Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review Fever Dream: Streetcar at Everyman Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 18, 2016 Tennessee Williams‘ A Streetcar Named Desire is atmospheric, outsized, swampy, passionate, quirky, in short Southern Gothic. In most respects, Streetcar is therefore the polar opposite of Death of a Salesman, the play with which it is […]
Morisseau’s explanation of the Detroit riots makes a lot of sense, and resonates with my understanding of what happened last year in Baltimore. Morisseau’s thesis is that the black citizens of Detroit were not crazy, just reacting to an ongoing culture of police abuse, and that abusive police and military responses were to blame for most of what went wrong once the spark of protest had been struck by the raid of an unlicensed after-hours drinking club known as a ‘blind pig.’
But the play is not all philosophical argument, as important as this is: it also is a love story, a family tale, and an account of the ‘band of brothers’ that was Gay Men’s Health Crisis. And like most great playwrights who turn their attention to public events, Kramer maintains a tight relationship between these stories. Kramer’s artistic control of the huge canvas on which he paints is in the end what makes the play so powerful.
This was a substantial play that dealt thoughtfully with a host of issues. There’s feminism: the story of a woman fighting her way through a male-dominated profession, rising from a little paper in Battle Creek to a national byline with the Associated Press. There’s journalistic ethics: what happens when a reporter gets too close to a subject, and the tricky line between reporting and public relations. Then there’s the problem encountered by an involuntary archivist: what to do with a trove of letters that reveal a historical personage’s private life? And most of all, there’s a strange love triangle: on the evidence of the play, Hickok was nearly as smitten with Franklin Roosevelt’s policies as she was with his wife, going so far as to serve in his administration.
There is no perfect way to realize Shakespeare’s vision, but employing an all-female cast is apt to be among the less successful ways. In the alternative, you can say the hell with realizing Shakespeare’s vision, and simply have fun with your own. And that, I think, is the approach that director Wendy C. Goldberg has chosen to pursue at Center Stage
If you view this production as an entertainment for those whose taste runs to Mad Max, to Rocky Horror, and to the movies of Quentin Tarantino (none of which I’m knocking, but let’s not call them Shakespeare), then this may be a lark for you.
Take the basic problems presented in Brassed Off, Local Hero, and The Full Monty, i.e. the deindustrialization of Britain and resulting working-class unemployment, observe those problems with the wry humor of those films, add drag performers from La Cage Aux Folles, a sensitive trans person of color from The Crying Game, a “love thyself” theme from Hairspray, and a romance between factory boss and subordinate straight out of Pajama Game. Stir well, and voilà!, you have a tale of a band of shoe workers and their manager who resist the oblivion that awaits British manufacturing by switching from ordinary cobbling to fabricating a line of sexy boots for drag performers
The America depicted here is a place of quests: Father’s for the unknown horizon, Tateh’s for a land where he and his daughter can prosper, Coalhouse’s for reuniting with Sarah and raising his son in a world where blacks are regarded and treated as equals. To these quests might be added two more: Younger Brother’s for some ideal he can build a life around and Mother’s, a quieter one, to nurture a family, whatever contours her decency and generosity cause it to assume. And all of these quests are played out among the novelties and sensations of an exuberant American decade: among the things which will figure in the plot are Henry Ford’s Model T, J.P. Morgan’s library of priceless incunabula, the notorious charms of uber-courtesan Evelyn Nesbit, and the antics of escape artist Harry Houdini.
I was struck by how much of the subject-matter of An Inspector Calls resonated today, despite the play being a product of the 1940s set just before the First World War. For instance, there is Priestley’s approach to what we now call a “living wage.” A complementary up-to-date theme is the frequently unconscious nature of privilege. If Noel Coward and Bertolt Brecht had collaborated, they might have given us this very play.
The characters are all compelled by circumstances to go back into the woods, and this time they encounter there such things as infidelity, divorce, the death of parents, the death of children, abandonment, catastrophe – and overarching this the absence of a narration (the narrator becomes a casualty) or any other authoritative guidance as to the choices that need to be made. As one of the characters observes: ‘The path has strayed from you.’ The unsettling conclusion: ‘You decide what’s right / You decide what’s good.’ This is all incredibly sad and confusing, not to mention frightening, and yet as the core of surviving characters gels, so does the indomitability of the human spirit they evince.