Starting October 13 we are proud to  present A Streetcar Named Desire  by Tennessee Williams  as a continuation of the series of classic theater productions that started with Cyrano de Bergerac last year and The Tempest this February.  John Deaderick will be directing a wonderful cast that includes  Jimmy McCammon as Stanley, Grace Fae as Stella, Trish Adair  as Blanche and Micah Cone as Mitch .  As in all my productions,  Sharon Olson is costume designer, Pam Hodges will design the sets  and Erin Beatie  will be  lighting designer  and of course the venue will be the hIstoric Nevada Theatre in downtown Nevada City. 

In this centennial year of his birth, Tennessee Williams’ popularity is in full revival. First breaking into the theatrical scene in 1944 with the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie and further establishing his prominence with the Pulitzer Prize winning A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, he established himself as the voice of the misfit, the outcast, those at odds with society.  Our production hopes to find an audience that feels the heart beating within the poetry of this most human of playwrights.

He described his work as “a prayer for the wild at heart that are kept in cages.” Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire surely slips easily into the realm of the dispossessed.  People who have never seen a Tennessee Williams play have heard the words “Stella!  Hey Stella!” or “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” A tragedy in the making set in post-WW II New Orleans, Streetcar portrays the battered and bruised crumbling beneath the brutal and bestial.  Williams presented themes not before seen on the Broadway stage, and battled the censors to do so: nymphomania, homosexuality, and rape.  The domestic veneer of the Kowalski household thinly covers carnal desires edged with violence.  Into this seething trap blunders the bereft and bewildered Blanche Du Bois, a woman with a past and no future, a victim of her own making and easy prey for the alpha male that is Stanley.

Paul Emery