Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Blanche DuBois, the sultry, perfumed demi-goddess of Tennessee Williams’s immortal play "A Streetcar Named Desire," has become a crack-pipe-tokin’ alkie with an unhealthy desire to cling to social mores of past decades, not helping her much in current, Hurricane Katrina-shattered New Orleans, where she is trying to locate shelter, post-natural disaster. Mark Sam Rosenthal, a Baton Rouge native, has written this new solo show to place DuBois in an ultra-contemporary setting with a touch of idiosyncrasy, not unlike what Charles Busch’s mash-up plays set out to do, but sadly, Rosenthal is not in that league as either a writer or performer.

Though the play runs a breezy 70 minutes in length, and there are patches of distinct, intelligent writing scattered throughout, director Todd Parmley fails to find a memorable palette for the evening. Rosenthal appears as more or less himself, wandering around a garbage-strewn set of apparent Louisiana aftermath debris. He pops on a blonde wig, and presto! He is transformed, but the audience is not. When you hear the opening strains of Funny Girl’s “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” it’s clear that subtlety is not of the essence here, and several other music cues throughout lack originality (isn’t “My Humps“ a tad passé“). The material cries out for more depth, particularly in performance. Rosenthal is vibrant but has little hold of an actual character here: the accent (strange from a Southerner) is rickety, the characterization continually at odds with itself, and the sense of movement rather remedial.

It goes without saying that the solo drag play has become a staple, but it occurred early on in the evening that casting an actual female might have provided a pathos not currently present . The furtive turns of phrase and occasional brusqueness of Blanche seem better suited to a feminine perspective. Played by a man feigning female characteristics (and not succinctly enough), it has a whiff of distance about it, further constrained by Rosenthal’s weak choices. The performance also did not fully embrace the camp quality of the endeavor, also recalling to mind how the aforementioned Busch walks that line between tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious.

A late scene of a sad, disillusioned Blanche sipping Irish coffee at an AA gathering hints at the dimensions the play has within it. After a dreary stint working at a Popeye’s chicken restaurant and befriending a rather crudely composed (and unseen) black female with a virile rapper boyfriend named Tyrese (Sheesh!), Blanche seems to be fully emerging as a real character. But at minute 65 out of a possible 70, that’s far too little too late.