Stage: A Streetcar Named Desire

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, D.C.

(800) 444-1324

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

****

“If Cate Blanchett’s nerve-shattering turn as Blanche DuBois doesn’t knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. Playing Tennessee Williams’ degenerating Southern belle in Liv Ullmann’s “revelatory” revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, the acclaimed Australian actress delivers “a truly great portrayal—certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I’ve ever experienced.” From the moment Blanche first appears, washed up on the New Orleans doorstep of her younger sister Stella, through the final scene, in which Blanche completes her cycle of self-immolation, Blanchett is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Blanchett is a welcome addition to a long line of actresses who’ve made Blanche DuBois their own, said Maura Judkis in The Onion. But “any actor who takes on the role” of Stanley Kowalski, Stella’s quick-tempered lunk of a husband, “shoulders the burden of being compared to Marlon Brando.” This, after all, was Brando’s breakout stage role, and one he made famous onscreen as well. Joel Edgerton echoes Brando’s brutish intensity, but he’s also softer than Brando was in several telling scenes. Where Brando “sinks to his knees” as he calls out to Stella in the play’s most famous scene, Edgerton actually collapses onto the ground, “weeping as his wife comes to scoop him into bed.”

But while Edgerton is deeply affecting, there’s no doubt this production belongs to Blanchett, said Elysa Gardner in USA Today. In her 2006 American stage debut, as the lead in Robyn Nevin’s Hedda Gabbler, Blanchett struggled to take on Hedda’s dysfunctions. Here she “tackles an even more iconic basket case” than Hedda, and succeeds in making Blanche’s demons palpable. Blanchett benefits from the sharp, “intuitive” direction of Ullmann. A masterful actress in her own right—and a longtime collaborator with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman—Ullmann knows a thing or two about portraying the bleakness, despair, and “wry humor” of the human condition. Together, she and Blanchett make this Streetcar a “brutal beauty that demands our attention and rewards it.”