Great idea, I thought, when I heard the Austin, Texas, collaborative called the Rude Mechs was bringing to the 34th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays a piece about an imaginary theatrical guru whose last project, before she left the country and never surfaced again, was a single performance of A Streetcar Named Desire that eliminated Blanche, Stanley, Stella and Mitch.
Now, having sat through the show as the sixth full-length play to open in the current festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, I still find the idea intriguing. But as written and staged with excruciating in-jokes, actorly excess and self-referential winks it's a terrible bore. Navel-gazing was never more intense or off-putting.
What you get is a cast of two men and three women going through typical audition exercises (crying, for example, and kissing), isolated Streetcar scenes that connect to the missing major characters (men in a poker game, the newsboy kissed by Blanche, the Mexican woman selling "flores para los muertos") and a lot of physical stuff (falling and rolling on the floor, pushing each other, and dodging lanterns that swing through the air).
But they do idolize their Stella -- not the Tennessee Williams character but Stella Burden, the legendary mid-1970s trainer of actors who called her method "The Approach." So dedicated was she that she rehearsed her eccentric Streetcar for nine years before staging its single performance.
From what I can ascertain, it was not Stella but the Rude Mechs who concocted the bit wherein the two male actors walk through a scene completely naked with balloons tied to their penises. Mardi Gras perhaps?
Stella reportedly went to the jungle when she left the country. That's a cue for someone to appear in a tiger costume complete with tiger head while a man speaks for it through a microphone. Later the tiger pops up from a "Red Hots" tamale cart designed to evoke New Orleans atmosphere.
Asserting that a play would be better if it had at least one tiger in it, this tiger says, "I think that we all can agree that given a choice between Death of a Salesman and "Death of a Salesman From a Tiger," the second one just seems more exciting." That's supposed to be funny.
More in line with my point of view is what one of the female actors says toward play's end: "This is bullshit. The Approach is bullshit. And everything we've done is nothing." So
what's the point?
ullsh
