Tennessee Williams' words still hit you in the heart in spellbinding Streetcar Named Desire

Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo and Lindsey Angell in Theatre Calgary's production of A Streetcar Named Desire which opened Friday night.

Blanche couldn’t bring magic to her own sad life, but she sure brought a sparkle to the stage at the Max Bell Theatre Friday night.

It was opening night of Theatre Calgary’s A Streetcar Named Desire, a drama by Tennessee Williams that goes right up on the neon-emblazened Mt. Rushmore of greatest American dramas ever written.

Set in the French Quarter of post Second World War New Orleans, Streetcar tells the story of Stanley ( Stafford Perry) and Stella (Heidi Damayo), a young working-class couple whose lives get thrown for a loop when Stella’s older sister Blanche (Lindsey Angell in the performance of a lifetime) comes for a visit one summer from her home in Laurel, Mississippi.

Blanche is a schoolteacher there, but she’s a schoolteacher with hints of faded grandeur. There was a family plantation, Belle Reve, that apparently has been lost to the bank and along with it, any hope that Blanche – and Stanley and Stella – might rise up a notch on the old social hierarchy.

That’s no small deal for Blanche, who arrives in town to discover little sis Stella slumming it in the Quarter in a one-bedroom apartment with a card-playing, brawny, bourbon-and-beer swilling working-class Polish husband who – in Blanche’s esteemed opinion -- barely qualifies as a primate.

Naturally, that last comment is overheard by sweaty Stanley one day when he returns from work down on the docks, or someplace like that.

Cue the Southern Gothic! Or in this delicious production, elegantly directed by Citadel Theatre artistic director Daryl Cloran, a jazz quartet who play in each scene with a few melodious bars of Crescent City jazz.

Blanche Dubois is one of the greatest stage characters ever written. She’s a narcissist, a hopeless romantic and a fabulist – and as Streetcar reveals over the course of the night, she’s making her life up on the fly, hoping no one is doing too much fact-checking.

Unfortunately for Blanche, Stanley, who is all abs and rage, has discovered something called the Napoleonic Code, a Louisiana statute where what belongs to a woman belongs to her husband too, meaning Belle Rive was his shot at some social mobility– and he zeroes in with ruthless realism on Blanche’s airbrushed version of reality.

“Blanche, you never tell the truth,” says Stella at one point.

“I tell what ought to be the truth,” Blanche says.

Angell’s Blanche is a wonder of contradictions. She’s beautiful but won’t meet a potential husband, Mitchell (Sheldon Elter), during the afternoon because she doesn’t want him to see her in the harsh afternoon light – upon arriving at little sister’s dump of an apartment, the first thing Blanche does is slide a Chinese lantern over the bare light bulb to make everything a little less harsh.

She’s grandiose at the same time she’s absolutely terrified of growing older – and alone. She presents herself to Mitchell as a somewhat prim and proper schoolteacher until Stanley reveals a much different backstory that shatters the veneer of Blanche’s version of her life.

The set (by Brian Dudkiewicz) is rickety old New Orleans in the French Quarter, where neighbours know everything about each other and look out for one another during the heat of summer nights, when someone as volatile as Stan – a war veteran who suffers from what appears to be PTSD -- is liable to pop a cork at any given moment.

Perry has big iconic – Marlon Brando! – shoes to fill in the role of Stanley, and he’s somewhat at a disadvantage because he looks like such a nice guy, but he locates his inner brute and gives Stanley all those different degrees of pain and rage that make him one of most unforgettable stage roles ever written.

He’s matched in every scene by the wonderful Damayo, who brings oversized heart and moxie to the undersized Stella, who is caught between brokering some sort of truce between her delusional big sister and her abusive husband before things go terribly wrong.

There’s Devon (Steve Hubbell), who lives upstairs with Eunice (Katelyn Morishita), as well as perpetually single sad-sack Mitch, who Elter bestows a kind of down market dignity on. Mitch lives with his sick mom and is desperately lonely, only to find himself falling for Blanche’s version of herself.

As Streetcar winds towards its sad finale, its humanity reveals itself one character at a time. It’s a story about the human cost of loneliness and our never-ending search for a little bit of a connection.

It turns out that the translation of Belle Reve, the paradise of a plantation lost to the bank, is “beautiful dream.”

It might have had its premiere in 1947, but it turns out that 78 years later, people are lonelier than ever – and Tennessee Williams’ unique brand of stage poetry--delivered by the capable and committed cast at Theatre Calgary, still hits you right in the heart.

Theatre Calgary’s A Streetcar Named Desire runs through Feb.23. For more information, go here.