A Layered Story
By Denise Maltese
“Live in the layers, not on the litter.”- Stanley Kunitz, The Layers
My daughter and her boyfriend are avid readers. They always keep me in the loop about what they’re reading, and during the last Christmas holiday they shared that they’d read A Streetcar Named Desire because Paul Mescal, a favorite actor of theirs, was in the London version of the play and it received dynamite reviews. It was coming to Brooklyn, they told me. As a newly appointed teacher to the Collegian Bridge Program through SUNY Ulster teaching twelfth grade, I was required to teach one play during the spring semester, so I wondered if I could teach Streetcar. I messaged my department and asked if anyone had taught Streetcar, and my colleague had, so I had the resources I needed to begin teaching it in January. Next, I contacted group sales at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play was set to begin at the end of February, so I hoped that I had time to book tickets for my students to take a field trip to the play. Group sales said that tickets had sold out almost immediately when they went on sale in November. There were only a few tickets left at $250. Not to be deterred, I asked them to please let me know should anything open up. Meanwhile, several weeks into the new year, my students dove into Streetcar . I selected sections of the play that I wanted them to read aloud. Students paired up, one playing the role of Blanche, the other Stanley or Stella. They felt the lines and they cringed at the sound of the words, and the meaning, the aesthetics of the art. They journaled about the characters’ actions and gave presentations about New Orleans, blues and jazz music, and even polka, as there is one polka song that plagues Blanche throughout the play. During this, I remembered that one of my current twelfth grade students, whom I had taught previously as an eighth grader, was the grandson of Clive Barnes, NYT theater critic during the late 60s and early 1970s. I found two of Barnes’ archived reviews of Streetcar . They were terrific. For example, in 1973, he wrote, “For although Blanche is, of course, Stanley's victim, he is very nearly hers. He is terribly frightened of Blanche's airs and graces and much of aggression is defensive. This is very well shown.”
HVWP COMMONPLACE 36
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