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The famous cries of “Stella!” will be ringing down Osborne Street and River Avenue this week as The 28th Minute theatre company presents A Streetcar Named Desire. The production represents a rare opportunity for Winnipeggers to engage with the drama of playwright Tennessee Williams, whose works are not presented often in the community.
“There was an MTC production of Streetcar back in the early 90’s,” recalls director George Toles (it was, in fact in 2000). “So much of Williams isn’t familiar to people here as a live experience.”
This unfamiliarity is what has inspired Toles, a longtime theatre professor at the University of Manitoba, to present Williams’ works in Winnipeg. “It occurred to me that I had the cast,” he recounted in an interview on Morning Light, “I had the people who I felt were equal to the extraordinary challenges of the work, and so, this year, here I am.”
Toles’ passion for Williams’ works started as a young man, and although his relationship with the plays has changed over the years as he has studied and taught them, there are still universal truths to be garnered from Streetcar.
“I think what Williams did for the first time was not argue in some philosophical way but in a dramatic way [that] there’s something profoundly irrational about desire,” says Toles. “It is not something that makes sense or is easily squared away with other parts of ourselves.”
At the same time as audiences wrestle with the formidable opponent that is desire, Toles notes that Streetcar’s longevity and legacy can also be attributed to its accessibility. “I think people have many feelings about Stanley, Blanche, Stella and Mitch which they carry out of the theatre with them and that they dwell on them as problems, as immediate perhaps as their own relationship problems,” he says. “I think that’s one of the things that enables directors to constantly find new forms of cultural relevance."
As relevant as Streetcar is in 2025, audiences will have to wrangle with some outdated ideas on masculinity when confronted with the character of Stanley, played by Justin Fry, or with the duplicity and moral turpitude of Blanche, played by Heather Roberts. For Toles, the problematic elements of the characters are a part of carrying the plot of the story. “There are things at work that go so far beyond the social and moral judgements that were so inclined or ready to place,” he says. “There are loads of things that an audience might choose to have some issue with, but there’s such a towering emotional sensitivity and a poetic awareness of beauty as an alternative possibility for life.”
A Streetcar Named Desire runs at the Gas Station Arts Centre from June 11 to 15. Showtimes, tickets and more information is available at the arts centre’s website.