Review: A Searing Streetcar at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor

There’s an old saying in the music business: “It’s not the singer, it’s the song.” Theater is the same way. All the high-wattage acting and directing talent in the world can’t make a production great if the script isn’t up to par.

On the other hand, when a local theater company chooses to mount a show like A Streetcar Named Desire – universally acclaimed as one of the most monumental works ever written for the American stage – it carries its own set of risks.

Can the production rise to the quality of the material?

In this case, the answer is a resounding yes. Bay Street Theater has staged a deeply affecting and powerful production of one of the greatest plays of the 20th century.

Director Stephen Hamilton and a stellar cast find the grit and humanity in Tennesee Williams’ masterpiece. Ably assisted by his production and design team, Hamilton, who is also Bay Street’s co-founder, succeeds in transporting the audience to a grimy little apartment in working-class New Orleans two years after the end of World War II – and he anchors us there for the entirety of the production. Streetcar’s setting makes sense in a small venue, and Hamilton adroitly uses the theater’s cozy confines.

Directing for the theater comes down to a series of creative choices. By choosing to stage his Streetcar without an intermission, Hamilton helps to maintain the vitality of Williams’ script.

While there are supporting players who provide vital context and layering to the play, Streetcar revolves around its three primary characters: Stanley Kowalski, Stanley’s wife Stella, and Stella’s sister, Blanche DuBois, who comes to stay with the couple for an extended visit.

Classic scripts become classics because they explore timeless themes. Stanley Kowalski (Shea Buckner), a man from a humble background, tends to define himself through the eyes of the DuBois sisters. Though their stars and their fortunes have faded, the sisters grew up as Southern belles at Belle Reve, a large plantation in Mississippi.

Stanley – a brute at heart, but also a fiercely proud man – feels that his wife and sister don’t respect him because of his blue collar roots and his coarse behavior. For their part, the DuBois sisters, especially Blanche, don’t attempt to hide their disdain for Stanley’s lack of breeding. In Blanche’s eyes, Stanley will never be a gentleman – an observation that informs so much of the play’s inner life.

The kind of classism depicted by a master playwright like Williams in a script written almost 80 years ago certainly resonates today. The rift between those from the blue collar and white collar worlds has emerged as one of the key factors informing today’s political landscape and voting patterns.

As the play’s title makes clear, another of the script’s timeless and universal themes centers on desire, a powerful human emotion that meets somewhere at the intersection of love and lust.

To capture an essential element of Streetcar, the desire that binds Stella to Stanley has to be visceral. As the couple, Shea Buckner and Katie Rodgers find the complicated carnality the play demands. Buckner nails not only Stanley’s physicality, but also the anguish that always sits just below the surface and bubbles up most intensely when he drinks. When Stanley calls out to Stella for something akin to forgiveness, Buckner’s reading (and Hamilton’s direction) of one of the most famous single-word set pieces in the history of theater hits a lot of the right notes.

In a role that can be easily overshadowed by Stanley’s bombast and Blanche’s struggles, Katie Rodgers more than holds her own as Stella. Rodgers lets us see Stella’s longing and the genuine feelings of pity (among other emotions) she has for her sister clearly enough. But she doesn’t completely open the kimono as an actress – a wise choice for this role.

As Stanley’s behavior gets more brutal and Blanche gets more detached from reality, we see the torrent of conflicting impulses Stella is feeling, but Rodgers doesn’t overdo it; the play’s emotional resonance lies partly in presenting Stella as more of an observer and a victim than a disruptor. And Rodgers makes the unselfish choice to play her that way.

Stepping into one of the juiciest parts any actor could ask for, Daniela Mastropietro’s Blanche DuBois is heartbreakingly damaged and vulnerable. Maybe the most difficult challenge in bringing Blanche to life is managing the subtleties of her evolution. As the audience takes in the slow reveal that is Blanche’s backstory – and the more she transforms from aging Southern belle to serial fabulist to rape victim, and ultimately, to a descent into madness – the more challenging the role becomes.

In deftly showing us the many faces of Blanche DuBois, Mastropietro exhibits an obvious devotion to her craft. Her performance feels like it channels the Blanche Tennessee Williams must have had in mind when he wrote her: a tragic anti-hero, a victim of circumstance, but also a victim of her own actions and internal demons.

As Blanche is being led away to the asylum and she utters the play’s final lines – lines almost everyone of a certain age has had permanently burned into their memories – it serves as a reminder, courtesy of the folks at Bay Street, of the transformative power of theater.

Visit baystreet.org for tickets and show times.