Sonia Rodriguez has a live-wire vulnerability as Blanche in the National Ballet of Canada’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
John Neumeier's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened in Toronto on Saturday night, begins and ends the with same image: Blanche DuBois sitting on a hospital bed in a New Orleans asylum, the round brim of her hat echoed by the spin of two ceiling fans. Blanche looks both hopeful and pathetic as she clings to a last vestige of dignity. The moment cuts through many of the 1947 play's big themes: shame, despair, madness, memory. It also gives us a taste of what Neumeier might be best at: distilling narrative and psychology through striking tableaux.
It's in these tableaux, and his imaginative use of the stage, that Neumeier can probably lay claim to having truly modernized the "story ballet." Rather than rely on the old conventions of pantomime and face-acting, so counterintuitive inside a technique that operates on a larger physical scale, he exploits the bigger components available to him – bodies (and lots in a ballet company) and the pathways of their motion in space.
In Act 1, Blanche reimagines herself inside her childhood home, the Mississippi plantation of Belle Reve, and the story unravels in a manner that feels visually discursive, with ethereal wedding guests clumping, weaving and sweeping across the stage. In Act 2, Blanche appears in the distance, suitcase in hand, as she approaches the jazzy French Quarter of New Orleans, where there's also a complex layering of people in motion. At any given moment, there's so much to look at on Neumeier's stage; he paints complex pictures that move with a myriad of counterpoints and have the sophisticated ability to suggest both the collective and the individual.
Inside these pictures, we get the small human dramas that form the basis of Tennessee Williams's plot, though Neumeier has significantly modified and reimagined them. Blanche's past is only alluded to in the play; here it's the basis of the first act, which focuses on her young husband Allan Grey's affair with another man, and his subsequent suicide. As Gray, first soloist Skylar Campbell has the uncanny ability to seemingly occupy two worlds at once. We get the in-the-moment passion for his friend (Francesco Gabriele Frola) as evinced by a tautly choreographed (and profoundly romantic) duet that has them cross and mirror each other's bodies. But Campbell's intense presence and otherworldly stare remind us that he's never wholly human here – he's a figment of Blanche's delirium – an idea hauntingly echoed in the repetition of his suicide. A gunshot rings out again and again; he dies a thousand times in Blanche's mind and Neumeier gives us this as stark dramatic metaphor.
Williams uses Stanley Kowalski as a symbol of brute, threatening masculinity, and the play gives us psychological (and cultural) insight through Blanche and her younger sister Stella's response to him. For Stella, Stanley's alpha-maleness is irresistible and titillating, and Act 2 of the ballet opens with a sex scene that should suggest as much. However, Stanley and Stella's lovemaking tends to look more acrobatic than sexy – don't get me wrong, it's interesting to see the unexpected positions that Guillaume Côté and Jillian Vanstone assume and there's imaginative choreography at work – but as a tussling reveal of imbalanced power, charged by the rawness of physical chemistry, it falls short.
In Neumeier's rendition, Blanche is a victim from beginning to end. Her flirtation with Stanley is a modest one, whereas in the play, Blanche riles, seduces and manipulates her sister's husband – she's neither passive nor innocent. Neumeier suggests Blanche's sordid past by using a trio of men who reappear whenever she begins to gain some distance: They grope her, call out sexual slurs (there's actual text) and physically overwhelm her. The implication isn't that Blanche regrets a promiscuous or sexually adventurous youth, but that she's never had sexual agency or pleasure. In other words, she's always been a victim.
There's a plot point in the play that tells a different story: Blanche's seduction of her 17-year-old student, which costs her her teaching job. Neumeier leaves this out. He does suggest Blanche's attraction to younger men through Allan's youthfulness, and then recasts Campbell as Allan's doppelganger paperboy in Act 2. Blanche kisses the boy, but it reads more like a moment of wistful confusion, rather than an adult woman making a sexual advance on a minor – a criminal offence.
We talked about rape differently in 1983, when the ballet premiered, and certainly in 1947, and contemporary productions of Streetcar have grappled with the retributive connotations of Stanley's rape of Blanche at the end of the play. There's no room here to go into the hypocrisies that still abound in a culture where a victim's behaviour before her assault can undermine her case. But there are, in fact, two rapes in Streetcar, one statutory and perpetrated by a woman, the other non-consensual and perpetrated by a man. There's a much richer adaptation in seeing Blanche as flawed, desirous, (criminally) predatory and – finally – a victim, then positioning her as a victim of male sexuality and aggression from beginning to end.
If this sounds like a negative take on the ballet, that isn't my intention. Neumeier's work is full of atmosphere, pathos and affecting choreography. I've left some of the finest sequences out, such as when the black-clad ancestors of Belle Reve creek and topple to the ground like ancient cypresses, and when the trio of men encroach upon the plantation in a stretch of plunging, muscular floor work. Sonia Rodriguez has a live-wire vulnerability as Blanche and is moving in her ability to evoke the effect of cumulative pain. Evan McKie has a nice turn as Blanche's suitor Mitch and, in Act 2, corps member Antonella Martinelli turns up the heat in New Orleans, with her standout, slinking sensuality. (It's worth noting that there was no orchestral accompaniment in order to extend the stage over the pit; the quality of the Prokofiev/Alfred Schnittke suffered proportionally.)
The story ballet is growing up and, as it does, I think content needs be analyzed more seriously. The New York Times critic Siobhan Burke wrote a recent article on the proliferation of rape scenes in new ballets (gang rape in particular). She ends by saying if you're going to depict violence against women onstage, please let it come with an embedded critique. Streetcar certainly has this. We leave the theatre with an acute and disturbing sense of the injustice Blanche suffers at the hands of various men. But Williams wrote a more flawed, complex and desirous character; she doesn't have to be sanitized for us to see the ways she is wronged.
A Streetcar Named Desire runs through June 10 at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto (national.ballet.ca.).