West Side Story

Various images from West Side Story, courtesy www.westsidestory.com
Clockwise from upper left: The Jets dance; Maria and Tony meet;
Maria feels pretty (singing in Spanish); the girls like to be in America

Late in his distinguished career, Arthur Laurents is making a new name for himself rethinking classic American musicals for which he was an original, key collaborator. After the spectacular success of his recently directed remount of Gypsy, with Patti Lupone, for which he wrote the 1959 book, Laurent has again transformed his writer’s eye into a director’s perspective on West Side Story, for which he wrote the book in 1957.

If his approach with Gypsy was to find its authenticity by sharpening the edges of the three leading characters, his concept for West Side Story is to more closely reflect the lives of the Puerto Rican gang members in 19 50s New York who anchor one half of the story’s revision of Romeo and Juliet. I admire Laurents’ decision to hire Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) to translate some of the show’s dialogue and two of its key songs into Spanish. I went to see the show (at the Palace Theatre, 4/4/09) hoping that the choice to honor its characters’ ethnicity might bring the musical new poignancy. But somehow, Laurents’ connection with the material seems less organic than gimmicky.

The Spanish language addition is more than a publicity stunt. The difference between the Sharks and the Jets becomes palpable and meaningful, and the very different textures of their adjacent lives in Manhattan starker, when the Sharks curse the Jets in Spanish and speak to one another in their own language. The fact that some portion of the Broadway audience will be marginalized from their dialogue matters, too, to the extent that it’s worthwhile to put a mainstream American audience in the position that non-English speaking immigrants in the States feel every day. The simple difference of language could productively underline the condition of being “othered” in an English-dominated, predominantly white culture.

But many of Laurent’s other choices work against the realism the Spanish dialogue and songs might provide. The stunning visual design woos the eye with gorgeous, romantic lighting, especially for “There’s a Place for Us,” a number choreographed as a utopian fantasy for Maria and Tony, in which the considerably brightened stage radiates with what feels like vibrant sunlight and vital warmth. Otherwise, the darkened set, too, seems to take place in something of a “nowhere.”

Although the design is vaguely reminiscent of Jo Mielziner’s concept for Death of a Salesman, with abstracted New York apartments sketched as wings on the side of the stage, the décor does little to evoke what it feels like to be Puerto Rican (or, for that matter, white) and poor and young in Manhattan in the 50s. There’s something very clean about this production, even though the young male actors wear conspicuously applied dirt on their faces and arms to give them a rough and tough appeal. Later, after the tragic rumble by the highway, their wounds, too, seem pasted on. They resemble the blood and gore of a B horror film, instead of the hard earned, knuckle-bruising knocks of a senseless fight.

The production, in fact, is peculiarly unconvincing, despite its obvious heart. A lot of love and attention has gone into this revival, but the only place the lavish affection pays off is in the dance numbers. Joey McKneely’s ’s reproductions of Jerome Robbins’ original choreography thrillingly recalls what it might have been like to see those moves for the first time, when the idea of dancing gang members was novel and exciting. In the Prologue and the opening “Jet Song” number, the boys lightly leap into the air, rising and falling with a kind of strenuous effortlessness. The dance at the gym, the horrible rumble, even the Jets’ abuse of Anita in Doc’s drug store, all are accomplished with an attention to detail that brings the choreographic archive alive.

The production’s more inferior aspects stem from poor casting choices. If Laurents aimed for verisimilitude with his choice to texture the production with Spanish, casting Josefina Scaglione, a lily-white Argentinean opera singer, to play Maria compromises what might otherwise be seen as a racially progressive gesture. Most of the Sharks and their women at least look Latino, with olive-color skin and shiny dark hair. But Maria appears practically corn fed; she and Matt Cavenaugh, who plays Tony, could be brother and sister.

For the star-crossed lovers to find and fall for each other, as a result, doesn’t seem taboo-breaking as much as it does pre-ordained. That Maria’s youth and virginity should be signified by her very white skin compromises the importance of the lovers’ difference from one another, and seems even more glaring in a production that wants to emphasize ethnicity. If Laurents intended to address the politics of skin color in minoritized cultures, his casting choice for Maria might have been interesting.

But nothing in the production suggests that this was his intent. In fact, Maria is mocked for her idealism and her naïveté by actors whose Latino/a ethnicity is generally more visible on stage, which gives those scenes an odd air of intra-race jealousy, instead of the concern and disapprobation of a community truly fearful for what might happen if miscegenation is condoned.

That Scaglione isn’t a very strong actor doesn’t help her make a convincing case for empathy. She plays Maria as more sophisticated than her years, her attraction to Tony less world-changing than the standard erotic charge of a woman who knows exactly what she wants. Scaglione and Cavenaugh are a pleasing couple, but they don’t generate the chemistry that leaves an audience devastated by their inevitable separation through death.

In fact, rather than making any of the by now mythic story fresh and surprising, this production takes the audience and the cast through our paces, bringing us to the sorry end through a well-traveled route. None of the actors’ interpretations reveal new angles on their characters’ situations. Even though thinking about race and class—especially during the nascent Obama administration—has changed considerably in the U.S. since the original production opened on Broadway, this revival captures none of that new energy or insight. The performance feels not so much like a slavishly faithful, museum-quality revival, but more like a remounting under glass, distanced and strangely clinical.

The cast’s youth might contribute to this remove. While many of the Sharks and Jets are terrific dancers who convey their slightly drawn characters with convincing body tics and emblematic physical signatures, and the principals have beautiful, resonant singing voices, no one in the cast stands out for their acting. While their talents energize the musical numbers that provide the revival’s most enthralling moments, the cast’s acting deficits make the book’s more emotional moments disappointing. No one seems to discover anything in the moment; they present their interactions—romantic or hostile—as a done deal, without showing us what prompts them to act.

I waited throughout the production to be genuinely moved, but felt instead continually disappointed. Only “There’s a Place for Us” brought welcome goose-bumps to my arms and a lump to my throat, and that was because a young red-headed boy of perhaps 10 or 12, who’d lurked in the back of some of the gang fight scenes with Anybodys, was trotted out to sing the first few phrases a cappella, while Tony and Maria fled offstage to change their costumes. Something about the musical change and the transformation of the production’s physical gestalt for that number approached the heart wrenching emotion I’d expected from the whole evening. (On the other hand, the use of the boy’s pristine soprano reminded me a bit too much of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in Cabaret, for which recent productions have used the same eyes-of-the-innocents gesture to manipulate audience response.)

Even the production’s last scene, in which Tony roams the abandoned streets, calling for Chino to slaughter him as Tony believes Chino has killed Maria, seems manufactured, offering canned, pat feelings rather than real emotion. When poor Anybodys—in a haircut that makes her look like Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in the film Boys Don’t Cry—approaches Tony to try to call him back to his senses, he snarls, “You’re a girl. Act like one.” Too bad that a production that tries—even if it fails—to be racially complex has to end, as usual (and as the original book dictates), by damning the one character in the musical performing herself through more complex gender identifications.

Hearing the orchestra play the soaring score and listening to those wonderful lyrics, I was only sorry that the singers conveyed the music’s emotion with more technique than heart. Laurents and his cast missed an opportunity to say something much more, to help us think through racial difference in new ways in a historical moment in which day to day politics already lead the way. In this West Side Story, the theatre is left lagging behind.

The Feminist Spectator

Chasing Manet

Jane Alexander (l) and Lynn Cohen in Chasing Manet

Tina Howe’s new play, at Primary Stages (which I saw just before it opened on 4/4/09), continues her career-long exploration of the foibles of blue-blood families and the women they oppress. This version of the story regards a patrician woman toward the end of a distinguished life, who finds herself—thanks to her feckless son—ripped summarily from a life spent as a painter in Boston and stashed in a nursing home in the Bronx.

Jane Alexander plays Catherine Sargent (fictionalized cousin to the great American painter John Singer Sargent), wearing a head full of long, flowing white hair and radiating the wasted vitality of someone stored to wait for her death much too early. Even curled up in a bitter fetal position at the beginning of many scenes, Alexander retains the play’s focus. Her intelligence and charisma as Catherine helps push a play that might have been a predictable trifle into more compelling evening.

Alexander’s terrific partner in this transformation is Lynn Cohen, who finds the humanity, warmth, and comedy in a character suffering the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Cohen plays Rennie Waltzer, who becomes Catherine’s new roommate at the nursing home, bringing with her a large and loud family of Long Island Jews (played by Julie Halston, David Margulies, among others).

Director Michael Wilson brings the actors performing as the Jewish family close to stereotype—that fine line between laughing at and laughing with is walked here—but manages to make them familiar but particular, with individual stories that keep them from falling squarely into type.

Rennie’s husband Herschel died several years before, sending her quickly into an emotional and mental spiral down toward losing her mind. She thinks that Herschel is still alive, calling out to him to observe the things that amuse her—frequently—in her new life. Rennie thinks she’s living in a four-star hotel, much to Catherine’s dismay.

Catherine’s plaint is that she’s trapped in a place she finds far beneath her; her burden is that she’s now blind, and truly can’t care for herself. Her son, Royal (Jack Gilpin, in an appropriately sedate turn as the ineffectual middle-aged man), is a Yeats professor at Columbia who moves her to New York thinking he’ll participate in her care and see her often. But his stressful academic life limits his availability, and he winds up leaving her warehoused, isolated, and lonely.

Catherine’s acidic fury at being left to die among strangers she openly finds inferior requires Alexander to convey a complicated set of emotions. On one hand, her anger makes her caustic and her arrogance can be tiring. On the other hand, the audience wants to empathize with a woman who’s clearly still smart and healthy. Catherine is a blind painter, who has to conjure her favorite images—especially Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’Herbe—from an old and deep mental archive. The injustice of watching someone who loves light and color no longer be able to see is enough to draw spectators to the character.

That blindness is Catherine’s only challenge raises disability politics that Howe doesn’t seem to consider. Why couldn’t Royal have found help for her at her own home in Boston? Why couldn’t Catherine learn to get around with a cane or a guide dog? But Chasing Manet is a comedy, which apparently lets Howe off the hook for not thinking very deeply about the logistics of her central metaphor.

The nursing home is indeed demeaning, as Catherine claims when she’s invited to toss around a beach ball that a well-meaning physical therapist suggests to his charges is molten lava. Catherine simply refuses to play, sitting off to the side wearing her own sour whimsy—she’s splattered a pair of spectacles with red paint and crashes into the physical therapy scene calling herself Oedipus. When no one rises to her joke—most of the others are wheelchair bound, while Catherine is mobile and strong—she sits outside the circle, sulking.

The play clarifies that the indignities of aging aren’t suffered only by the rich and by those still for the most part mentally and physically intact. The beach ball scene, and other interactions between the staff and the residents, shows how the elderly are infantilized, even by personnel as well meant as those Howe creates here. Played with sensitivity and humor by Vanessa Aspillaga and Rob Riley—the only two actors of color in the cast—the nursing home staffers are entirely empathetic, seeing the people with whom they work as people to respect and engage. But even for them, it’s clearly difficult to keep from speaking down to people who are, in fact, losing control of their bodies and their minds.

Sometimes the play wants us to identify with Catherine’s son and Rennie’s daughter, who’ve enrolled their respective parents in this circumscribed life because there seemed no other choice. Howe writes both characters scenes in which they express their fear at losing their parent, and both are given ample reasons for their decision about where to let their mother end her life. In other scenes, Howe wants us to feel the indignities of aging and losing control of your own agency.

Aside from Cohen and Alexander, the nursing home residents are played quite over the top by the other actors (all of whom rotate through multiple roles as family members and friends, nursing staff and residents). They select physical and emotional mannerisms—based on the excesses of Howe’s text in these scenes—that push their characters into caricatures. One is a sex-obsessed elderly gentleman who can’t keep his hands out of his pants. Another is paranoid and fearful; another dotty and weird, with uncontrolled facial tics (Halston, overacting as an old woman here, while she’s more reserved and effective as Rennie’s daughter, Rita). That these scenes push into the absurd and grotesque undercuts the critique Howe wants to launch of how older people are treated by their families.

Assisted by topnotch actors like Alexander and Cohen, Catherine and Rennie retain the story’s focus. Rennie’s exuberant love of life begins to thaw Catherine’s icy Brahmin reserve. And once Catherine realizes that Rennie, who at least can see, could be a partner in her plan to escape from the prison of assisted living, the two strike up an unlikely friendship that gives Rennie back her dignity and Catherine back her heart.

As farfetched as Chasing Manet’s resolution might really be, it’s a pleasure to see two strong older female characters get what they want and deserve (see Howe’s conversation with Jane Alexander at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/theater/09howe.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Tina%20Howe%20and%20Jane%20Alexander&st=cse). That they enable one another, and wrest back control of their lives, immersing themselves in pleasures and choices their children prematurely decided they should lose, lets Chasing Manet sound a triumphal, hopeful note. Watching Alexander and Cohen play off of one another in elegantly timed, warm repartee reminded me of Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes in Terrence McNally’s Deuce a few seasons back. That two-hander gave the older actors more complex live stories but less to do, as they sat watching a tennis match and reminiscing about their lives of competition with one another and the tour. In Chasing Manet, women who should by rights be less mobile are ironically empowered to travel—literally and figuratively. Perhaps that difference comes from Howe’s career-long attention to women’s plight, and her determination that neither age nor gender should hold a good woman back.

The Feminist Spectator

Frozen River

Misty Upham, left, and Melissa Leo, in Frozen River

Courtney Hunt’s film Frozen River is a quietly moving examination of lives blinkered by poverty in a small town in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border. As the local economy withers away, residents of the town and those on the nearby Mohawk reservation turn to illegally smuggling immigrants into the country as a way to turn a quick buck.

Melissa Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman whose husband has run off with the balloon payment due on the double-wide trailer they’ve been saving to buy. The film starts with Ray sitting in the passenger seat of her car, wearing a worn, pink chenille bathrobe. The car is parked outside her rusty single-wide mobile home, which sits precariously, isolated on an abandoned, grassless lot in the middle of the nowhere where the surrounding town is already dying.

The camera moves in for an extreme close-up of Ray’s face, scrutinizing every pore and inch of her rough red skin, worn from smoke and worry. Unexpected tears suddenly spill out of her eyes, while she blows smoke from her mouth. Her tears flow without a drop of self-pity; they release something that lets her pull herself together and go back into the house to attend to her two sons. T.J., the teenaged boy (Charlie McDermott), watches over his five-year-old brother; he can’t bear to see him suffer the disappointments T.J. already knows are in store. The younger boy lives happily ignorant of their poverty, as both Ray and T.J. struggle to keep his world intact.

At the film’s start, Ray’s husband has just left, and not for the first time. While the boys are in school, she goes to look for him at the Bingo parlor on the nearby Mohawk reservation, where wary locals refuse to help her. In the parking lot, Ray sees Lila, a young Native woman, driving her husband’s car. When Ray confronts her, Lila says she found it with the keys in it at the bus station, and later mentions she saw the car’s owner getting on a southbound bus. Ray knows her husband is headed to Atlantic City; she also knows the money is irretrievably gone.

Ray’s initial interactions with Lila play out in icy recriminations, as neither woman has much sympathy for the other. Their equally desperate straits make them natural competitors, but they’re both smart enough to realize they’d be better off as collaborators. The car holds value for Lila, because she needs a vehicle to participate in a smuggling ring that shepherds illegal immigrants across the St. Lawrence River, frozen solid in the bitter winter. Once they see that they can help one another, they strike up a situational relationship of convenience. How it changes propels the film into surprising emotional territory.

Lila is implacably calm about the smuggling operation into which she initiates Ray. Lila knows everything: how much it costs to be smuggled into the States; how long the immigrants have to work until they pay off their debt to the people who bring them in; how much time you have to serve if you get caught running an illegal; and how much they make for each smuggling run. But Lila needs a car and she also needs someone who can see. Her ill-fitted glasses are too uncomfortable to wear. But she worries that the smugglers will cheat her, and makes sure that Ray counts their money at the beginning and end of every trip.

Lila lives in circumstances even more humble than Ray’s; her trailer is a one-room camper, abandoned in deep, snow covered woods. An unexplained crime has destroyed Lila’s reputation on the reservation. Something happened that resulted in her young husband’s death, which prompts the tribal council to collude with Lila’s mother-in-law to take away Lila’s one-year-old child. Lila watches the baby, hiding in the bushes outside her mother-in-law’s house, leaving money for them in potato chip canisters she quietly props by their door.

Because Ray has the car and Lila has the knowledge, the two women make a business deal. They drive together across the frozen river to still another ramshackle mobile home, rolling across the ice to where the smuggler keeps illegal immigrants waiting to be ferried into the U.S. Ray and Lila load two of these people into their trunk at a time and drive back on the ice to the unwatched border. When they get off the river, they drive through a portion of the route watched by a state trooper. The tensest moment of the trip is when they look to see if he follows. Lila tells Ray bitterly on their first trip, “He won’t stop you, you’re white.”

Throughout the film, Ray forces herself into situations in which she’s singular—the only white woman, the only working mother, the only woman who’s not a stripper or an alien in the Canadian club they visit in the film’s climactic scene to collect their last load of illegal immigrants. She handles herself with incredible resolve and aplomb, once she decides to participate. She and Lila clear $600 for each trip they make; the money is generous and easy for someone who works long hours, standing on her feet for a minimum wage that amounts to much less.

Unsavory men run the smuggling operation. One is a hirsute, brutal Canadian who owns the strip club; the other is the long-haired Native man in the trailer on the river, who takes one look into Ray’s car and tells Lila, “I don’t like to deal with white women.” But Ray needs the money and can’t afford to bristle at the racism she suffers. After all, Ray is racist, too.

Hunt’s film carefully calibrates the dual oppressions of being poor and white or Native American in a country in which there are fewer and fewer social service nets. Without her husband, Ray needs to earn twice as much. But she works as a clerk at the local Dollar Value store, where her manager is an unctuous much younger white man who refuses to put her on the schedule fulltime after she’s worked dependably for two years. But he lets another, younger, prettier female employee come in late and keep much more lax work habits. Ageism also works against Ray and her struggle to feed her kids.

T.J. complains about eating popcorn and drinking Tang for breakfast and dinner. Ray searches for coins in the couch pillows, meting out the few quarters and dimes she can scrape together so that the boys can buy themselves lunches at school. T.J. wants to leave high school and get a job, but Ray insists he continue his education. She’s steely in her resolve that he’ll do better, that he’ll somehow transcend the circumstances in which she’s raising him.

Ray hasn’t yet acquiesced to her situation. Every act is motivated by her dream of buying the double-wide trailer with three bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in the master, and wall-to-wall carpeting. At the film’s start, the new house is being delivered on a flatbed truck that pulls right up to the field where the old one sits, desolate. But since her husband has absconded with the cash, Ray doesn’t have the final payment. The angry trailer salesman drives the truck off, telling her he won’t come out again.

Ray wants that home. The film respects that the double-wide is the apogee of the better life toward which she can stride. Frozen River isn’t a fairy tale. But its clear-eyed understanding of Ray and Lila’s plight insures that we don’t pity either character. Their part of upstate New York is forsaken and barren, but it has a brutal, chilled beauty that makes the landscape look like a Catherine Opie painting of strangely symmetrical, subtly colorful ice-fishing huts on a frozen lake.

Ray isn’t asking for hand-outs; she isn’t even really blaming her husband. She understands he’s sick: “He has an addiction,” she tells her son with clenched teeth. They settle in at the end of their evenings to have important conversations as they look beyond one another, staring at the television while they talk about how they’re going to get through the next day.

The son substitutes for his father, even though he, too, is still a child. T.J. makes crank calls to swindle unsuspecting elderly people out of $29 and their credit card numbers, telling them they’ve been left an inheritance for which he needs their information to process the small fee before he releases their windfalls. His own anxious ploy for cash preys on the desperation of the people he reaches, extending the cycle of poverty and despair and determination to survive by your wits.

T.J. isn’t scamming for drug money or alcohol, or anything about which a young boy with slightly more means might scheme. He’s trying to pitch in, since Ray won’t let him pull his weight and work for the few dollars of extra cash that might mean real food on their plates. Ray has rented a flat-screen television from a place called “Rent to Buy.” When the store calls to say if she doesn’t make her payment, they’re coming to take it away, T.J. frantically plots to find the money, so that his little brother won’t be left without his meager entertainment. These quotidian crises propel this drama, and yet they generate surprisingly ominous suspense.

Hunt produces a narrative that could be told much more conventionally. For instance, when a state trooper comes to their trailer at the film’s end, looking for T.J., a different sort of film-maker could succumb to cliché and have him haul the boy to jail. In Frozen River, the officer brings along the elderly woman T.J. swindled, asking only that the boy apologize face to face for what he did and that he not do it again. The law here isn’t the enemy—the troopers (including Michael O’Keefe, nicely underplaying as the officer whose interactions with Ray over the course of the story determine her fate) find themselves employed among people whose actions are motivated by the extremity of their poverty, not by evil.

Likewise, Ray’s future comes as no surprise, but how it’s handled is humane and forgiving. For someone managing such a hard-scrabble life, she finds reserves of compassion and understanding that model a hopeful extension of conventional kinship systems across race, ethnicity, and class. On the other hand, Ray isn’t portrayed a saint. She deflects any empathy she might receive from the other characters as well as from spectators. On one of their smuggling trips, Ray carries a Pakistani couple in her trunk, a man and a woman who have a duffle bag they insist Ray and Lila carry inside the car. Ray doesn’t know what “Paki” means when Lila refers to their passengers, or where Pakistan is when Lila explains.

The mysterious package makes Ray uneasy, and she decides to leave it on the icy river halfway through the trip. When they arrive at the roadside motel where the illegal immigrants are passed along to the next operative in the seedy smuggling ring, delivered into a life of servitude working for the people who bring them over, the Pakistani couple is distraught about the abandoned bag. For good reasons, Ray and Lila return to the river in the glacial cold of a very dark night to retrieve it.

Ray makes mistakes; she’s not worldly; she’s racist; she has a gun and she’s more than willing to use it. But her innate intelligence and her sharp survival skills make her a compelling, moving study in economic determination. Leo’s performance—for which she received a richly deserved Academy Award nomination—is unsparing and vulnerable. She brings a transparency to her performance that lets you see Ray deliberately make each of her impossible decisions, and track her commitment to seeing them through.

Leo registers the injustices she confronts with bitter knowledge, but never with self-pity. There’s no wallowing in her performance as Ray, just a deep willingness to bring this woman dignity and finally, understanding. Each of the central performances is equally unsparing and natural. Misty Upham, as Lila, has the same blank affect as Elaine Miles, the Native American woman who played Marilyn on the television series Northern Exposure in the early 1990s. Lila is perhaps a bit of a stereotype, as the unemotional, inexpressive Native American who nonetheless observes and comments dryly but perceptively.

But the character’s back-story and her uneasy relationship to the Mohawk territory where she clearly lives as an outsider lets Lila exceed stock. Her determination to retrieve the baby that was stolen from her fuels her own trips back and forth across the border. One of her most painful scenes shows her holed up in her tiny, snow encrusted camper, startled awake when the container in which she’s been leaving money for her mother-in-law and her baby is thrown against her thin tin door with all her money still rolled up inside.

Frozen River details the kind of desperation that drives good people to do bad things. The movie is as suspenseful as a James Bond film, but the drama here is all about the struggle to survive and the most human of emotions. When a connection is finally made, no one lives happily every after, but they do manage to pool their wits and their wiles enough to survive. For these two disenfranchised women and three young boys, that’s admirable enough.

The Feminist Spectator

Ruined, by Lynn Nottage

Photo Joan Marcus
Manhattan Theatre Club

Lynn Nottage’s new play, Ruined (Manhattan Theatre Club, 3/8/09), rewrites Mother Courage and Her Children in the context of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She weaves a story that chills spectators with its violence and moves us with the remnants of compassion evident in even the most hard-boiled of the play’s characters. Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) presides as the Madame of a bar and brothel isolated in a mining town in the middle of a rainforest, from which rebels and government soldiers roam and return.

Caught in the crossfire of men’s war, Mama Nadi and her girls survive by profiting from the men’s loneliness and their desire, appealing to them with seductive dance moves, sitting on their laps, teasing and cajoling them into parting with their cash and into joining the women in the bar’s back rooms, where higher prices can be charged for more intimate encounters.

Mama Nadi provides music, food, drink (however watered down her whiskey), and the comforts of female flesh to interchangeable batteries of men who arrive from the same forest, their chests adorned with weapons and their foreheads swathed in bandannas, their only distinguishing marks the color and cut of their uniforms. In fact, the warring soldiers in Ruined are played by the same male actors, implying that although their rhetoric is righteous, their brutality and crimes against humanity are equivalent and indistinguishable.

Mama Nadi’s, however, is no peaceful refuge. Only the force of her personality and the sexual pleasures with which she barters keep the soldiers from raping her and her girls and pillaging the small stores on which they survive. The social contract is utterly tenuous here; although the rainforest rows of dense trees comprise the back half of the set, they’re lit (by Peter Kaczorowski) ominously, almost as though they harbor the deliverers of the women’s violent demise. The precarious operation is both haven and hell, its safety and comfort mercurial.

Nottage builds the characters’ fear and tension slowly, delivering information about the setting and the political moment by carefully filling in the outline of her characters’ pasts, presents, and futures. When Christian (Russell Gebert Jones) arrives at the bar, along with the sundries and supplies he brings to sell to Mama Nadi, he offers her two other pieces of merchandise for the price of one. Not until he drags into the bar two dirty, clearly abused young women—Sophie and Salima—do we realize he’s been talking about people, so callus and indifferent appears the bartering between him and Mama.

Mama surveys the two women like a slave auctioneer. Sophie, Christian reveals, even though she’s beautiful, will be no good to Mama’s business because she’s been “ruined”; rebels have raped her with a bayonet and destroyed her genitals. Sophie walks with the ragged, uneven gait of someone who bears the memory of her assault in every move she makes. Despite her lack of value on Mama’s economy, the older woman reluctantly agrees to take Sophie in, along with the less physically broken young woman, Salima.

In between Mama’s tentative embrace of the two damaged women and their eventual losses and redemptions, Nottage demonstrates that Mama has more heart and shrewder politics than it at first appears. Although she treats her girls sternly, her gruff affection for them motivates her actions. Salima, too, has been raped by rebels, and forcibly separated from her husband and her little girl. Nottage unfolds Salima’s story across the play’s two acts, until her pregnancy as a result of rape, and the arrival of her desperate husband, combine to propel her to an unspeakable act that provides one of the play’s several climaxes.

Nottage modulates the play’s tension level, intercutting visits from rebels and government soldiers with more familial scenes of Mama and her girls, trying to establish some sense of a normal life in between the anxious moments with the men, whose brutality and arrogance are interchangeable. Mama and the girls suffer their presence because it puts food in their mouths, but the acts required of them in exchange fray their souls.

Sophie, however, pays her way through Mama’s employ by singing, accompanied by a guitarist and drummer who perform for the theatre’s spectators as much as for the characters in the bar. (Nottage wrote the songs’ lyrics to original music by Dominic Kanza.) Condola Rashad (Phylicia Rashad’s gorgeous young daughter) has a golden, bell-like singing voice that lights up her face. The beauty of that sound, ringing in a place of such spiritual and physical impoverishment, is a lush and heart-rending contradiction. The musical performances also provide a Brechtian element that lets spectators—and the characters—rest from the viciousness of the action, giving us a chance to breath, to think, to contemplate how a sound so beautiful could come from a situation so untenable.

The women focus Nottage’s anti-war plaint. Played by Ekulona, Mama is a powerhouse, whose gestus here, rather than Mother Courage’s fastening her teeth on each coin she earns, is to stuff into her bra the wads of cash she receives from the soldiers, patting at her breasts as they grow heavy with bills. Nestled close to her flesh and her heart, the money appears to go directly to sustenance, as though hidden from the work for which it’s payment. The money might be dirty, but lodged between her breasts, Mama Nadi rechristens it before she exchanges it with Christian for food (and the occasional piece of chocolate over which she’s enraptured).

Nottage emphasizes that the wages of war are visited on the bodies of women who are pawns in battles between men. When Salima stages her tragic protest late in the play, she shouts, “Don’t fight your wars on my body.” Ravaged by assault, these women nonetheless find dignity and strength. Mama, the towering, wily matriarch of this outpost, tells Christian, “I didn’t come as Mama Nadi; I found her here.” She steps into the shoes of a heroine, rising to an occasion not of her own making.

Men have failed these women. Salima’s husband was buying a new pot when the rebel soldiers overran their village and attacked her; she was an arbitrary victim in a war without rules, but her body bears the price. Pregnant, she cries that she’s carrying the “baby child of a monster.” As her husband pleads with Mama to allow him to see Salima, he holds the new pot in his fist, a pitiful symbol of reparations he’s unable to make.

In the play’s world—and in the real world of violence in the Congo Nottage references—raped women are considered damaged, as though the violence inflicted on their bodies is somehow their fault. Caught in such impossible contradictions, the women have nowhere to turn. Women like Mama capitalize on their spoiled flesh.

But Mama draws her empathy from another source. After a critical confrontation between the rebels and the soldiers, in which Christian and the women are caught as potential victims, life settles back into its uneasy rhythms. Christian, who’s trying to recover from alcoholism, and whose status as a merchant has marked him as somewhat less than a man throughout the play, finally articulates his love for Mama.

Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man. Before she can accept his affections, the previously stalwart Mama unravels with emotion, and tells Christian the secret that binds her to the women in her employ. The 11^th hour confession, which Christian accepts on the way to reintegrating the nuclear family, is the play’s one false note, one that compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.

Would that Nottage had maintained her singular, Brechtian vision of the consequences of war for women to a more bitter end, instead of capitulating to realism’s mandate that narratives resolve with heterosexual marriage that solves everything. The gender politics of the Congo that Ruined describes with such force are compromised by this conservative happy ending.

Still, director Kate Whoriskey (who teaches at Princeton) stages a taut, muscular drama filled with compassionate, fierce performances (especially from Ekulona as Mama, Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the doomed Salima, and Cherise Boothe as their hardened colleague, Josephine). Rashad, as Sophie, is the story’s fragile, luminous center, the hope in the women’s despair. She makes Ruined a moving testament to survival.

The Feminist Spectator

The L Word: Good Night and Good-Bye

From the Showtime web site

And so they go, the girls of The L Word, off into the LA lesbian sunset . . . or wait, are they going into the police station to give their testimonies about Jenny’s mysterious death to the hot sheriff who came to investigate her drowning? An overhead shot at the show’s end lets us watch as a number of very large cars pull into a nearly empty parking lot in some ambiguous LA location, from which the city, glittering at dusk, looms in the background. One after another, our heroines leave their vehicles and walk—each in her idiosyncratic way, but each looking remarkably like a model, with that showy swagger, that lithe, winsome affect, and that hair blowing in a breeze that comes from nowhere—toward a destination ultimately unknown.

At first, their faces are serious. Perhaps they’re thinking toward their fateful meetings with Lucy Lawless (in an amusing piece of intertextual casting) as the sheriff, Sergeant Duffy. But wait, moments into their individual saunters, they begin to smile, almost slyly. Gradually, the women meet up and acknowledge one another, in twos and threes, ending up in a long row of L Word women, their arms wound gleefully around each others’ waists in a final kick-line to send off their six-season show.

Bette and Tina smile particularly widely—after all, they began the end by deciding to decamp to New York, where perhaps this time, Tina really will pull her weight and Bette really will let her be the family’s Uber-mom. Or maybe Kit’s new erstwhile drag queen lover—whom Angie sweetly calls “Daddy” when he and Kit bring the little one home after a trip to the zoo—will join them and create a transgendered as well as biracial nuclear family. Maybe Max, despite his sudden aw-shucks reaction to his baby’s first kicks, will move to New York, too, and ask Bette and Tina to help him raise his child (or maybe they’ll adopt his kid after all, and Max will grow his beard back).

Hard to say. But in those final moments of winsome walking, everything seems both possible and forgiven. Even the wretched Jenny Schecter is resurrected from the recently-dead to join the long march toward The L Word’s ending, wearing some sort of gold lamé dress and, eventually, smiling, too, as Bette and Tina and then Shane reach out their hands to bring her back into the fold. But hey—are they still acting? Or are they Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, Kate Moenning, and Mia Kirschner, just taking their curtain call?

Since the producers held the valedictory credits until the very end, I was surprised to see that Ilene Chaiken wrote and directed the finale. The episode was shot with a sense of style and written with a kind of restraint that I haven’t associated with Chaiken’s work in recent seasons. A lot of final exposition had to be set up and moved along, but the dialogue that accomplished the girls’ propulsion into their futures was crisp and true to character.

Even the camera work got a bit arty, especially in the interspersed, flashed-ahead scenes of the women’s interrogation at the police station, where high, stark lighting, dramatic angles, and extreme close-ups gave them a cool film noir style. Chaiken lent scenes set in “West Hollywood” some equally varied angles, shooting a number of them from high above the action. (Maybe she was just giving us a god’s-eye view on the characters she created.) The filmic choices gave the episode a richer texture. And happily, Betty’s grating theme song was absent, replaced by a music collection ranging from female pop artists to melancholic cello work, all of which heightened the emotions of the moment.

After all, this was the swan song for history’s first more or less mainstream lesbian soap opera/“dramedy.” That it lasted six seasons (for which spectators were thanked in a producer’s note after the credits) seems remarkable and notable, regardless of whether you watched avidly and with pleasure or watched not at all, unable to stomach the whole proceedings. During a visit I made recently to the University of Maryland, more than one lesbian apologized for not being a fan; one even said with dismay, “Do I have to watch it?”

Of course, I said no, since I’m hardly the arbiter of these things. But why not, I wondered? Isn’t it even fun to hate? Is it just that my nearly 52-year-old self is still amazed to be watching Lez Girls cavort, between the sheets, at the Planet, at Helena’s palatial ocean-side abode, at Bette and Tina’s newly renovated house, with its pool-side cabana and its conveniently, fatefully unsteady deck railing? While I, too, got impatient or bored with the show more than once through its run, I watched every episode and I’m sad that it’s over.

It’s not that I won’t have other things to do with my Sunday nights. But a story has ended in which I felt implicated and cathected, emotionally and psychologically connected to characters that had little to do with my life, but everything to do with a cultural moment I needed to mark and enjoy on a weekly basis. The availability of television by and about lesbians required me to witness it as a new wrinkle in the American cultural zeitgeist. I don’t want to see the space The L Word created in public consciousness close over without a ripple.

Gossip has it that Chaiken is developing a spin-off for Leisha Haley. Another lesbian-focused series would be terrific, but Alice Pieszecki became one of the least interesting characters on The L Word. Why couldn’t she let go of Tasha, even after it was Alice who seemed attracted elsewhere at the end of season five? Haley and Rose Rollins are capable performers, but their chemistry as a couple was never convincing. In their brighter moments, their banter and teasing and flirting were fun, but their sex scenes always lacked conviction. Haley and Rollins just couldn’t manufacture on-screen magic. Mei Melancon, playing the last season’s third wheel interloper, Jamie, and Rollins, although they never consummated their attraction, gave their longing gazes more zing.

In fact, Tasha’s return to Alice at the last episode’s 11th hour seemed unrealistic, a forced happy ending rather than a choice the character actually might have made. Alice and Tasha were never right together; why not choose the biracial girl who seemed to “get” Tasha instead of Alice, who always blundered through their relationship, disrespecting Tasha’s difference on numerous levels. Alice became shrewish and grasping by the end.

When she confronted Jamie and Tasha about their feelings for one another at the Planet in the last episode, and Jamie finally confirmed her love for Tasha, Alice acted like a teenager, saying, “Thank you. And fuck you,” and later, “Shut up,” as Jamie tried to talk to her. The old Alice might have been tougher, her response more complicated. For someone who began the series as the keeper of the Chart—that genealogical web of dyke relationships, that cartographic image of incestuous lesbian lives—Alice became strangely attached to a very conventional notion of monogamy.

Still, much of the humor in the last episode came from Alice’s drunken day waiting for Tasha to choose her or Jamie. Alice wiles away the tense time talking on the phone to Shane and Helena, fantasizing about what Tasha and Jamie are doing together. Haley got the one-liners right; it made me miss Alice’s video blog, when she served as the voice of a community, commenting on its mores and foibles. Too bad Chaiken reduced Alice to just another needy lesbian by the finale.

Shane, on the other hand, seems to be the character who grew the most. The final show spends a lot of time resolving her narrative thread. She conveniently bumps into her most recent ex, Molly (Clementine Ford), in a gift store. When Molly refers to dropping off Shane’s coat and the letter that (of course) Jenny never passed on to Shane, poor Shane blanches visibly, as the shoe drops and the various pieces of Jenny’s deception and its consequences fall into place.

Ford makes a crisp, wistful cameo appearance. With a new girl looking soulfully into her eyes, Molly’s able to tell Shane that she’s over her and that it’s okay. Shane initiated her, and like so many other girls, Molly fell for her hard. But she’s okay, Molly says, and trots off to put her new arm candy back on. The devastated Shane watches her past and her preferred future walk out the door and races home to find Molly’s letter in the jacket Jenny stuffed in the attic of their house. In the process, she comes across the stolen negatives of Lez Girls that Jenny had stashed away the whole time.

The last episode confirmed that Jenny truly was pathological. She stole the negatives; she kept Shane from Molly; she meddled outrageously in Helena and Dylan’s relationship, as well as Bette and Tina’s. Thanks to Jenny, Helena rejects Dylan (Alexandra Hedison), forever unable to trust that Dylan loves her for herself and not her money. (“It’s a cliché,” Rachel Shelley says into the camera, during her scene with Sergeant Duffy, eyes batting, “But it’s hard to be rich.”) It’s a shame Helena has to dump Dylan, since their rekindled relationship was one of The L Word’s more mature, their sex the best Rachel Shelley ever performed on the show. In one of the several reminiscence reels available from Showtime On Demand, Shelley remarks that she and Hedison “clicked”—it shows.

Jenny’s plan to tell Tina about what she mistakenly believes is Bette’s infidelity proves the final straw. In my oh-so-close examination of the last episode, I think Chaiken intimates that Bette killed Jenny. Their last scene together on the deck leaves the two women in a face off, with Bette practically snarling that she won’t let Jenny hurt her family. As the scene cuts away, Jenny’s lower lip trembles with defiance. After Bette returns to the house, Jenny is never seen again.

And is Jennifer Beals smiling just a bit too knowingly in that final bow? And why is her interrogation scene with Sergeant Duffy repeated twice, shot at a different, even closer angle, but with the same dialogue, as Bette repeatedly rolls up the sleeves on her crisp white blouse? “Jenny is complicated, complex,” Bette says thoughtfully, “talented, sometimes generous, but complicated, complex.” What’s that supposed to mean? And how could Bette, with the walls of her home adorned with smart, contemporary feminist art, think that Jenny’s execrable novel and trashy film indicates talent?

Setting Bette up to take the fall for Jenny’s murder—even if only implicitly—continues the demonizing of Bette for her season one original sin of her affair with the carpenter. Bette’s vilification is one of The L Word’s most conservative ploys. In the end, Bette tells Kit that she’s sick of everyone being in her business. I don’t blame her, given how eager they all became to vilify Bette and how easily her friends and her sister believed that she’d stepped out on Tina with the horrible gallery owner Kelly Wentworth (Elizabeth Berkeley, not at all redeeming her Showgirls debacle). Surely Bette has more taste than to be attracted to the manipulative, voracious Kelly, when she’s got earnest, exasperated but lovely Laurel Holloman at home.

Bette and Tina have always been the show’s leading couple; they were destined to be together at its end. Shane, in fact, gives them a nice nod, stumbling upon them after one of her nights out carousing as Bette and Tina sit on their house steps, drinking coffee and beginning their day after a night of loud sex and quiet intimacy. (Scenes of them sleeping intertwined are all shot from above, too; the goddess is watching, don’t you know.) Quoting the threesome’s exchange from the first season, Shane teases them about having sex—she can always sense when they’ve been at it, and her envy is rueful and sweet. Using the same moment to bookend the series is a lovely acknowledgment of the couple’s longevity.

Jenny’s farewell video for Bette and Tina brings all the women together for a nostalgia fest. The intercut clips of testimonials from friends near and far serve as a benediction for the show as well as the characters. Karina Lombard appears in a silly clip as the long forgotten Marina, speaking now with a French accent since she’s apparently moved to the south of France. She’s probably sorry she missed those six seasons of steady work. Tim (Eric Mabius) pops on to wish them well, cracking jokes about “crazy” Jenny. (Mabius generously sets aside his Ugly Betty character to resurrect Tim.) Ivan (Kelly Lynch), in his rather Goth trans regalia, sends regards staged in front of a placard that says “Vote No on 8,” bringing the show into the political present.

The soigné Peggy Peabody, played by the inimitable Holland Taylor, gives Bette and Tina her blessing, making me nostalgic for the good old days when Bette was mounting the “Provocations” show at the LA museum. Angus (Dallas Roberts), who betrayed Kit with Angie’s babysitter, says he’s got his heart open and waiting for Bette and Tina in New York. Jodi (Marlee Matlin) signs to the camera how much they’ve changed her life, surprisingly setting aside her ugly break-up with Bette (or maybe she’s just being ironic). Even the jilted Carmen (Sarah Shahi) appears, looking self-serious (and not at all like “herself” or like a lesbian) to wish the couple well.

Kit jokes that the video is a catalogue of her ex-lovers, but the clips recall many of the women’s former romantic entanglements. (At least Jenny/Chaiken steered clear of including clips of the long dead and gone Dana, which would have been really cloying.) That these old characters appear in Jenny’s video brings the show full circle and gestures toward a truism of many lesbians’ lives—ex-lovers do eventually become friends, because we need and value the extended circle of people who once were intimates. Watching the women watch what amounts to a home movie underlines their intimacy and their kinship. (Max calls them “framily”—more than friends, not quite family.)

As they watch her (three hour) video, the gang finally realizes that Jenny isn’t there to see their reactions. Alice, who’s valiantly decided to be friends with Jenny again, goes to search her out. Max quips, rather uncharacteristically, “Maybe someone threw water on her and she melted,” which turns out to be not far from the truth. They should have noticed Jenny’s Pomeranian frantically sniffing and whining around the pool while they were eating popcorn and watching the video.

Some viewers are disappointed that Jenny’s murder, so touted in previews and so anticipated in the script, was so anticlimactic. Did Jenny fall in the pool? Did she jump? Was she pushed? By Bette? Who cares? We’ll never know and it hardly matters. Perhaps Chaiken was just trying to fulfill fans’ wishes, many of whom have wanted Jenny dead since the first season. Like so many others over the show’s run, the plot point was contrived and unnecessary; Bette and Tina’s move from LA would have been enough to wrap up the story.

But Jenny’s death keeps The L Word true to its roots. The show was always a fantasy, a fairy tale about beautiful, sexy lesbians who never seemed to worry about money, despite how often they changed precarious jobs. The clothes, the bodies, the situations—few of them were authentic to most people’s idea of what it’s like to be a lesbian, or a dyke, or queer in early 21st century America.

But The L Word’s flashes of humorous insight, and complicated desire, and hard fought relationships, and fraught friendship networks, and love and commitment among a group of women who helped one another survive really did hit a vein of something true. For those moments, I’ll miss it.

Mourning an era’s end,
The Feminist Spectator

Streetcar Named Desire at Princeton

Usually, there's something pathetic (and as a result irritating) about the women in Williams's Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche is flighty and damaged, and Stella is so blindly in love with Stanley, she follows him around like a puppy waiting for him to throw her a bone. Usually, too, even though Blanche, well, blanches when she sees the squalor into which Stella has descended from their glory days on their family's Belle Reve plantation, in other productions, the size of the stage makes the apartment in New Orleans's French Quarter seem spacious and colorful.

The Princeton Program in Theatre and Dance's terrific production of Streetcar (3/6/09) avoids both of these traps. To take the second trap first, thanks to set designer Jeffrey Van Velsor's spot-on conception, a good half of the expansive Berlind Theatre stage at the McCarter Theatre is blocked off for use as the social environment surrounding the apartment. Characters exit to walk the streets or saunter off to the bowling alley or bar nearby. The other half is a small, square, raked platform, onto which is crammed Stella and Stanley's tiny kitchen, with its filthy sink, ancient refrigerator, and few worn wooden cabinets, as well as its round table and four chairs, at which Stanley and his buddies spend most of their time in energetic, beer- and cigarette-infused games of low-stakes poker.

A sheer white curtain, hung on a precarious rod from a few thin rings, separates this very public space from Stella and Stanley's bedroom, which is adorned with an over-sized bed, a narrow dresser, and a rickety night table. Behind this room is the bathroom, enclosed with an imaginary door that's mimed by the actors. The audience watches voyeuristically as each of the characters enters what should be their only truly private space, where they use the toilet (quite realistically), shower, gaze at themselves in the mirror, change their clothes, and otherwise try to compose themselves for the on-going battle to survive that comprises their lives.

The bathroom “mirror” looks into the apartment’s kitchen, which allows the audience to see how the characters peer at themselves and also underlines the permeability between the rooms. Blanche's Army-issue cot hovers downstage in the nether-region between the public and the private spaces, with her trunk of worldly possessions as her only furniture. Blanche's tiny corner overflows with her finery and her fantasies, as she begins to spin her deluded narrative of her past, her present, and her future.

The cramped space quickly becomes a powder keg when Blanche arrives, as she robs Stella and Stanley of their little privacy. Without her presence, as Stanley complains to Stella, they'd “play our colored lights” and enjoy the intense and intimate pleasures of one another's flesh, which draws them magnetically together. With Blanche and her fantasies sucking the air out of their home, Stanley becomes the violent animal Blanche assumes he is from the start, and Stella is frustrated and exhausted by trying to mediate between her sister and her husband.

The lack of room to breathe—and the New Orleans heat, which the actors here all manifest in the sweat they wear across their foreheads—makes it difficult for anyone to be civil or loving, and lets the audience feel viscerally how their circumstances trap the characters, forcing them to either lash out or to weave stories that allow them to escape their surroundings, if only in their dreams.

In this production, the female characters are far from pathetic, avoiding the second typical trap for Streetcar. In Shannon Lee Clair's intelligent, nuanced portrayal, Blanche is a woman desperate to survive in much reduced circumstances. The character is often played as driven only by desire, and moralized against as a slut masquerading as a saint. But Clair’s delivery clarifies that Blanche has suffered the devastation of her homestead, burying her parents and their servants as they each slowly decline and decay, then finding herself left with nothing ("Death is expensive, Stella," she says cuttingly).

Stanley finds out that Blanche has been working not just as a teacher but also as a prostitute in Laurel, Louisiana, and proceeds to deride her for her loose morals and easy virtues. But Clair's Blanche is a woman who'll do anything to survive. She’s tough and resilient, and though her choices aren't always admirable, she's kept food on her table and a roof over her head. Until, that is, she's run out of Laurel by the sheriff for having sex with one of her 17-year-old male students.

That indiscretion reveals Blanche's motivating guilt: She married, quite young, a beautiful boy who turned out to be gay. When she stumbled on him and an older man having sex, her disgust rushed the boy toward suicide, an action for which she still can't forgive herself. Blanche is eternally caught in a nexus of guilt and desire from which she can't be extricated. She flashes back to the scene of her betrayal, hearing again and again the carnival noises and the flashing lights that accompanied her harsh confrontation of her husband, and the gunshot that signaled his death.

Director Tracy Bersley illustrates the flashbacks with sound and lights, as the interior of Blanche's psychic turmoil is manifested on stage. For a play that's more often staged as strict realism, these flights into the sensual texture of Blanche's fixations make for very compelling theatre. And while those moments could sink into melodrama, Clair's Blanche tethers them to a keen sense of the woman's unbearable remorse, her desire to make it right, and her inability to stop finding herself attracted to young boys who stand in for her dead lover.

Stella is hardly a simpering fool in the Princeton production. Played with intelligence and warmth by Veronica Siverd, Stella becomes a compassionate foil, caught in her corner of the triangle she comprises with Blanche and Stanley. She knows that Blanche is fading off into fantasy and she can see that Stanley is infuriated by her sister's class snobbery and phony airs. But Siverd plays Stella's love for them both as sincere and complicated.

Stella's drawn to the physicality of her life with Stanley, but in Siverd's hands, she’s equally thrilled by her life in the French Quarter, with the jazz playing through the apartment's windows, the speakeasies to visit down the block, Stanley's bowling games to watch, and the easy camaraderie of her upstairs neighbors, whose easy laughter and on-again off-again domestic squabbles echo her own. Stella has saved herself from Belle Reve's ruin by making her own way in New Orleans, finding Stanley and reinventing her life. She knows that Blanche can't drag her back, but she's compelled by her own guilt at the burden Blanche has borne on her behalf.

All the actors present excellent performances. Tyler Crosby's Stanley avoids the temptation to imitate the iconic Marlon Brando characterization, and instead finds Stanley's scheming, workmanlike intelligence, if not his intellect. Crosby's Stanley knows he's not smart, but he compensates by being wily and manipulative, asserting his power through mental as well as physical intimidation. Shawn Fennell is gentlemanly and effete as Mitch, nicely playing the double standard of a man who wants his women to be virginal yet is willing to take his turn when he finds out they're whores, as he does with Blanche.

Peter Walkingshaw and Stephen Strenio play very well the burdens of working class men trying to enjoy themselves over poker and a case of beer, and Arielle Sandor and Alexis Brown ably create the women who are Stella's compassionate, empathetic but strong neighbors. James Mears, Cristina Luzarraga, Brad Baron, and Laura Hankin all take advantage of their supporting roles, turning in crisp images of the characters who people Streetcar’s world.

Bersley reprints in the program parts of a letter Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, who directed the Broadway production and the film version of Streetcar, which relates that he thinks the play is about the tragedy of judging one another falsely. In the spirit of our times, however, this production of Streetcar seems to me much more about the lengths to which people will go to survive, when their reduced circumstances give them so few options. Love becomes a pawn in a game that's much more about economics than emotion, but still, the characters with the most compassion remain standing with their hearts intact at the end.

The Feminist Spectator