So, when I heard Cate Blanchett was in A Streetcar Named Desire down at BAM, I decided I had avoided theatre long enough.
I don’t tend to go to live theatre. It stresses me out. I get nervous for the performers to the point that I can’t enjoy the show because I am terrified that some disaster will occur. WHAT IF SOMEONE MESSES UP OH GOD?
(I trace this back to my mom taking me to see Annie Get Your Gun as a traveling production when I was maybe seven years old, and the bird not falling from the cage when Annie shot it, so there was this long horrible silence while everyone waited for the bird to fall before they started up again, and then later the bird fell down in the middle of a musical number and it landed on someone’s head and they had to pretend it didn’t happen, BUT IT DID. I have been to live theatre since, but I will never forget the horrible, horrible sound of the fourth wall breaking.)
On the other hand, Cate Blanchett.
Was I a fool? No. I was going to stand in line with my friend and get tickets no matter how many trips it took.
Trips it took: one. (I’ve never had such good ticket karma!) We bought tickets off a couple who couldn’t make their actual performance night. The seats said, “Cushion,” which they explained meant on the stage. We had no idea what this meant, and wondered where the hell we’d end up. We figured – behind some plywood.
What they meant by “on the stage”: TWO FEET FROM THE SET. OH MY GOD. We were so close to the stage that if anyone had dropped a prop at any point, it would have landed on my foot. During the curtain call I kept making eye contact with Cate Blanchett, because she was so close it was like being at a cocktail party with her, only she’s the most amazing actress of all time and you’re a dork with a dusty ass from sitting on the floor.
(P.S. I was wearing a black dress over pants, which I thought might be unfashionable, but turns out to be the best thing ever when you’re sitting on the ground for three and a half hours. Oh dowdy fashion sense, never leave me!)
How I feel about Tennessee Williams in general: Merp. I mean, iconic, but heavy on the melodrama and not so kind to the ladies, so I have mixed feelings.
How I feel about A Streetcar Named Desire in particular: I first saw it as a play-within-a-movie that Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken did in “Who Am I This Time?” which aired on PBS or something when I was a teeny person. I managed to scrounge a DVD of years later and watch regularly because I’m a huge nerd. In it, Susan is a mousy phone rep at a bank in the 60s, and Christopher is the totally socially inept hardware-store employee who comes to life onstage, and they’re part of a community-theatre production of Streetcar with her as Stella and him as Stanley, and I remember watching the little scenes of them rehearsing and thinking, “Wait, what the hell is this?”
And that’s how I felt about every version of this play I had ever seen right up until the lights went out in the Harvey Theatre.
How I felt about Streetcar Named Desire after that: …ooooooooh, I get it.
See, Blanche DuBois has the capacity to be SUCH a terrible character, a vicious caricature of the Southern Belle who loses her looks and slowly becomes a laughingstock, and lives in a dreamworld because the play told her to seem as fragile as possible. (In more than one version I’ve seen, Stanley ends up positioned as the play’s hero, which, no thank you.)
This production positioned Blanche as a scrapper, a fighter who will use any weapon she can find, sometimes until the gun is empty, and even then she keeps firing.
Why this works:: Cate Blanchett. There are no words. Her performance is gripping and exhausting and funny (her Blanche is self-aware, and it’s awesome), and by the last few scenes no one in the theatre was moving. I don’t think anyone was BREATHING.
Trying to describe her performance beyond that is pointless; she’s an absolute genius in her craft, and has the luminousness you always hear about in Empire magazine profiles but dismiss as hyperbole (not hyperbole, OMG), and she completely overshadowed everyone else on the stage. Not because she upstaged them, but because you just can’t not look at her, because whatever little thing she’s doing is so completely absorbing that you’re afraid to miss something.
The good news is that Joel Edgerton, who made a total upgrade from “Gawain in that terrible King Arthur movie” to “Acting with Cate Blanchett,” was a great Stanley. In any other production he would have been the focal point; he brings to life the part of Stanley that’s threatened and awash in a world where he never feels adequate, and has no trouble conveying the magnetism that draws Stella to him. (The stage directions must have read exclusively, “And Then Stanley Takes Off His Shirt,” is all I’m saying.)
The thing is, so much of the play hinges on that first meeting between Stanley and Blanche; it sets the tone for the entire struggle that follows. Most of the time that moment, for one reason or another, doesn’t work – Stanley barrels her over and we lose a heroine, or Blanche’s vibe is wrong, or something.
This time, when he came in the door of the dingy, cramped apartment set and clapped eyes on Blanche, the theatre was SILENT, because they recognized each other immediately as a pair of people just barely holding it together in a zero-sum game, and for the first time I felt that little ping of inevitability that this play needs to play out as a Greek tragedy and not a soap opera.
(There was also a lot of heat, and not the flirty desperate-Blanche thing that sometimes happens, but that thing where every time they’re close to each other on the stage you hold your breath.)
Watching Cate slowly fall apart, and Stanley trying to pull her apart because he Just Has To, was tense and amazing and basically the best version of this play ever, and I count the movie.
Also, it was EXHAUSTING. We were so close that every facial expression registered, which was amazing, but it also meant three hours of sensory overload, and by the end of it everyone in the stage seats was so gutted that we all sort of had to stumble up to clap. (Plus, our butts were numb. That is a long play, and those are thin cushions.)
If you have time to run to Brooklyn and stand in the ticket line, there seems to be a regular degree of success there, and it is absolutely worth the price of admission. Go. GO GO GO GO GO.
