Fifty years after its opening on Broadway, a new production at ACT of A Streetcar Named Desire shows that Blanche DuBois' disintegration has aged better than even the youth-obsessed Southern belle could have dreamed. Set designer John Iacovelli's peeling columns and wrought-iron trellises beautifully depict the lively decay of the New Orleans French Quarter of the 1940s as well as the fragile claustrophobia of the psychic landscape. Armed with a dynamic cast and a dark, bluesy score by sound designer Garth Hemphill and composer Michael Roth, director Richard Seyd deftly unfurls one of the most important and disturbing tales in the American canon.
Grand spectacles of sentiment rarely survive the lacerating irony endemic to our culture today. But Williams' enduring empathy for the swaggering, explosive Stanley and his imperious, deluded sister-in-law preserves the story's contemporary resonance. Yes, Blanche now seems excessively fixated on the fear of growing old; Stanley's assumption that he is the "king" of his house draws giggles from the audience. And Stella's lackadaisical acceptance of her husband's violent outbursts seems old-fashioned, even bizarre. Yet Williams' voices for his characters are timelessly eloquent. He embeds his many themes -- class conflict, sexuality, violence, obsessions with youth, beauty, and money -- through those voices into characters so complicated they can never be reduced to mere types.
Seyd successfully creates a sense of caged passions under pressure and elicits remarkable performances from his actors. Marco Barricelli's Stanley is never simply a brutal tyrant. He's an injured man, a goofy adolescent, a mournful lover. His ruthlessness -- until his final act of violence -- always seems to spring from a place of sheer vulnerability, allowing us to understand, and even feel, Stella's attraction. The cherubic Michelle Elise Duffy imbues Stella with a willfulness and sensuality that make her decision to stand by Stanley feel doubly inevitable: Both her weakness and her strength push her toward the same tragic choice. Matt DeCaro, as Blanche's lonely suitor, Mitch, conveys his love for his mother with an erratic courage that dispels any traces of the pathetic "mama's boy" stereotype.
Only Sheila Kelley as Blanche stumbles before she finds her rhythm. Kelley, the youthful TV star, is not the image of Blanche we have from the Vivien Leigh role in the movie. Seyd says in the program that he cast DuBois in her early 30s against tradition but in accordance with Williams' original notes. This has a subtle but powerful influence on the way we perceive Blanche in ACT's current production. Here, we see a younger Blanche with fewer delusions, rather than a faded, middle-aged woman flouncing around like a girl. We witness the creation of her madness, rather than gawk at a madness already taken hold.
Despite her youth and beauty, Kelley in the first act gives the impression of a brittle, sparrowlike schoolmarm, not a fading Southern belle. She flits about, drinking compulsively but wielding little of the physicality that a woman with her experience might display. As the play unfolds, however, Kelley rises to the formidable demands of her role, dancing a jagged line between wretched egotism and fey insecurity. Yet when she finally lets down her defenses to display, for a brief moment, her true motives in her plans to ensnare and marry Mitch, she becomes all the more affecting. "I want to deceive him long enough to make him want me," she whimpers to Stella. Kelley finally begins to unravel when she graphically describes her lover's suicide. Voice cracked and ragged, body electric with sorrow, the well-groomed regular on L.A. Law suddenly disappears behind the ferocious survivor of 50 years of staged madness, the phoenix-like Blanche DuBois.
-- Carol Lloyd
Urban Cowgirls
True West. By Sam Shepard. Directed by Aida Jones. Starring Carolyn Bates, Kerry LaBelle, Saul Kimmer, and Debra Catanzaro. At Arena Interplay, 701 Oak (at Fillmore), through Nov. 16. Call 982-6422.
Last January, Aida Jones directed a sex-swapped version of The Zoo Story with Carolyn Bates cast as the straight-laced book executive sitting in Central Park and Kerry La Belle as the ranting transient. Now the same three women are giving the same treatment to True West, and it works so well that a German woman sitting next to me on opening night may never know Sam Shepard wrote the parts for men. The story is a duet between Austin and Lee, siblings who try to write a screenplay together in their mother's suburban home. Bates plays the straight-laced part again -- Austin, the Ivy League-educated screenwriter -- and La Belle plays her drunken, jealous counterpart, Lee. They start to feud when a producer named Saul buys the outline of a cheesy western from Lee and chooses Austin to co-write it, scrapping one of Austin's movie deals in the process. They also switch roles: Austin starts swilling beer and Old Crow while Lee tries, responsibly, to peck at Austin's typewriter.
True West takes place in a suburb "40 miles east of L.A.," where cowboys had roamed a century before. In its original form it works as a comment on the end of the American West and also on manhood, with Austin and Lee fighting each other in their mother's furnished house. So the gender-swap isn't idle. It may not add to the play, exactly, but it's an insight on its own that it doesn't seem false. To say it works, though, isn't to say it's flawlessly played. Kerry LaBelle forces her lines as Lee and acts as if she's trying to be a man, although she has a normally husky voice and wears her beer-stained T-shirt and tie-for-a-belt with a natural swagger. She's best when she forgets herself in a fit of feeling. ("This is the last time I try to live with people, boy," she says at one point, snapping with bitterness.) And Gregg Pauly is consistently awkward as Saul, the producer, which is damaging because it's more than a walk-on part. But Carolyn Bates does a nimble job as Austin, first with her hair back, trying to concentrate on her writing, and later with her shirttails out and hair straggling, complaining to Lee that she wants to learn how to live in the desert.
The best part of the show, to me, was Bates' delivery of a drunken monologue about their father driving to a dentist in Juarez to get his teeth pulled for a bargain price. He spends the rest of his money that night in bars up and down some West Texas highway, leaving his teeth in a bag of leftover chop suey. Bates' voice moves in and out of a slur as she tells it, like a badly tuned radio. It's meant to be a sad moment, with the sisters' screenplay mired in bickering and phony dialogue. Their drunken father never finds his teeth: "True story," says Austin wistfully, and the lights fade.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Desert Rats
True West. By Sam Shepard. Directed by Dan Chumley. Starring Philip Stockton and Mark Phillips. At the Magic Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina & Buchanan, Oct. 1-Nov. 2. Call 441-8822.
The Sam Shepard trilogy of Buried Child, True West, and Curse of the Starving Class share a common denominator -- family, those frightening people and spooky places we are born into without choice. Families are fairly pedestrian fare, but Shepard gives them alluring depth by making dysfunctional homes parables about America -- the America constantly in search of coherent identity.
In these plays, key characters steer their lives in the direction of the American Dream, only to be caught in the muck of alcoholic fathers, despair, and dead babies buried in the back yard. The other plays boast plot developments like maggot-infested livestock wandering the kitchen; in this context, True West is probably the most accessible. It's not-so-simply the story of two brothers who try to make a fortune as screenwriters and nearly destroy each other with sibling rivalry and jealousy. But playing True West like a suburban melodrama misses out on the mythic themes Shepard has woven through the story. In the Magic Theater production, the brothers aren't aggressive or macho enough to step up to the great archetypes they're supposed to represent. Too often they are apologetic, friendly, and just too familial -- more My Three (Drunk) Sons than Cain and Abel.
Austin (in his early 30s) and Lee (10 years older) are crashing in Mom's Orange County home. She's on a pleasure cruise through frigid Alaska; ever-absent Dad is drunk and toothless in the desert. Shepard's meticulous set notes describe a generic home in one of many subdivisions spreading, cancerlike, over the hills. This is the newly tamed West: Through the white-lace-trimmed windows, silhouettes of a fence framing the ridge and distant hogback hills are visible; the sound of barking coyotes grows as the night sets.
Austin, who tries to maintain an intellectual coolness in the face of Lee's wild tales of desert survival, is a Harvard graduate and Hollywood screenwriter. He is the affluent New West -- with no accent and no dirt under the nails. The sports shirt and white tennis shoes Shepard requests should indicate his acquired sophistication. The Magic's Austin is less refined: Mark Phillips' broken-in jeans and a casual shirt make him seem on a par with the older Lee. But Lee is of a much different pedigree: He represents the West that was the land, not an opportunistic attitude. Like the loner in the Shepard-scripted Paris, Texas, he wanders the dry, open West as a subsistence drifter, robbing homes of small appliances when he needs cash. His only purpose in visiting Mom's pad seems to be to aggravate his brother.
Austin's trying to write a script as a period romance, but Lee instigates petty fights -- about their parents, their manhood, and the keys to Austin's car. Ultimately, he takes control of a meeting with Austin's agent and convinces the man to dump Austin's romance for Lee's vision of a "true-to-life" western. But man-of-the-land Lee can't script dialogue and needs his brother's talents to write a draft.
What should result is a natural tension between intellectual and physical prowess; but the weakening of Austin's character never allows it to materialize. The pair aren't an equal emotional match. The conflict only reaches the parboiled, primal jealousy the script is capable of when the struggle turns physical. Phillips ultimately turns up the machismo, becoming surly as the two brothers booze and try to hammer out the story. The fight scenes, choreographed by Nick Scoggin and R. Randal Miller, threaten to rip the frail walls of the set apart.
The play closes with a frieze of the brothers set against the purple hills, suggesting a battle to the death. But the full import of this modern struggle isn't realized. The actors are talented, but not mythic; entertaining, but hardly the participants in the war for masculine identity in the West. True West premiered at the Magic Theater in 1980 (with Peter Coyote in the role of Austin); this revival was decent, but a bit disappointing from the inheritors of Shepard.
-- Julie Chase
Rapper's Delight
Evolution of a Homeboy: Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop. Written and performed by Danny Hoch. Directed by Jo Bonney. Presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater at the Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College (at Derby), Berkeley, through Nov. 16. Call (510) 845-4700.
For Danny Hoch's Evolution of a Homeboy, the Berkeley Rep is offering half-price tickets to people who can prove they're under 30. The idea is to bring in customers who Don't Usually Go See Theater, either because they're too young, too hip, or too worried that theaters are full of stick-straight white people overconcerned with Art. The ploy isn't working. Danny Hoch is a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who's becoming one of theater's most prominent -- one of its only -- hip-hop voices, and his talent is so broad that even the people who wince at the foul language and don't get the rap references think he's funny. What's weird is that these people made up most of the audience on Hoch's opening weekend at the Julia Morgan Theater. It was like watching a Shaw-and-Shakespeare crowd titter at Andrew Dice Clay.
There's nothing wrong with that, because Hoch deserves the attention. At least he's a lot better than Dice. Hoch has a detailed understanding of hip-hop culture, and he can follow the wrinkles and ironies of its evolution from a black urban folk movement to a corporate-fueled image machine. He can flawlessly mimic characters from a Cuban street vendor to a hopped-up, pissed-off jailbird ranting about race. The skit that gives the show its title imagines a David Letterman interview with a rich rap star. The setup alone is an act of satire, since Letterman almost never interviews rap stars; but "M.C. Enough" is a bonehead. He wears a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a silver cap on one front tooth. He talks about the "evolution" of his work from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s -- really he's just been following trends -- and he contradicts himself as he builds his media image. "Now I'm kind of large," he says, so he's been going back to his neighborhood to encourage kids to stay in school: "I mean, I dropped out of junior high and now I'm a multimillionaire, but what I'm sayin' is -- well, I don't really know what the fuck I'm sayin', Dave."
Another skit has a Puerto Rican kid on crutches trying to chat up a pretty student in a waiting room. He's recovering from cop-inflicted gunshot wounds. Hoch mimes his movement on crutches with absolute conviction and talks in a Puerto Rican voice gentled by romance. "What do you study?" he says, then nods. "That's good, we need more business people." He tells her earnestly that he's proud of the United States. "Here, it's not like in other countries, where you get shot by the government." He thinks the woman's Puerto Rican but she turns out to be Czechoslovakian, and when she moves away, uninterested, the effect is poignant without being sentimental. Hoch's writing relies on the natural suspense of getting to know somebody: He's not finished until his characters drop some vital clue about themselves, and the ones who do it naively are his funniest.
See? He's better than Dice. And there's no reason the hip-hop nation should be avoiding his show.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Dances With Cars
Ice/Car/Cage. Choreographed and performed by Keith Hennessy, Jules Beckman, and Jess Curtis. Presented by the Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival at the Brady Street Dance Center, 60 Brady (at Market), Oct. 24-26. Call 558-9355.
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But in the high-octane dream world of Car and Driver, Road and Track, and Motor Trend, a car is never just a car. Showcased in exhilarated, popping prose, each car is like no other: A suave, sleek 424-HP Porsche 911 Turbo S doesn't run in the same circles as a "Fresh-Faced, Bad-Boy Firebird." And even when two cars -- both of them "speed freaks" -- do ride together, they don't hang. They're rivals! Ferocious and at each other's throats! These auto-macho magazines, overrun with lovingly detailed profiles of every new model, exist to persuade you that each car is a finely tuned individual -- and, as its proud owner, that you will be, too. Ice/Car/Cage is about people and cars, too. Created and performed by Jules Beckman, Jess Curtis, and Keith Hennessy, all from the local experimental performance group Core, the work was one of several commissioned for the second annual Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival last month. In the dance, the men are drawn to the car in their landscape the way any wheel-loving, car-mag-toting gearhead would be. But what draws them is not the car's "personality" -- in this case, it's a poky, dirty little white thing -- but the possibility of merging with blank, automatic power.
A large block of ice, a ladder, a cage, a blaster-radio, the men, and a car litter the dance's surface -- a square parking lot, off Market and west of Van Ness, bordered by squat warehouses. The elements in Ice/Car/Cage -- a dancing still-life -- remind us that cars and ice and radios and other useful blocks are the fruit and flowers of our millennial age.
The car at the center of the work's canvas sets the men in motion. Early on, someone gets in, drives it in a circle, then gets out. The car keeps going. Around and around and around the parking lot it rumbles while the men follow, somersaulting backward over its roof and rolling, with a thud, off its back. They spin along the car's sides, leapfrog over its hood, and let the rolling tires graze their heads as the car, oblivious, keeps to its circular course. The dancers are caught in the car's monotonous rhythm, as if it were driving them.
The dance with the car -- it setting the terms and the dancers becoming its extension -- is the model for other interactions in the work, both between people and objects and, in one section, between the dancers themselves. A 4-foot block of ice determines this scene's shape. In a perfect fit, Hennessy lies, face-to-face and hip-to-hip, on top of Curtis, who slips gently back and forth on the ice. Later, Hennessy becomes a childlike mechanic, and Curtis a mechanism. Curtis is still belly-up on the block of ice -- his legs now bent like a bug. Hennessy spins Curtis by the foot, as if it were the handle on an ice cream maker. Like a kid scrutinizing the springs of a clock, Hennessy watches Curtis go: How does this man run? Like another driverless car -- give him a little push and he'll spin on his own.
On first reflection, Ice/Car/Cage seems to be about humans turned into machines. The men respond more to the car than to one another, letting it determine the shape of the dance. And the men's presence is very quiet, muted under a soundtrack and accompanying found sounds: a loud, low-pitched refrigerator buzz; intermittent Chopin Nocturnes from the portable radio; the chugging of the car; and the subterranean clatter of the nearby Muni. The only sound from the dancers is the thud of their bodies hitting pavement. But what keeps the men revolving around the car -- and hushed -- is not oppression but some inarticulate desire to blend and mesh with their environment, even a postindustrial one. They don't want to stand out like some bad-ass, flaming red Firebird; they want to melt into a block of ice or hum like an engine. Ice/Car/Cage's stark beauty conveys the integrity of that desire and then goes further, suggesting it is an impulse toward freedom: The piece begins with a man let out of a cage. Liberated, he rushes to dance with a car.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
