O dressed in her pillbox hats and sheaths designed by Rachel Anne Healty, the Mississippi want-to-be version of East Coast upper crust society. French and New Orleans cutlure connect when Blanche creates her unique brand of magic to hide the horrible realities in her life. APT''S renowned Tracy Michelle Arnold captures the essence of Blanche's dignity and denouement in her portrayal of a woman at her wit's end, in income, society and spirit, unable to cope with the conflicts of desires and deaths in her life any longer.

Real life partners Eric Parks and Cristina Panfilio inhabit Stanley and Stella Kowalski with their own animal chemistry, palpable on stage and in the audience. Panfilio's silm, toned body matches Parks' inherent display of machismo and contrasts the elegant Arnold's, which further defines the differences between the two sisters's fates even thoguh their childhoods were similar. Panfilio delvers intense affection to asauge Blanche's peculiar predicaments, while their sisterly competiton for each other remains visceral.

There are few winners in this classic Willimms' drama depciting the romantic versus realistic approach to life. Although at the end scene, perhaps Stella becomes more romantic than Blanche ever could be in believing Stanley's stories. In between the disruptive family dynamics, Tim Gittings gave Mitch, Blanche's admirerer, a quiet intelligence, the gentlemanly support Blanche desired to escape her desperate circumstances, and then her fading mental stability, at first endearing..

Brown directs the stellar cast including LeShawn Banks, Danny Martinez, Demetria Thomas and Jonathan Smoots to name several without delivering too much sympathy for Blanche. He also allows Stanley to reflect his humanity alongside the neanderthal man Blanche perceives him to be. Realities reflected in Stanley's remorse when he mistreats Stella, and then his conscious pride for his newborn, however cruel his behavior towards Blanche remains. Entrenched in these characters' intimate lives, the audience envelops their entire humanity, for better or worse.

A sensual set adorned with iron work banisters along the steps and accented by ferns and palm trees placed in clusters offers a shabby depiction of Southern charm. Designed by Kevin Depinet, the stage scenery adds to the Louisiana ambiance in this boarderline tenement disguised by Blanche's bohemian effort to dress the tiny apartment with a paper lantern over the naked light bulb, new bedspread atop a wrought iron bed and soft toss pillows thrown nochanlantly against the headboard. Everyone eventually becomes naked in this intimate space, although they try to cover their fears and insecurities with paper-thin emotions.

The scenery distills the metaphorical light between the romaticists and realists, providing an illusion of civility to this quickly unraveling Kowalski living arrangement placed alongside the dark underpinnings in these characters's lives: violence, drinking, gambling and suspending the truth..There's no altering the facts that Williams' play exposes the cruelty one human being can inflcit on another, even in these very close personal quarters where the actions can remain in the shadows and only the audience may acknowledge what happens inside their walls.

These events might be the greatest gift Williams gives to his audience, in any place or time, dramtizing that communications and interactionss between any two persons can be cruel or kind, healing or hurting. Blanche expresses her feelings on these relationships when she says, "Somethings are forgiveable. Delieberate cruelty in not forgiveable, It is the most unforgivable thing in my opinion, and the one thing which I have never, ever been guilty."

Who has been guitly of a minor cruelty? Deliibrate cruelty? Anyone in the audience will contemplate their actions towards another human being and then.decide for themselves. Can empathy shine even in a run-down tenenment or rich Southern plantation? Seduced by this exquisite, brilliantly polished and sterling production of Streetcar, the audience travels the lines between desires, spoken and unspoken, and deaths straight into the human heart. Who does this better than the master playwrright and poet Williams when he says: What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no. it's curved like a road between the mountains."

Take the theatrical road round the curves into Williams' intense, private struggles at American Plaeyrs Theatre, which was as the one couple in the audience exclaimed, "Absolutely Amazing."

American Players Theatre presents A Streetcar Named Desire at Up the Hill Theatre in Sping Green through the summer season. For infomraiton, performance times and schedules, or tickets, pleas call 608.588.2361 or visit www.americanplayers.org.

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