THEATRE REVIEW

JUNE 2026 | Volume 264

 

Are 20th century dead white male playwrights having a moment in Vancouver? United Players closed its 2025-26 season with a Shaw play and is staging a Beckett next January. Three local companies join forces to present an Ionesco double-bill later this month. Even the Arts Club is getting into the act with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman anchoring its 2026-27 season. And now Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

It was probably healthy having all these classic modern playwrights on hold for a whileto allow others to muscle in on the canon. But having them backsure is nice. A varied theatrical ecology is a healthy theatrical ecology.

Anyway, Streetcar is a treat, full of iconic moments: Stanley’s “STELL-A-A-A!!” Blanche’s “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Premiering in 1947, it offers a potent x-ray of mid-century American modernity and a lacerating portrait of what’s lost in the evolutionary survival of the fittest.

Chris Lam’s Ensemble Theatre production gives full value to the tragedy of Blanche DuBois, played with power, dignity and humour in Cat Smith’s devastating performance. She has a worthy antagonist in Terrell Clarricoates’ hunky bulldozer of a Stanley Kowalski.Brynna Drummond is fine, too, as Stella, physically smaller than both of them, trying hopelessly to mediate the war between her sister and husband. There’s room for only one alpha in this household, and Stanley will make sure he’s it.

Blanche has come to the Kowalskis’ modest New Orleans apartment (nicely functional set by Emily Dotson), having “lost” the DuBois’opulent ancestral Mississippi plantation home to bankruptcy. She brings whiffs and whispers of Gone with the Wind in her insistence on elegance, good manners, good grammar; but her truth is that of a woman already effectively destroyed by the death of her husband plus her own alcoholism and sexual indiscretions.

She puts up a good fight for a while against “brute,” “animal” “Polack” Stanley but it’s really no contest. Stanley is Williams’ new, vulgar, postwar American heterosexual male who has no time for old-fashioned niceties. His amoral physical strength and sexual potency are overwhelming, his desire for Stella his only weakness.

Stanley’s friend and fellow vet Mitch (solid Connor Riopel) looks for a while like he may be Blanche’s salvation. But he shares too many of Blanche’s “civilized” qualities to come out on top in this brave new world. He and Blanche will have no children unlike Stanley and Stella. The future belongs to them.

Lam seems not to have cut any of Williams’ script, which makes for a very long first act but also leaves plenty of room for the secondary characters who flesh out Stella and Stanley’s world: Stanley’s poker and bowling buddies Steve (Kazz Leskard) and Pablo (Hernán Adrianzén), Stella’s upstairs friend Eunice (Stephanie Elgersma), and the flower vendor (Irene Lozano-Garcia) whose cries of “flores de losmuertos” provide ominous commentary on Blanche’s fate.

Credit costume designer Starlynn Chen for Blanche’s striking white outfit on her entrance, Sam Cheng for the varied lighting effects and especially sound designer Rick Colhoun for the very effective streetcar sounds, thunder and music that evoke the world outside the claustrophobic apartment.

Running this powerful, provocative, straightforward Streetcarin rep with a contemporary comedy (Jiehae Park’s Peerless), Ensemble Theatre shows how intelligent programming, sharp direction and strong acting avoids any need for gimmicking up a classic play. This is a production that respects both the original material and the audience. I say bravo and strongly recommend this show.

 

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