Scottish Ballet's 'A Streetcar Named Desire' gives muscle to female characters

By Jessica GeltStaff Writer

May 12, 2017 9 AM PT

Scottish Ballet’s interpretation of Tennessee William’s 1947 play “A Streetcar Named Desire” begins with a single stark image: the fallen Southern belle Blanche Dubois, in a snow-white dress, fluttering beneath a naked light bulb.

It’s no coincidence that Williams titled early drafts of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “The Moth.” That fact was very much in the mind of Eve Mutso, the dancer who portrays Blanche in the acclaimed ballet, which opens as part of the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center series on May 19.

“This delicate creature is attracted to the heart of the flame,” she said by phone from Glasgow. “You can see the heat building, and you can see her downfall, and you want to save her, but she can’t help herself.”

This is pretty new to the field of ballet, to have a 20th-century play with a feminist perspective.

— Rachel Moore, Music Center president and CEO

Mutso is part of a creative team dominated by women including director Nancy Meckler, choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and set and costume designer Niki Turner — a power dynamic that favors the female protagonists over the males, said Rachel Moore, president and CEO of the Music Center.

“It’s really exciting because women do have a different voice in dance and a different perspective on their place in the world,” she said. “This becomes Blanche’s story.”

That’s not an exaggeration. The ballet includes almost 40 minutes of prelude devoted to Blanche’s back story. This material is told through flashbacks in the play, but in the ballet, it all takes place first.

Blanche is shown as a young woman who falls in love and gets married only to discover her husband with another man. Astonished and heartbroken, she tells him that he disgusts her, and he kills himself. The ensuing guilt causes Blanche to crack, and she slides slowly into madness.

“When we see Blanche discover these two men being very intimate in her bedroom straight after the wedding, it hits home that this young woman is really quite naive and confused,” Mutso said.

When the play begins, Blanche arrives at a squalid New Orleans flat that her sister, Stella, shares with her animalistic husband, Stanley Kowalski. The couple fights often and angrily but come back together like feral animals in heat. Stanley resents Blanche, and thinking that she has cheated Stella out of the family inheritance, he strips Blanche of her sanity with the force of his jealous brutality.

Marlon Brando played Stanley on Broadway and then starred in the 1951 film adaptation directed by Elia Kazan. His portrayal, filled with sex, sweat, sleek muscle and shuddering pathos, cemented the play in the popular imagination, ballet director Meckler said.

“I think Tennessee Williams always wanted the audience to be sympathetic with Blanche, but because Marlon Brando was so attractive and always seemed to be suffering, it became difficult to get sympathy for her,” she said.

The ballet’s first 40 minutes remedy this problem, she said, so by the time audience members meet Stanley, they are already firmly planted in Blanche’s corner.

Taking the play’s testosterone down a notch was not the goal of the ballet’s creators at the outset, Meckler said.

Outgoing Scottish Ballet director Ashley Page commissioned the project in 2012 because he was interested in what would happen when a theater director took the lead on a ballet. He approached Meckler after seeing her theater work, which is very physical, and said he would pair her with the right choreographer. That was Lopez Ochoa, a Colombian-Belgian choreographer based in Amsterdam.

Meckler hit on the idea of doing “Streetcar,” which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Lopez Ochoa was immediately all in. The pair set about deciding how to tell the story in dance, and they realized that the art form, by virtue of its sheer immediacy, doesn’t lend itself to flashbacks. The logical answer was to show Blanche’s back story at the ballet’s outset, resulting in the elevation of one of drama’s most beleaguered female characters.

“This is pretty new to the field of ballet, to have a 20th-century play with a feminist perspective,” said Moore, a former dancer and then executive at American Ballet Theatre before she left New York for the Music Center. “Being here a little over a year, I wanted the dance season to speak to where the field is going. As women gain leadership positions in arts organizations and corporations, their voices do make an impact.”

Moore said she made bringing this ballet to Los Angeles a higher priority than other leaders might have. She first saw “Streetcar” when it was at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2015, and she was immediately drawn to the fact that this Blanche was a worthy adversary to Stanley. Even a pas de deux between Stanley and Stella cedes control to the abused wife.

Williams’ work is powered by dreams and poetry, and it possesses a visceral physicality that naturally lends itself to dance, Meckler and Mutso said.

“I let Nancy direct me and made the choreography as alive and organic as I could with my body and my limbs,” Mutso said. “The feeling of being trapped, and the heat of the city, and all the sex she’s not having that everybody around her is having, and the frustration and the drinking — Nancy gave me a great many tools to build the character with.”

The ballet ends as it begins, with Blanche beneath a naked bulb. This time, however, the light goes out.

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