The cutthroat, heat-of-the-summer struggle that is A Streetcar Named Desiregets worthy treatment in South Florida at New Theater with persuasively well-rounded performances in the central roles of the Tennessee Williams drama and transformative tech.
Angie Radosh, who a couple of seasons ago was Amanda when New Theater turned to Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, now is the long-haunted Blanche, who, having lost the family estate in Mississippi to miscellaneous debts and the high cost of family deaths (this, in 1947), has found her way to the two-room New Orleans apartment of her younger sister, Stella, and Stella’s very wary war veteran husband, Stanley.
But the many sides of Stella and Stanley aren’t lost to Blanche in this production in Coral Gables. Stanley Kowalski might live in the public imagination as the subhuman Blanche describes, but at New Theater, with Travis Reiff in the role, we also see him as Stella does (a man with prospects), as his friends do (the loud leader of their card-playing group by common consent) and, certainly, as he see himself – wise to the world, well-connected and a man not to be anyone’s patsy. And Elise Girardin limns Stella’s split allegiances: a passionate and forgiving love of Stanley and a sisterly bond to Blanche colored by guilt over leaving her to manage the family home. And among the denizens of the New Orleans street where Stanley and Stella live is the loud and generous Eunice, a role inhabited by Kitt Marsh.
A letdown comes very late, when a physician and nurse arrive on the scene. In what might have been an effort to underline the characters’ institutional detachment, their sentences come out wooden and with so much time between them that we wonder whether the actors have forgotten their lines. The lapse isn’t enough to ruin the production, but it’s an unfortunate distraction during Blanche’s exit.
Tying the production together is the sense of the audience being on the street and looking it at this drama. It’s accomplished with clarity under artistic director Ricky J. Martinez, with set by Nicole Quintana and lighting by Kris Cardenas. Daytime lighting presents walls of light-colored clapboard, but for dead-of-night scenes, the interior lights are down and the walls are revealed as dark, wide horizontal slats through which seeps deep blue light -- as if the action is being played out before giant Venetian blinds that might give anyone passing by a hint of what’s going on inside.
