Nick Myers/University of Tennessee

Actress Dale Dickey returns to her alma mater to play Blanche DuBois in the Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening Sept. 3.

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Best known for her comic television role as a daytime hooker, Dale Dickey remembers laughing when asked to portray Blanche DuBois in the Clarence Brown Theatre production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."

"I said, 'You know I play hookers and drug addicts and bad girls, don't you?' But I wanted to do it," said the Knoxville native and University of Tennessee graduate. "I am so excited they asked me; I have so many fond memories of Clarence Brown."

Tennessee Williams' play opens the UT theater's 35th anniversary season with a Sept. 3 preview. CBT Company Artistic Director and UT theater department head Calvin MacLean directs. Third-year graduate students Matthew Ventura and Jessica Ripton play Stanley and Stella Kowalski.

"Streetcar" focuses on the genteel yet pretentious Blanche. Having lost her teaching job and the family plantation, she arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley. But Blanche's propriety is a veneer, and Stanley discovers she lost her job because of an affair with a student.

Near the play's end, Stanley rapes Blanche. She loses her fragile hold on reality and is sent to an asylum. As she departs Blanche speaks one of American theater's most quoted lines, telling the doctor, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Set just after World War II, the play tells a story of the "old" and the "new" South, says MacLean. Blanche represents the past; Stanley the new. "The 'new South' is in my mind the more economically and socially diverse culture that has evolved since World War II.... This culture challenged many of the customs and attitudes often associated with the 'old South,' both good and bad," says MacLean.

To Dickey, Blanche is a "dream role," yet one very different from the women she often portrays.

"I just never thought I would be asked to do it. It's not that I don't have the emotional makeup to do it. But I've always thought of Blanche as a great beauty. I'm a character actress; I play the coarser, harder Southern roles. … But there's something in the core of it. I can't put my finger on it; I just feel it. ... I really understand her."

This is Dickey's first role in a Tennessee Williams play. "Blanche is so complex. ... It is such a fabulous, beautiful play, and it reminds me why I chose acting to begin with."

The daughter of Missy Dickey and David Dickey has been acting since she was 9. As a child she performed in such UT productions as "The Sound of Music," and "Oliver." She was in nearly 50 plays as a UT theater major in the early 1980s before moving to New York.

She earned awards for her stage performances in fellow Southerner Del Shores' "The Trials and Tribulation of a Trailer Trash Housewife" and "Southern Baptist Sissies." She hopes to reprise her "Sissies" role as barfly Odette Annette Barnett in a planned film version of the play.

Her movie parts include supporting roles in "Changeling," "The Pledge" with Jack Nicholson and the recently released "A Perfect Getaway." On television she's played an alien on "X-Files," an addict on "Breaking Bad" and a desperate mother on "E.R."

For most of her acting career, Dickey took other jobs to help pay the bills. She's waited tables, delivered balloons and made phone calls for a nonprofit. She didn't quit her day jobs until she earned the role of Patty the Daytime Hooker on "My Name is Earl." She felt "blessed" to get the reoccurring part on the now-cancelled television comedy. "I had the time of my life."

The Bearden High School graduate previously returned to the UT stage for "Our Country's Good" in 1994 and "The Rainmaker" in 2001. She still gets an "instant reaction" to the Clarence Brown Theatre.

"It's home. ... The smell of that building is the same and the echoes of the doors are the same. … I can picture myself sitting in technical rehearsals when I was a kid in 'Oliver,' lying down on the floor and counting the bricks in the wall. And those bricks are still there."

Amy McRary may be reached at 865-342-6437.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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