Writers’ Theatre
Chicago
(847) 242-6000
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
****
There are few plays “as deep and poetic and cruel and altogether haunting” as Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Consequently, many directors are so awed by the script that they fail to take many chances. David Cromer, thankfully, is not one of them. The Obie Award winner has created an “eye-opening take” on Williams’ allegory about the demise of the Old South. He and designer Collette Pollard have devised an almost “incestuously intimate” setting that makes audience members feel like cramped cohabitants of the shabby New Orleans tenement in which fragile, genteel Blanche DuBois has been forced to stay with her sister, Stella. The conflict between Blanche and her coarse brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, builds to such explosive force that “you will never be able to see this play again in quite the same way.”
Cromer’s staging “springs to life” thanks to some of Chicago’s best young talent, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. His raw, energetic performers embody their characters both physically and emotionally. Matt Hawkins’ Stanley is muscular, “loud, and brash,” giving in to every primal urge as he wavers between brutishness and neediness. Natasha Lowe’s doe eyes and alabaster skin perfectly suit Blanche’s vulnerability, though her performance doesn’t quite capture Blanche’s “faded Southern gentility.” In an interesting twist, Cromer initially frames Stanley as a more sympathetic figure than “prissy, neurotic” Blanche. Nevertheless, as Stanley chips away at her sanity until she completely falls apart, the unnerved audience is left feeling nothing but pity for a woman forced to depend “on the kindness of strangers.”
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 23 September 2023The Week’s daily digest of the news agenda, published at 8am
-
Pinochet’s coup in Chile 50 years on
The Explainer Half a century on, the former leader still sharply divides opinion in his home country
-
The Week Unwrapped: Ghost tankers, loyalty cards and contempt
Podcast Should we be worried about illicit oil tankers? What are the limits to protests outside court? And are supermarket loyalty schemes all they seem?
-
If/Then
feature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.