Amy Rutherford, as Blanche DuBois, and Mac Fyfe, as Stanley, in A Streetcar Named Desire at Soulpepper. Rutherford is in full command of her performance, while Fyfe's portrayal of Stanley is one of a survivor who you never for a moment feel sympathy for.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: A Streetcar Named Desire
- Written by: Tennessee Williams
- Director: Weyni Mengesha
- Actors: Amy Rutherford, Mac Fyfe, Shakura Dickson
- Company: Soulpepper Theatre Company
- Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to July 14, 2024
Critic’s Pick
Sometimes, there’s God so quickly. But, in theatre, more often the divinest of productions are the slowest of burns.
That’s the case with director Weyni Mengesha’s revival of her acclaimed 2019 production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire – now simmering on stage at Soulpepper for an extra week, until July 14.
Five years after she first played Blanche DuBois for the Toronto theatre company, Amy Rutherford has returned to the role, the most iconic of Williams’ Southern belles.
The highly distinctive, yet chameleonic actor is never not in full command of her performance vocally or physically for a second of the show’s running time of three hours and 15 minutes. If you missed her tremendous take last time around (as I did), here’s a chance not to make that mistake again.
In this classic 1947 American play, Blanche shows up in New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella (Shakura Dickson) and husband Stanley (Mac Fyfe), a salesman who is everything she disdains: loud, crass and of Polish descent.
Blanche has been through a parade of traumatic deaths of her closest loved ones and lost the family plantation – and, along with that financial security, seemingly some of her sanity. And yet, she still retains a certain love of beauty, language and imagination that makes her one of American theatre’s most intoxicating characters.
Rutherford weaves the proper surface spell with her depiction of Blanche’s tics, her twang, her theatricality, but her flightiness here seems to be a survival technique that’s more calculated than it is uncontrolled. Each long soak in a hot bath is a strategic retreat, each nervous breakdown also an elegant deke in her battle with her brutish brother-in-law.
Rutherford always makes it seem possible that her Blanche might not just survive her latest setbacks, but eventually thrive – making the play’s inevitable tragic ending all that more crushing.
The fight between Blanche and Stanley is the heart of the play, and on one level, is over the smallest piece of territory, a fold-up bed behind a curtain in a cramped French Quarter apartment. But it’s also for the mind and body of Stella – who believes she has found freedom from her past in an abusive relationship – and the future of the unborn child inside her.
Fyfe is one of the few male Canadian stage actors working these days who doesn’t feel the need to make his characters likable in the least. You certainly get the sense that his Stanley is a survivor himself – of racism, of classism, of whatever he saw or did in the Second World War – but you never for a moment feel sympathy for him.
“You know what luck is?” Stanley asks his poker buds, rhetorically. “Luck is believing you’re lucky. To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you are lucky.”
It’s clear in the restrained (though not always restrained) rage of Fyfe’s performance that he’s as full of delusions about himself as Blanche is; he’s living in a patriarchal American society that will ultimately reward them.
The softness in this Streetcar comes from Dickson as Stella – new to this revival, and not yet digging quite as deep as she could into the character – and Gregory Prest as Mitch, one of those seemingly good straight men that Williams likes to dangle in front of his female protagonists and then yank away.
Shakura Dickson, as Stella, and Fyfe, as Stanley, in A Streetcar Named Desire. Dickson brings softness to Tennessee Williams’ iconic tragedy.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
What leavens the playwright’s remorseless cruelty in Mengesha’s production is a wonderful conjuring of the steamy atmosphere of New Orleans and its jambalaya of cultures through music and the excellent ensemble work of Divine Brown, Lindsay Owen Pierre, Sebastian Marziali and Ordena Stephens-Thompson.
Designer Lorenzo Savoini’s set transforms the stage into a kind of giant shipping container – its corrugated metal walls on all sides buckling and making unsettlingly loud bangs when bumped up against (at one point, devastatingly).
There are some pleasing anachronisms in Rachel Forbes’ costumes, as well as the props; Blanche’s first entrance, dragging a modern suitcase with wheels down the auditorium aisle and onto the stage, shows just how out of place she is in the world she’s about to enter.
This is Mengesha at her best as a director – not showing off but using imagery and metaphor for maximum impact.
Soulpepper first arrived on the scene saying to Toronto theatregoers – hey, you don’t have to drive out of the city to see stellar productions of classics in the summer. It still offers that, here.