Among the Intellectualoids/Streetcar Express
Queenan, Joe
Streetcar Express by Joe Queenan 4 4 ometimes," Blanche DuBois proclaims in an uncharacteristically chipper moment halfway through A Streetcar Named Desire, "there's God—so quickly." Yeah,...
...At least three drinking scenes could be cut—trimming Streetcar by five to ten minutes—if Blanche would ransack the Kowalski medicine cabinet for Prozac instead...
...And instead of having Blanche wait for Western Union to contact her mysterious millionaire friend in Dallas, have her use E-mail...
...With all the talk these days about speeding up baseball, this is the way to go...
...T here is, of course, a simple solu- tion: Cut...
...5) But the easiest way to move Streetcar along is to compress Blanche's monologues through the use of contemporary terminology...
...44 The American Spectator August 1992 (3) Reliance on other technologies and services not in existence forty-five years ago would also speed up matters...
...he has lots of muscles and chest hair, and he remembered most of his lines...
...Yeah, Blanche, but sometimes there isn't...
...Nothing else happens very quickly in Tennessee Williams's 45-year-old blabberpuss masterpiece—which runs three hours and twenty minutes in its current star-studded incarnation on Broadway—so I don't see any reason why God Almighty should break the mood and manifest Himself with an undue celerity...
...let her use these terms: "Stella, I'm really sorry, but your husband is, like, dysfunctional...
...Gregory Mosher's production is a turgid affair, and the only reason it has been drawing good crowds is the allure of its two stars: the talented Jessica Lange, whose motion picture career stalled more than a decade ago, and the less talented Alec Baldwin, who seemed on direct course for stardom until he hooked up with Kim Basinger in The Marrying Man and then badmouthed the studio that produced it...
...My wife and I were two of the many unfortunates who had moseyed on down to Times Square to see what kind of fireworks the stars of Frances and Tootsie and Beetlejuice and The Hunt for Red October could set off in person...
...If something is not done soon, I suspect that Tennessee Williams will find himself getting cut out of the standard repertory, and there'll go my last chance of ever seeing Jessica Lange on stage...
...Time saved: three days...
...Those three hours and twenty minutes can seem even longer if you happen to see the play on one of the increasingly frequent evenings on which Jessica Lange has called in sick...
...But no one, not even working-class people, plays poker anymore...
...He seems like a nice young man with a bright future in the talkies, but he won't make you forget Brando and he isn't talented enough to keep you from counting the hours and minutes until the show's end...
...4) Streetcar was originally called "The Poker Night," because several major confrontations between Stanley and Blanche take place during his weekly poker game in the living room...
...LEMLEY, YARLING & CO...
...Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one...
...Better still, have someone from the Polish Anti-Defamation League cut all the abusive remarks Blanche directs at Stanley and we can all go home in an hour and a half...
...You want her on the next plane...
...then, after Stanley decks his wife Stella, have his buddy Mitch declare: "Rotisserie League Baseball shouldn't be played in a house with women...
...Already down a hundred smackers for the two tickets, plus $35 for the babysitter, plus $15 for parking, plus Joe Queenan is the author of Imperial Caddy, coming this fall from Hyperion...
...It would also speed up marriage...
...The American Spectator August 1992 45...
...Sometimes, there's God—long about suppertime...
...Speed things up by switching to Rotisserie League Baseball...
...She'd be out of Stanley's hair by suppertime and we could all relax...
...Baldwin was okay...
...It was too late to ditch our tickets and go see another play, so we decided to tough it out, curious to see whether Baldwin was a budding Brando as Stanley Kowalski...
...The problem is that Streetcar was written at a time when Americans still had an attention span, when theater-goers were accustomed to interminable works from O'Neill and Ibsen and Shaw and found it exciting to spend 3.5 hours listening to Blanche's whining and Stanley's belch-ing...
...So instead of having Blanche describe Stanley in this fash-ion He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits...
...Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle...
...2) A major holdup is all that time spent waiting for the supply man from Stanley's company to come back from Blanche's home town with the lowdown on what she's been up to...
...For example, instead of having Blanche wait a full four days to catch the next Greyhound back to Mississippi, book her on one of the many flights that now connect via Denver...
...The use of fax would reduce the play by at least one hour...
...Who needs all that expository material...
...Why not settle the question instantly by installing a fax machine in the Kowalski household and transmitting a photograph of Blanche to the manager of the Flamingo Hotel with the question, "Has this woman been entertaining a lot of male visitors in her room recently...
...Yes, something—ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in—anthropological studies...
...In the interests of keeping our second-best playwright in the public eye, I'd recommend the following cuts: (1) Throughout the play, Blanche hits the sauce pretty hard...
...They'd survived the Great Depression and were happy to be getting more bang for their buck...
...The last thing you want is to give Blanche more time to hang around and make speeches...
...20 for a quick snack, I was in a foul mood when I opened my Stagebill to find that Blanche would be played not by the lovely woman who had once played opposite both King Kong and Dustin Hoffman, but by her lovely understudy from the Denver Center Theatre Company and "As the World Turns...
...Investments Asset Management The Lemley Letter Ralph Lemley, Kathleen Pinto, Don Yarling, & Ronald Burr Member: NASD, SIPC 208 S. LaSalle Street (312) 372-2422 Registered Investment Suite 500 (800) 654-9865 Advisor Chicago, Illinois 60604 (IL) (800) 624-8964 For information about who we are and what we do please write or call...
...It doesn't take much to figure out that Stanley is a pig and that Blanche is nuts...
...Today's audience, even during good productions of Streetcar, fidgets, plays with candy wrappers, goes to the loo, and invariably nods off during one of Blanche's countless reveries or one of Stanley's macho tirades...
...If Richard III, which runs four and a half hours in the Elizabethan original, is always chopped by 20 percent in modern productions, why can't the same be done to Streetcar...
...Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley Kowalski—survivor of the stone age...
...There's even something—sub-human—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet...
...Sometimes, there's God—in the sweet by and by," is what Blanche should have said as she melted into the embrace of Mitch, her newfound beau...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
