Don't Miss Marin Theatre's STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE AT MARIN’S BOYER THEATRE

Some plays never get old and this gem by Tennessee Williams is one of them. It tells it like it was and sadly how it still is in far too many ways. When she was too young to understand the implications of beauty and bonding, Blanche DuBois (Carrie Paff) married a delightful boy who was gay. When she discovered his sexual preference, she recoiled from him and he killed himself because he couldn’t face who he was. That sounds pretty extreme here in California, but I grew up in Ohio at a time when gay men didn’t dare admit their sexual preferences much less act on them.

I can remember when being gay was labeled degenerate and I can remember how that label destroyed lives without mercy. I can remember when a woman’s only hope for security was to find a man to care for her and I can still feel the destruction that socially accepted attitude caused in creative, ambitious minds. My mind’s eye still pictures those dynamic women of the forties trapped into teaching school or being secretaries. They did not dare to allow themselves to grow in unconventional ways. They were pitied by all the far less imaginative, complacent housewives who found the guy, got their house and stayed home, bearing children, doing housework and baking endless batches of cookies.

Yes, it is a new world now where women hold jobs and have adventures never imagined in the forties. Still, I am not convinced that attitudes have changed as much as we say they have. Women still believe marriage is the ideal and when they couple a career with being a wife and mother they end up working twice as hard to become half as much. Indeed, there are more Blanches in this world than we care to admit.

There are more Stellas as well; girls who really want to become “the little woman” because it is more comfortable and more predictable than trying to become themselves.

When you push any living thing into a corner and take away its options for acceptable survival bit by bit, it is going to carve a new pathway all its own, one that might seem perverted, illogical or even sick. Yet, if it offers hope to someone desperate to find security, it is the road that will be followed. Blanche is such a woman: no money, no preparation to forge an independent life, no confirmation of her worth as a human being except in her own picture of herself. “How strange that I should be called a destitute woman when I have all these treasures in my heart, “ she says.

Those treasures no more real than her self image and she knows that. Her bank account is an empty chamber that must be filled somehow, some way and that search and its consequences form the plot of a moving, powerful play.

Jason Minadakis directed this glimpse into another world not so far removed from the one we live today and he has created an amazingly sensitive and touching tragedy on the Marin Theatre stage. “I fell in love with this marvelous play the first time I read it,” he says. “It burst off the page and into my imagination as the most poetic, lyrical cry of anguish, love, frustration and passion that I had experienced.”

Carrie Paff is Blanche DuBois, distraught, driven and forced into solutions her pride will not name and her heart cannot accept. Her sister Stella is a woman in love not just with her rough and tumble husband, but with a life that is predictable and very real; one where we are not afraid to face ugliness and beauty because it reveals truth. Arwen Anderson is Stella, Blanche’s younger sister and she has found just the right note for her character, sympathetic to her sister, loving to her husband and willing to sacrifice softening the harsh edges of reality for a life that doesn’t hide its desires, but takes what it wants on its own terms.

Daniel Thomas May is a hateful, crude Stanley, violent and crafty when he is after his due. Gabriel Marin is Mitch, the guy who thinks perhaps Blanche is the princess she says she is. He discovers that she is tarnished and he cannot see beyond her past. She has sold herself to anyone who will give her the love she needs and she saw her behavior as her only option.

Blanche DuBois tried to convince herself by telling others that she is a delicate, wronged Southern belle. She lied to herself so much that she can no longer see truth. She only sees that she wants her life to be. “I want magic,” she explains. “I tell things the way they should be.”

This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948 and it still mesmerizes its audiences. “Williams’ plays give life to a South that is both fact and fiction,” says Minadakis. “An epic tapestry of a place connected by history, social conventions, food, music, people, geography and of course, stories.”

He is a writer who can peel away artificiality and dig into the very core of what makes us human beings. The Marin Theatre Company has given us a powerful interpretation of this classic work, one you will not soon forget.

If you go:

Performances through April 20; Tuesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday at 8 PM; Wednesdays at 7:30 pm. Sunday evenings at 7 PM

Matinees Saturdays April 5 & 19 and every Sunday at 2 pm

Where:

Marin Theatre Company,

397 Miller Avenue in Mill Valley.

Tickets:

$30-$50 with $10 discount for seniors on weekday and Saturday matinees.

415 388 5208 or www.marintheatre.org