Content Warning: Mentions of domestic violence.
A story of an old world clashing with a new and brutal one, with all the hypocrisy and ugliness that such a story entails. Blanche DuBois (Amy Rutherford) has come to live with her sister Stella (Leah Doz) and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski (Mac Fyfe) in their New Orleans apartment after losing her job as a high school teacher and her ancestral plantation home, Belle Reeve, amid dubious circumstances. She immediately develops a dislike of Stanley due to his crudeness, aggression and implicit violence. He, in turn, can tell that she is dishonest and fears that she is going to take away the control and influence he holds over Stella. Blanche tries to get Stella to leave him because he is abusive. Stanley, in turn, attempts to show Stella how untrustworthy Blanche is because of her past. The dynamic between these three people forms the basis of the play.
I found Blanche to be a bundle of contradictions: shallow yet full of pathos, beautiful yet overdressed, whimsical yet haunted by her past and her lost love. You can see her slowly pull away mentally throughout the play. It’s heart-wrenching to watch as her new life and any possibility of happiness she had in New Orleans is destroyed by the sexism and misogyny of the society she lives in. One that expects her to live the fantasy that she loves to present: the fantasy of old-Southern gentility and wealth, which was lost along with her ancestral home. She is desperately looking for some kind of security but is too out of touch with real people’s needs and too irresponsible to find it.
Stanley is harsh and brutal; his brutality and violence towards his wife is motivated by his insecurities, his desire to keep Stella under his thumb, and the genuine offense he takes at Blanche’s derogatory comments about his Polish heritage. His violence and aggression are embodied as toxic masculinity, and, like all toxic masculinity, it is motivated by maintaining a sense of dominance over what and who he sees as his possessions. Namely, his wife Stella whom Blanche influences, and his apartment, which Blanche invades. However, I also found the actor very effective at conveying Stanley’s increased desperation to keep Stella with him and at hiding his thinly-veiled contempt for Blanche behind a veil of amusement at her decaying mental health. This attitude makes him increasingly horrible as the play goes on, while also giving him a kind of intrigue which captivates the audience’s attention.
Stella is the only mature and sensible one of the three, expecting her first child throughout the play and attempting to protect Blanche, but she too is a victim of Stanley’s violence. Likely feeling trapped with nowhere to go, Stella is unable to leave Stanley and his abusive acts. Together, these characters form a triad of dysfunction. Blanche and Stanley’s respective battle for the hold over Stella’s heart escalates as Blanche’s deceit over how she lost both her job and home, and her past sexual history come to light. In the process, Stanley’s derailing of her character and her life, and revelations of her deception gradually destroys her mentally while also destroying Stella’s sympathetic opinion of her by the end. While the play is constantly reinforced as tragedy, it also emphasizes the need to be kind to one another, to help one another, and to not be judgmental towards others just to feel a sense of power and superiority.
A Streetcar Named Desire is now at Soulpepper until October 27th
