A Streetcar Named Desire

I saw A Streetcar Named Desire on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Cate Blanchett. Incredible.

I'm normally wary of performances with stars because the stars are bigger sometimes than the roles they are performing, and they forget to leave themselves out of their performances. I felt that way watching Jude Law perform Hamlet: always, I was aware that he was Jude Law and that got in the way of him being Hamlet.

This was not the case with Cate. She was incredible.

The woman is extremely imposing and makes her presence felt. But it was not as Cate per se but as Blanche DuBois.

Here's what I really liked about the play: I thought that the playwright had done an excellent job at making each character flawed, which made them human. So Blanche's downfall was her vanity, brought on at least partly by the traumatic events she had undergone in the recent years as members of her family passed away, leaving her alone; her strength was too not settle for anyone, but to be the star of her own life, alone as she was. Stella stuck with a man who sometimes treated her badly (domestic violence) but who was able to see that he loved her in a unique way. Stanley's downfall was that he could not control his temper; his strength was that his hot-headedness allowed him to try to get to the bottom of Blanche's problems (although contribute to them, he did).

The one scene that really stuck out for me was when Blanche watches Stanley strike Stella and Stella rushes away to the upstair's neighbor's house for protection only to return a little while later. Blanche matter-of-factly starts pacing about wondering what to do to protect Stella and comments on how Stella should not be with him, and I thought, what a strong woman. In all fairness to Stella, when she forgave him, part of me felt a little repulsed but part of me recognized that humans are flawed, and we take what we get and we recognize that some parts of people are better than their other parts.