Review: A Stripped-Down Streetcar Soars in a Los Angeles Airplane Hangar

In a desolate airplane hangar in downtown Los Angeles, four actors perform the classic A Streetcar Named Desire with only folding chairs and flood lights. No set, period costumes, or supporting cast. They grind Tennessee Williams’s characters to the bare bones, like animals marking their territory and ripping one another to shreds. This production, created by lead actor Lucy Owen and director Nick Westrate, is visceral and intimate.

In a crowded neighborhood in New Orleans, Blanche DuBois (Owen) enters her sister’s place with disgust and apprehension. Though her life has hit rock bottom due to bad finances and risky living, she can’t believe she has to stay in this dumpy apartment. Stella (Mallory Portnoy), a more earthy, less haughty version of her sister, is a voracious, sexual woman with a passion for her brute of a husband, Stanley (Brad Koed). Stanley has no compunctions about smacking his wife around when he’s drunk. He instantly recognizes the hypocrisy in his sister-in-law and the pain behind the façade she desperately wants to portray.

Owen plays Blanche as a wilting flower that could be trampled at any moment, but she also captures Blanche’s dignity. In another time when women had power to make their own decisions and express their sexuality freely, Blanche DuBois might have flourished. Yet in the Deep South of the 1940s, the patriarchy was there to break her. Owen convincingly shows us that a woman like Blanche had no chance in Stanley’s world.

Koed gives us a Stanley who seems to shamelessly enjoy inflicting pain on his sister-in-law as well as on his wife. He seems sadistic rather than misunderstood. Portnoy is raw as Stanley’s pregnant wife, playing her like a drug addict jonesing for her husband’s body. As Mitch, Stan’s lonely friend who falls for Blanche’s delusions, James Russell is tender but naïve, controlled by his adherence to gender roles.

Director Westrate has the four actors also play minor roles. This can be confusing at times, especially when one actor plays two characters arguing with each other and when Blanche slips into her memories. The blocking also sometimes makes it difficult to hear important dialogue, such as when Stanley reveals Blanche’s past to her sister or when we witness the lead-up to the rape. Fortunately, the four actors sizzle as a foursome, and the strengths outweigh the weaknesses.

Westrate makes great use of the hangar space (the production will move to a Venice Beach warehouse November 1-3). Flood lights attached to the walls or dragged on the floor illuminate only small parts of the stage, leaving the characters in silhouette during a striking mis-en-scène — particularly when Blanche invites Mitch into the apartment after he missed her birthday party, and when Blanche sensually dances alone in the apartment.

The sound design, accredited to Westrate, also sets the mood with a mix of hot jazz, gothic folk, and death metal at the climax, as well has screeching cats and streetcar clatter. The hangar itself produces chilling effects with echoing voices, slamming metal doors, and natural elements, such as the train whizzing by, firecrackers launching intermittently, and bikers zooming behind the stage outside. The uncontrollable chaos fits perfectly into the suffocating atmosphere of the French Quarter.

Westrate and Owen’s concept of A Streetcar Named Desire is ripe with possibilities, and they skillfully tighten the noose around Tennessee Williams’ characters. With the constricted proximities, the audience feels less like they’re viewing a play than guiltily eavesdropping on neighbors’ high drama.