Here is an interesting review I found on the extremely helpful data base Project Muse that really delves into past and present productions of Streetcar. I also have a review of the Split Britches Streetcar which took a whole new stance on the show and in the mean time did a wonderful job analyzing the gender roles and relations in the play.
As the century drew to a close, New York audiences witnessed one of the most extreme revisionings ever of a classic American play when director Ivo van Hove stripped bare both stage furnishings and actors alike and made an onstage bathtub the focal point of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Had van Hove’s 1999 production at the New York Theatre Workshop opened a little earlier, it would certainly have merited more than passing mention in Philip C. Kolin’s stage history of a work that, for a half-century now, has been “interrogated” and “destabilized,” “radicalized,” and “deconstructed.” Kolin justly characterizes Streetcar as a seminal example of what he calls “stylized realism” in drama, formally innovative in its presentation of “interiority” and thematically daring in its treatment of “sexual politics.”
This prodigiously researched volume–Kolin consulted literally hundreds of production reviews–meticulously describes the intense theatrical collaboration that resulted in the play’s original and highly acclaimed 1947 production. It then goes on to record major restagings worldwide (from Mexico City to European capitals to Tokyo to South Africa); over thirty years of revivals around the United States from the mid-1950s on, including crosscast and multiracial ones; and adaptations to other media (film, ballet, television, opera), before concluding with a chronology of almost four dozen major productions. Through it all, Kolin displays an unerring instinct for choosing from the reviews just the phrases necessary to help readers see with their mind’s eye what was happening on stage.
Williams’s play has, over the years, attracted great actresses–Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Uta Hagen, Arletty, Claire Bloom–and great directors and designers–Elia Kazan, Jo Mielziner, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zefferelli, Ingmar Bergman. And, in Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, it has given American drama two of its most enduring and indelible characters. Blanche has been variously the “soft and shimmery” tragic victim, a “Foucaultian . . . poisoned disrupter,” an oppressor attracted to The Other, an arrogant bigotted racist, and a sensualist who achieves sanctification. Stanley has veered between the brute animality, orality, and “phallic gestures” that turned Marlon Brando into a sexual icon and a complex if sometimes beleaguered person of wit, insight, and intelligence.
A production history such as this takes on its greatest value when it prompts scholars and theatre practitioners to rethink the text. Reading about earlier innovations, such as Bergman’s decision to place a movie theatre called Desire, or the Pleasure Garden–showing a film entitled “Night in Paradise”–directly upon the stage; or Jean Cocteau’s adaptation that emphasized disparagement of the immigrant Stanley as a displacement of racial prejudice in a heavily black New Orleans; or the Japanese premiere that hinted at a connection between Blanche as an “unwelcome intruder” and the army occupation forces, can help alter staid perceptions and revision the text anew in imaginative and sometimes provocative ways. Many of the productions Kolin recounts reveal a much more politicized Streetcar than the original one, with increased emphasis on proletarian protest and class struggle, particularly in Italy, England, and through the black or interracial castings in America.
In his discussion of the 1951 film of Streetcar, Kolin usefully reminds readers that Williams upended the traditional female position by making “the male anatomy the object of desire”–a point that somehow seemed to elude Susan Bordo recently in The Male Body where she neglects to discuss the homosexual gaze in screen versions of 1950s plays by Williams and others. Yet, despite its potential usefulness in disputing a misreading of Blanche as a character in drag, the discussion (however welcome) of the queer/camp Belle Reprieve in a production history of Williams’s play is a little like including Hamletmachine or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in a stage history of Shakespeare’s tragedy. And even though Andre Previn’s recent operatic version of Streetcar, with a libretto by Philip Littel, may have succeeded in restoring the centrality of Blanche that had been lost (along with any hint of homosexuality) in the censored Hollywood movie, it seems an odd choice to privilege it in the cover photo since it is not Williams’s play.
Kolin might have generalized even more than he does about the trends he uncovers in the way that Streetcar has been reimagined in different times and places and for different audiences. And if the format of the Cambridge series forces him to be almost too objective and largely to eschew interpretation and evaluation, readers can find in the reliable select bibliography references to the major recent articles that have made Kolin an undisputed expert on Williams’s richest play and perfectly suited to lead them authoritatively through its history.
“What is striking is not simply how often Williams’s play
of A Streetcar Named Desire has been recycled, so that it has taken on the status of a cultural artifact A cultural artifact is a human-made which gives information about the culture of its creator and users. The artifact may change over time in what it represents, how it appears and how and why it is used as the culture changes over time. , but also how deeply these re-citings of Williams’s text are caught up in issues of gender and sexuality, as well as issues of performance and the performative
Relating to or being an utterance that peforms an act or creates a state of affairs by the fact of its being uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances, as a justice of the peace uttering . Of queerness and the attachment to cultural objects, Eve Sedgwick writes in Tendencies, “We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love” (3). Perhaps some of the “fascination” of Streetcar is the number of these sites–masculinity, femininity, madness, desire–where these slippages of meanings, what Sedgwick would term excesses, tend to occur: where the lines don’t fall neatly into place. The trajectory of desire supposedly ends, as Blanche knows, in death
First presented at London’s Drill Hall in January 1991 and then a month later at LaMama in New York
New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , Belle Reprieve is a work Co-written and performed by Bette Bourne Bourne, town (1990 pop. 16,064), Barnstable co., SE Mass., crossed by Cape Cod Canal; settled 1627, inc. 1884. Bourne Bridge (1935), across the canal, made the town an entry point to Cape Cod and a resort and commercial center. and Paul Shaw Paul Shaw (born September 4 1973 in Burnham, England) is an English footballer who currently plays for Oxford United.
Shaw started his career as a trainee at Arsenal, turning professional in 1991. His debut came against Nottingham Forest on December 3 1994. of the gay British group Bloolips, and Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches, a lesbian-identified off-off Broadway group. By altering and reversing the gender roles in Streetcar (Blanche is played by Bette Bourne, as “a man in a dress”; Stanley is played by Peggy Shaw, as “a butch lesbian”; Mitch is played by Paul Shaw, as “a fairy disguised as a man”; and Stella by Lois Weaver as “a woman disguised as a woman” [4)), this theatrical piece creates a Brechtian commentary on the sexual roles and games in Williams’s text. Belle Reprieve’s intertexts (which include the film version of Streetcar), its moments of vaudeville, and the characters’ own self-conscious attention to theatricality extend the gendered role-playing into a deconstruction of dramatic role-playing itself. Like Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine or like many of Char les Ludlam’s works for the Ridiculous Theater (Big Hotel, Bluebeard Bluebeard, nickname of the chevalier Raoul in a story by Charles Perrault. In the story Bluebeard’s seventh wife, Fatima, yielding to curiosity, opens a locked door and discovers the slain bodies of her predecessors. , etc.), Belle Reprieve’s response to the past, to its theatrical antecedents, is a complex one. Ultimately, the work is less of a parody or an adaptation of Streetcar than it is a postmodern refashioning and a “queering” of a play that is already, as C. W. E. Bigsby puts it, about “a culture in a state of crisis, its certainties dislocating, its myths collapsing” (16).
Throughout Belle Reprieve, the characters/performers comment on the relationships between the roles of gender and sexuality they play (both in this piece and in “real life”), and the gender/sexuality of Williams’s characters. Williams hints throughout Streetcar, for instance, at Stella’s sensuality: the morning after the “poker night” fight
Bound collection of comic strips, usually in chronological sequence, typically telling a single story or a series of different stories. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. in her hand, “[h]er eyes and lips have that almost narcotized nar·co·tize
tr.v. nar·co·tized, nar·co·tiz·ing, nar·co·tiz·es
1. To place under the influence of a narcotic.
2. To put to sleep; lull.
3. To dull; deaden. tranquility that is [on) the faces of Eastern idols” (62). The writers of Belle Reprieve go one step further and play with the image of Stella’s sexual drive as overdetermined Overdetermined can refer to
- Overdetermined systems in various branches of mathematics
- Overdetermination in various fields of psychology or analytical thought
and narcissistic nar·cis·sism also nar·cism
n.
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in . In her opening speech–directed partially at herself, partially at the audience–she asks:
Is there something you want? What can I do for you? Do you know who I am, what I feel, how I think? You want my body. My soul, my food, my bed, my skin, my hands? You want to touch me, hold me, lick me, smell me, eat me, have me? You think you need a little mote (reMOTE) A wireless receiver/transmitter that is typically combined with a sensor of some type to create a remote sensor. Some motes are designed to be incredibly small so that they can be deployed by the hundreds or even thousands for various applications (see smart dust). time to decide? Well, you’ve got a little over an hour to have your fill. (5)
As the object of Stanley’s desire, Stella here has embraced (and refigured) her own role as commodity; moreover, her words call attention to the audience’s status as consumers, as hungry to possess the performer, to get their “fill” of her–at least until the (performance) time is up. As if she were aware of Williams’s stage directions, Belle Reprieve’s Stella explains to Mitch, “Look, I’m supposed to wander around in a state of narcotized sexuality. That’s my part” (6). Blanche’s visit brings out Stella’s quasi-incestuous revelations of her attraction to her sister, as the two don matching cheerleaders’ outfits and sing about exploring one another’s bodies “under the covers” (14). But we also see the “colored lights” of Streetcar enacted in the moments of passion between Stella and Stanley (doubled in Brechtian fashion by the awareness of many audience members in the original performance that Lois Weaver [Stella] and Peggy Shaw [Stanley] were real-life lovers)–particularly when Stella pulls off Stanley’s ri pped T-shirt as Stanley carries her offstage, thus evoking Marlon Brando’s Stanley in the very moment that the audience’s attention is called to Peggy Shaw’s body. As Elm Diamond puts it, in an often-cited essay on Brechtianism and feminism that has, I think, interesting applications for discussions of queer theater as well, “Brechtian theory imagines a polyvalence pol·y·va·lent
adj.
1. Acting against or interacting with more than one kind of antigen, antibody, toxin, or microorganism.
2. Chemistry
a. Having more than one valence.
b. to the body’s representation, for the performer’s body is also historicized, loaded with its own history and that of the character, and these histories ruffle the smooth edges of representation” (89).
In a monologue that Split Britches member Deb Margolin Deb Margolin is an American performance artist and playwright. Coming to prominence in the 1980’s, as script-writer and performer in the feminist theater troupe Split Britches (of which she was a founding member), Margolin has since gone solo in a string of one-woman shows, which wrote for the play, Stella talks to Cassandra, the seer, asking her for advice on love, and poses and sings “Running Wild” like Marilyn Monroe, after she says to the imaginary Cassandra, “Come sweet prophetess, what is going to happen? Tell me, I’m nailed to this story. Cut me down. I’m in here. Can’t you see me?” (22). In this sense, Stella is portrayed as a woman who is entrapped in the limited “part” that has been written for her, yet who makes the best of it by immersing herself in her own desires. She tells Stanley, “I know that your tension is sexual, and it’s a desire I share in, but not for your pleasure, for my own” (24). Her words mock Williams’s image of Stella as a woman who is willing to sacrifice everything for Stanley’s needs (here, even when Blanche is trying to argue Stella out of her attraction to Stanley [“I think he’s a fag,” she says (27)], Stella is more interested in the taste of the Coke she is drinking, which she conflates with he r orgasmic satisfaction: “Pure sugar, liquid sex” [27]). Elizabeth Grosz Elizabeth A. Grosz is a feminist academic living and working in the USA. She is known for philosophical interpretations of the work of French philosophers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as her readings of the works of French feminists, , in an important essay on “Refiguring Lesbian Desire,” argues that the traditional psychoanalytic interpretation of desire as based on “lack” should be replaced with an account of lesbian desire that is full, productive, predicated on presences rather than absences–more, she says, like Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of “practices and action” than the Freudian view that links the female with objects, receptacles, emptinesses (75). Belle Reprieve’s Stella is caught between her role as desired object (thus her evocation of Marilyn Monroe), and desiring subject; whereas Williams implies that the characters in Streetcar are motivated by desire, by lack–again, the end (or satisfaction) of which is death–the characters in Belle Reprieve parody and multiply their desires, making them what Grosz grosz
n. pl. gro·szy
See Table at currency.
[Polish, from Czech
gro would call “energies, excitations [and] impulses” (78).It is difficult not to bring Allan–Blanche’s first lover in Streetcar, who killed himself after Blanche discovered his homosexuality–to mind as we see Mitch in Belle Reprieve flirt alternately with Blanche (the
drag queen drag queen Female impersonator, gynemimetic Sexology A ™‚ with ™€ affect–often ‘overplayed’; a ™‚ homosexual and ™€ wannabe, with ™‚ genitalia; DQs may take hormones to †‘ breasts, and thus are hormonally, but not surgically ) and with the very butch Stanley. If Mitch, portrayed as a “mama’s boy” in Williams’s play, is implicitly another Allan, then Belle Reprieve’s Mitch is correspondingly only part of the way out of the closet. After he delivers a long speech describing (in intricate detail) a vision of a man with “large bedroom eyes” on a blue feathered throne (16), he engages in a frenzied dialogue of erotic
machismo machismo
Exaggerated pride in masculinity, perceived as power, often coupled with a minimal sense of responsibility and disregard of consequences. In machismo there is supreme valuation of characteristics culturally associated with the masculine and a denigration of with Stanley (which also evokes some of the homoeroticism homoeroticism /ho·mo·erot·i·cism/ (ho?mo-e-rot´i-sizm) sexual feeling directed toward a member of the same sex.homoerot´ic of Williams’s “poker night” scene). When Mitch gets carried away after he and Stanley arm wrestle–“Bite me! Bite me! Suck on me…” (17)–he has to pretend he is talking about mosquitoes, but the sequence culminates in Stanley’s song, “I’m a Man” (“spelled M … A … N” [19]). Mitch woos Blanche by appearing to her above the bathtub, w earing a fairy costume and playing the ukelele u·ke·le·le
n.
Variant of ukulele. ; later, in another one of the piece’s tableaulike monologues that seems to be directed out into the audience, he says:
I think it all started to go wrong when I wasn’t allowed to be a boy scout. There were more important things to be done. Vacuuming, clearing up at home, putting the garbage out… Then one day I fell in love with a beautiful young man. He came like a messenger from another world bearing a message of simple physical desire. But it was already too late, for me everything about the body was bound up with pain and boredom. I even used to ear fast because I found it so boring. Soon the boy left. … Then I was alone. At night I would lie awake Verb 1. lie awake – lie without sleeping; “She was so worried, she lay awake all night long”
lie – be lying, be prostrate; be in a horizontal position; “The sick man lay in bed all day”; “the books are lying on the shelf” on my bed, and imagine I could hear things. (33)
The newsboy in Streetcar, referred to by Blanche as the “young man,” here becomes the “messenger” of desire for Mitch instead– but again, the invitation is not mutually reciprocal. If Mitch in Streetcar is self-conscious about his body (he tells Blanche that he’s ashamed of the way he perspires [88], and that he’s afraid his “heavy build” makes him look clumsy), then Mitch in Belle Reprieve is, like Stella, both the same and the opposite: he is slight rather than heavy, “bored” with his body, but the effect is to underscore the loneliness and marginalization mar·gin·al·ize
tr.v. mar·gin·al·ized, mar·gin·al·iz·ing, mar·gin·al·iz·es
To relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. that both Mitches feel. Williams’s Mitch looks on helplessly from the sidelines at the end of Streetcar as Blanche is carted off to the asylum–but in Belle Reprieve, Mitch and Stella join one another in singing that they’re not quite the “pushovers” (36) that Williams’s text would make them our to be.
In Streetcar, when Blanche and Mitch return from their date at the amusement park amusement park, a commercially operated park offering various forms of entertainment, such as arcade games, carousels, roller coasters, and performers, as well as food, drink, and souvenirs. on Lake Pontchartrain Lake Pontchartrain (local English pronunciation [leɪk ˈpÊ°É‘ntʃətʰɹeɪn]) (French: Lac Pontchartrain, pronounced (notably bearing, the stage directions say, “a plaster statuette of Mae West” [85]), Blanche remarks to Mitch, “I don’t think I’ve ever tried so hard to be gay and made such a dismal mess of it.” She adds, echoing the language of the carnival they have just attended, “I get ten points for trying!” (85). Much, of course, has already been made of the original Blanche as a “coded” gay character. John Clum John Philip Clum (September 1 1851 – May 2 1932) was an Indian agent in the Arizona Territory who had the nickname “White Chief of the Apaches”. Clum was also the first mayor of Tombstone, Arizona, USA, and founder of the Tombstone Epitaph. calls her “in many ways the quintessential gay character in American closet drama” (150), while David Savran points out that original impulses to see Blanche as “only” a “female impersonator female impersonator Vox populi Drag queen, see there ” have risked creating what he sees as reductive re·duc·tive
adj.
1. Of or relating to reduction.
2. Relating to, being an instance of, or exhibiting reductionism.
3. Relating to or being an instance of reductivism.
….. Click the link for more information. or homophobic interpretations of the play, though not necessarily so (115). More recently, Anne Fleche flèche
n.
A slender spire, especially one on a church above the intersection of the nave and transepts.
[French,
arrow, flèche, from Old French,
arrow,
of Germanic origin; see has suggested that it might be more useful to see Blanche’s character as an example of “the performative, constrained enactment of gender”; Blanche, Fleche argues,can be viewed as the representation of a woman who finally doesn’t pass as a subject, because she does her gender incorrectly, and because her
hyperbolic hy·per·bol·ic also
hy·per·bol·i·cal
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or employing hyperbole.
2. Mathematics
a. Of, relating to, or having the form of a hyperbola.
b. theatricality challenges the masculine/feminine heterosexual codes that enable and constrain gender performativity. (266)
Blanche’s identity in Belle Reprieve is triply (or perhaps quadruply) embedded: “she” is a woman played by a man who imagines herself not just as Williams’s Blanche DuBois, but as Vivien Leigh (like Bette Bourne, a Brit) playing the role of Blanche in Kazan’s movie. These multiple visible “texts” of Blanche depend in part on being hyperbolic: just as the “original” Blanche embodies her sexuality through the near-caricatured imagery of the Southern Belle, Belle Reprieve’s Blanche has an identity composed of surfaces, of costumes, of performances, such that when Stanley says he is going to look through the contents of her trunk to determine who she is, she tells the audience, “And so it was that I set out to prove to the world that I was indeed myself.” Stella says, “She threw herself at the feet of an unforgiving world to prove her identity,” and Mitch adds, “The answer was somewhere in that trunk” (9). In other words Adv. 1. in other words – otherwise stated; “in other words, we are broke”
put differently , in a postmodern theatrical universe, “Blanche” is inseparable from the costumes, the odds an d ends, the fragments that make up the performance of her “identity.” Williams’s Blanche, herself, is a consummate actress and role-player; Bigsby, among other critics, has characterized her as “construct[ing] her own drama, costuming herself with care, arranging the set, enacting a series of roles, developing her own scenario” (61). And if Bette Bourne as Blanche in drag is a comment on what Clum and others would see as the original ‘drag act’ of Williams’s Blanche, it is worth keeping in mind Judith Butler’s argument in Bodies that Matter that drag is predicated in part on an awareness of the performance of difference: “What is ‘performed’ in drag is, of course, the sign of gender, a sign that is not the same as the body it figures, but that cannot be read without it” (237). In Belle Reprieve, Blanche describes herself as feeling like “an old hotel. Beautiful bits of dereliction dereliction n. 1) abandoning possession, which is sometimes used in the phrase “dereliction of duty.” It includes abandoning a ship, which then becomes a “derelict” which salvagers can board. in need of massive renovation” (28). As a ‘renovation’ of the text of Streetcar, Belle Reprieve itself reassembles the fragments o f Blanche into what are still fragments, but ones that allow us to read them (and hence her) differently. Stanley says to Blanche in what replaces the “rape scene,”