Review: Everything works in 'Streetcar' production

There are three simultaneous productions of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" playing at Clarence Brown Theatre on the University of Tennessee campus, all of them woven into a theatrical jacquard by director Calvin MacLean.

In the foreground is a Balanchine jazz ballet verbally danced by Dale Dickey, who plays Blanche as though she is a platinum swan shot on a hot Mississippi plantation and left to rot in the smothering heat of a small Jim Crow town.

Instead, Blanche escapes to New Orleans and interlaces her illusional grandeur into a Tharp clip-stepped piece being performed by the rest of the excellent cast.

Easing all this together is music by composer and Knoxville Symphony Orchestra music director Lucas Richman, which MacLean uses like a needle and thread putting gathers into one of Blanche's dresses created by costume designer Marianne Custer.

While Dickey does her jazz waltz with Williams' magical language, everybody else provides realism in the orchestral texture.

Wrapped up in all this is Williams' social commentary about people who are making do with life without much complaining, as well as those whose world decomposes around them and they find themselves on a level of Dante's Hell they never envisioned and do what they have to do to survive.

In Blanche's case, she simply escapes to New Orleans, bringing her illusions into her sister's house.

It's only gradually that Stella Kowalski, Blanche's sister, well played by Jessica Ripton, realizes that there is mental moldiness in Blanche's trunks and hatboxes, mostly because Stella's husband, Stanley, played by Matthew Ventura, pries into all of them and adds some bacteria of his own.

But the real counterpoint to Blanche's trapped world of dead or dying relatives is Mitch, very well played by Peter DeFaria.

In the end, however, the dutiful existence of his life with his sick mother turns out not much different.

It will be hard to find better theater.

Don't let this streetcar pass you by.

It runs through Sept. 20. Tickets, which are $15 for students, $22 for seniors older than 60 and $27 for adults, may be purchased online at www.clarencebrowntheatre.com or by calling 865-974-5161.

Harold Duckett is a freelance contributor to the News Sentinel.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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