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I came home at midnight to a house like an oven. It is beautiful, this little house, but it is all wrong. All winter I waited through freezing weeks thinking: at least it will be cool in the summer. No. It will not be cool. It will be like a giant triathlete's sweaty armpit.

I know a giant triathlete, so perhaps that is why the image occurs.

I thought A Streetcar Named Desire would be the perfect play for the first really hot day of the summer, and in a way it was, though I didn't really feel the overpowering heat onstage, despite the smoking and the steam. It was benignly tepid in the seats.

Because I live in Victoria, I have the curious privilege of seeing, with a frequency well above the national average, Thea Gill, late of Queer as Folk, performing on stage. That is, as her husband runs the Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre here, and as I go see the Blue Bridge plays, and as she sometimes performs in them, I not infrequently see Thea Gill. It's not a bad thing; it's quite nice. But it's slightly odd. I don't see anyone else from the QaF cast on a regular basis.

Her Blanche DuBois was good; she's a little young, maybe, a little too radiant yet for the part, but she held the stage. I quite want Blue Bridge to make a go of it, despite their perplexing taste in musicals (The Fantastiks?) They're a real theatre company, and they do real plays, and this seems surprisingly hard to maintain here.

Everyone was solid, in fact. I thought the direction seemed unfocused during the monologues -- soliloquies really -- but the person I ended up feeling dubious about was Tennessee Williams. Silk pajamas? Really, Stanley? Really, Tom?

The set design was very good: the New Orleans room stretched up into two stories, so that a realistic room became metaphorical just by its vertical exaggeration. The space beyond was visible through the slats, which gave everything a vulnerable, spied-upon feeling. Every partially visible movement was purposeful, and the space behind seemed narrow and cramped, so that a large space could be made to feel claustrophobic. It perfectly supported all the half-hearing and overhearing and pretending not to know-ing.

In the end, though -- and I have not see the movie, nor another production that I can recall, so this could be circumstantial -- that famous climactic scene felt wrong. I saw its symmetry, I felt the threads of rivalry and parallel come together. I believed it could happen. I just didn't think it would go like that.

Stanley felt wrong in Act II, too. I was set up for a much more complex character, one who had the potential for regret--again, I believed in his betrayal, but not in his emotional state afterwards. The play makes him, finally, just a brute, as he's been accused of being throughout; I see the grim trap this makes for Stella, the contortions it forces on her thought, the betrayals she has to make. Still, I feel cheated of a more profound engagement with both Stanley and Stella.

And Blanche, rushed off to the madhouse, effectively the moment after consummation--when so much dramatic material could come after that? Something in Williams telescopes his best moments, rushes away from them -- I might even say 'forecloses', but then I am an English major. It seems to me that Blanche is carted off not through the logic of plot or staging, but by some emotional arc parallel to but not directly visible in the apparent action of the play. Easy enough to say Williams identifies with Blanche -- I surely did, at moments -- but I think there's something more complex to be drawn out there.

Not at twenty past one in the morning, though. The house has cooled down, and I have to work tomorrow.

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