Gate Theatre’s new production of A Streetcar Named Desire

IT’S been a rare Irish summer of glorious sunshine and so the Gate Theatre’s new production of A Streetcar Named Desire couldn’t arrive at a more apt time.

Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece is set against the backdrop of a sweltering hot New Orleans.

“It’s been very helpful to have the warm weather,” the show’s American director, Ethan McSweeny agrees. “But I have said to the cast: ‘You have no idea. The heat we’re experiencing now is like a winter day in New Orleans.’ Ireland just doesn’t get the same stifling humidity. But it’s been nice to let the cast go out and get a little sun.”

If nothing else, their white Irish hides will look a little more sun-kissed.

McSweeny, a native of Washington DC and a hugely acclaimed director on his home turf has enjoyed working with Irish actors and crew. One of the benefits of doing so, he says, is that it enables him see this landmark of American culture with fresh eyes.

“It keeps you honest,” he says. “The most dangerous thing with any play is to presume that you know the world and not to question it. I should approach a Tennessee Williams play the way I approach Chekhov or Ibsen, asking what is this play’s context, what did this interaction mean to these characters in that specific time?”

First staged in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire promptly earned Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and confirmed his reputation as one of the voices of his generation. Among the original cast were Marlon Brando, who would reprise his part in the later film adaptation. The play’s narrative centres on self-styled Southern belle Blanche Du Bois, a woman who hides her alcoholism and growing dysfunction behind a veneer of ‘genteel’ sophistication and prudish morality. When she moves in to the confined working class digs of her sister Stella and her husband, the uncouth, brutish Stanley, the consequences are devastating.

Meanwhile, the city of New Orleans — and its climate — is itself a character in the play. Yet McSweeny learned during his research that it was actually only Williams’ third choice as a location.

“Originally, he set the play in Chicago,” says McSweeny. “The Kowalski family were not Poles but Italians. And then he moved the play to Atlanta and the Kowalski family became Irish, at which point — in the words of this one scholar — the character of Stanley became ‘notably more assertive’. It was only in the third draft that he finally changed the location to New Orleans, which is where Williams was when he was writing it. The family became Polish-American, and Blanche’s ‘Southern belle’ identity comes into the fore. It was shocking to me because I’m sure most of us imagine that the Southern setting is so inherent to A Streetcar Named Desire.”

While the clammy, repressive heat of New Orleans and the remnants of the city’s historical decadence bring a heightened, lyrical pitch to the play, McSweeny’s production is nevertheless anxious to locate the real fever in the apartment itself.

“Quite often, productions of Streetcar feature sets that are very large and operatic and elaborate,” he says. “And then you lose the intensity of the small apartment that these three people are trying to inhabit. If you take any three adults and you put us in an apartment with one bathroom, well it’s going to turn into Big Brother and there’s going to be a fight within a week. So there they are, Blanche, Stella and Stanley. It’s hot, sultry New Orleans and they are trying to live, but there’s just no way that it’s going to work out. The Gate stage is so intimate and has such a wonderful, direct connection to the audience and it has helped us make the world of the apartment a little tighter.

“It was important not to get too seduced by New Orleans, which is easy to let happen. You feel like you want to show all the beautiful dilapidated buildings of the South, but no, these people are living in urban poverty in the middle 1940s and it’s not pretty. So what we’re doing is making it sweaty and visceral.”

Heralded as a new star of Broadway before he had even turned 30, McSweeny’s glowing reputation is founded on his faith in calling on all facets of theatre’s potential for storytelling.

One of his earliest supporters was Irishman Joe Dowling, the former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre. For many years, Dowling has been at the helm of the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minnesota, where McSweeny has often worked. McSweeny says the Dubliner has been a “significant force” in his career, and the two had long been musing on the possibility of his directing a show in Ireland. (McSweeny great-grandfather emigrated from Cork a century ago.) When an offer came in from the Gate’s Michael Colgan, McSweeny jumped at it.

“To be honest, it’s not a hard, hard sell,” says McSweeny. “I’m Irish-American and I’m proud of that, so I relish the chance to come work in this community. There’s such tremendous acting talent in Ireland. It’s amazing when you consider that the country’s population is not quite half the number of people in my home town of New York. So that was exciting for me, as was the chance to work on an historic stage like the Gate, and the chance to bring a production like Streetcar to life. This play is one of the great mountain climbs of the theatre.”

* A Streetcar Named Desire runs at the Gate Theatre until September 21.