A Streetcar Named Predictable
The theatre department is putting on A Streetcar Named Desire sometime next month. The show itself is great, even though Tennessee Williams gets caught up in his own cleverness, both Streetcar and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are really well written plays that have helped a lot of actors start their career, such as Marlon Brando.
Even though the show is prolific and a classic, I really don’t think that it can be performed well at the college level. Since this is a community college, the amount of student taking theatre classes is smaller than Universities with larger budgets. The talent you find at a community college is sparse compared to a theatre school you’d have to audition for. With that in mind, shows that have such a wealth of interpretation like Streetcar isn’t the best choice for student actors. It’s like Shakespeare. No matter how good a student is, how deep they play Hamlet or how flippant they play Puck, there are still thousands of actors that are doing the same thing, and better.
The community college theatre is more a place to explore new ideas on stage, newer plays and less known scripts to expand the horizons of both the actors and the audience. The problem with putting on shows like Streetcar, or Fiddler on the Roof, or anything Shakespeare, is that the audience is going to be much more critical, as they’ve seen the show many times before. They will have been exposed to many interpretations of those shows and will stack all those performances against the show put on by the students.
Lisa Abbott, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, is leaving Clark after this show. I was hoping that she’d do something a bit more challenging or controversial to signal her departure. The Clark audience would have really benefited from seeing No Escape or Tartuffe, or something as grand and magnanimous as Les Miserables. Instead, we’re going to get a well-meaning, but disadvantaged version of a show almost everyone’s seen.
