Bare-bones ‘Streetcar’ invites a reconsideration of the Tennessee Williams’ classic

“The Streetcar Project,” a bare-bones production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” passed through town last week. First stop was an airplane hangar in East L.A., followed by a warehouse in Venice.

I caught the show in Venice on Friday, after a traffic nightmare prevented me from seeing it earlier in the week in Frogtown. The production, co-created by Lucy Owen, who plays Blanche DuBois, and director Nick Westrate, employed a four-person cast. There were no props or scenery (except for a few folding chairs and some basic lighting). The costumes seemed pulled from the actors’ closets. A few sound effects (a rattling streetcar, raucous alley cats) and some period music fleshed out the surrounding world.

The focus was on Williams’ words. At times, the actors spoke their lines from obscure corners of the cavernous playing area. I found myself at times closing my eyes and listening attentively, as though to a radio drama. The production, built to be performed in alternative spaces, sought to get us to hear the play anew.

Most of the time, of course, the actors were front and center. Their appearances, with the exception of Mitch, suggested what the character might be like in a home movie. Owen’s Blanche, battered by life, looked in desperate need of a good night’s sleep. Brad Koed’s beefy Stanley seemed like he just crawled from under a broken-down car.

The plainness of Mallory Portnoy’s Stella was epitomized by the way she cuffed her jeans. The one wild card was James Russell’s “Mitch” (as Harold Mitchell is known to his friends), a leaner and less clumsy version of the character.

Russell was called upon to serve as a utility player, so perhaps it was best that he wasn’t a replica of the lumbering Mitch we’ve come to expect from Karl Malden’s memorable portrayal. Koed was no Marlon Brando, for that matter. But he was closer to the Polish American factory parts salesman than more glamorous Hollywood types striving to live up to Brando’s masculine archetype.

Few contemporary classics have been as defined as “Streetcar” by its original production. Elia Kazan, who directed the Broadway premiere and the subsequent movie adaptation, ushered in a new era of American acting with Williams’ drama

Brando, Malden and Kim Hunter, who played Stella, reprised their Broadway performances onscreen. The one significant cast change was Vivien Leigh as a replacement for Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche. This shift was in part to alter the dramatic balance of power between Stanley and Blanche. (On Broadway, audiences were so seduced by Brando that some assumed he was meant to be the hero of “Streetcar” and not the play’s brutish antagonist.)

I appreciated the opportunity of re-experiencing the play, though I’m not convinced by this production that “Streetcar” is the everlasting masterwork it is widely assumed to be. I realize this is heresy, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the irreducible strangeness of the drama.

This is the story of a guilt-ridden high school English teacher, who after her role in the suicide of her gay husband, has become a sexual pariah. She was thrown out of her hotel residence for her nightly trysts and was deemed morally unfit to teach after an affair with a 17-year-old boy. Considered a nymphomaniac, a child predator and a loon, she had no choice but to seek refuge at the cramped, tatty New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, who wisely escaped from Belle Reve, the DuBois plantation that was lost along with the family’s last remaining connection to the Southern gentry.

Married to Stanley, a man of carnal appetites and vulgar manners, Stella has embraced the crude pleasures of realism, while her freeloading sister still clings to tattered aristocratic illusions. The standoff between Blanche’s impractical aestheticism and Stanley’s ruthless pragmatism is the heart of this quintessentially American drama. Westrate, however, is less concerned with the allegorical meaning of this battle than with the interpersonal dynamics of the combatants.

The production was determined to make the dramatic situation and characters credible for a 21st century audience. But in doing so, the play can’t help revealing its age.

Williams was writing in an idiom that was unique to him. The more stylized approaches of traditional “Streetcar” revivals aren’t just frippery. Williams challenges directors to meet his poetry without losing sight of the play’s earthiness. The characters must be larger than life and one of us.

Although the scenes are often played to music, Westrate’s staging lacks a certain lyricism. When more theatrical elements come into play — such as the Mexican flower lady crying, “Flores para los Muertos” — the staging feels almost intruded upon by an extraneous sensibility. The humor, an integral part of the playwright’s flamboyant arsenal, is also missed. In the final scene, the mix of secondary voices, pinballing among cast members, makes for a confusing pileup.

The lack of sentimentality was admirable. Owen’s bedraggled Blanche, too exhausted to keep up with her own lies, seemed complicit in her own demise. Koed’s Stanley, full of class grievance, had a vengeful look from the outset. Portnoy’s Stella clearly loved Blanche but didn’t seem to like her all that much. Russell’s Mitch was as in touch with his animal needs as with his guilty concern for his sick mother.

The true compensation of this “Streetcar” was the way the language was translated by the actors into natural-sounding speech. Each performer made the dialogue ring true to contemporary mores. The resulting authenticity passed the verisimilitude test with flying colors. But Williams, like Blanche, wants magic, not the realism of today’s TV drama.

“Streetcar” may be Williams’ most exciting and even hypnotic play, but I’m not sure it’s his best. (I prefer “The Glass Menagerie.” Theater critic Gordon Rogoff once made the astute observation that Williams was always better at writing scenes than constructing seamless dramas and that his true gift may have been as “a pointillist painter of shimmering portraits.”

That’s enough genius for any writer, but Williams goes further by offering actors the opportunity of incarnating his interior poetry. He also gives directors the chance to prove that the theater can simultaneously capture the sweaty and symbolic levels of our lives.

The production’s simplicity ditched the cliches that have accumulated around the play over decades. But it also reminded us that naturalism is only one thread in the multi-hued fabric of Williams’ playwriting.