Theater review: Serenbe’s misguided ‘Streetcar’ derails

THEATER REVIEW

“A Streetcar Named Desire”

Grade: D+

Through June 28. 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays. $25-$30. The Art Farm Stage at Serenbe, 10455 Atlanta-Newnan Road, Chattahoochee Hills. 770-463-1110, www.serenbeplayhouse.com.

Bottom line: Sorely wrongheaded.

If for little else, Serenbe Playhouse’s new outdoor rendering of “A Streetcar Named Desire” is notable for one thing. It’s probably the only time you’ll ever see and walk away from the classic Tennessee Williams drama feeling greater sympathy for the brutish Stanley Kowalski than for the tormented Blanche du Bois.

In the frightfully miscalculated performance of Deborah Bowman — perhaps as instructed by Serenbe artistic director Brian Clowdus — the delicate creature we’ve always known as Blanche comes on like more of a brazen hussy than a fading Southern belle. Hardly a truly tragic figure, here the character seems better suited for “Taming of the Shrew” or any other screwball comedy.

For all of the solemn (occasionally loud and obtrusive) mood music that composer John Burke uses to cue her presumably tender remembrances of things past, it might as well be peppy ragtime. Blanche’s infamous encounter with a young newspaper delivery boy isn’t so much a sad or desperate seduction as it is a randy, campy flirtation. Rather than being sorry to see her go in the end, after three interminable hours you may be well over her already.

In something of a coup, Clowdus casts TV star Matthew Davis (“The Vampire Diaries”) as Stanley, who’s suitably hunky in and out of a wet T-shirt. Ultimately, Davis can’t really compete with Bowman’s over-the-top Blanche. Instead, he offsets her somewhat by downplaying his part — understandably irritable, but not especially domineering or threatening.

Clowdus’ staging is as stylistically misguided as it is dramatically ill-conceived. At first glance, the set (which he designed with Ryan Oliveti) is intriguing, a converted railway car adorned with modern decor (a chic white sofa and bed, a fancy glass dinette and marble tub). Still, it more closely resembles a swanky Manhattan loft than a squalid New Orleans tenement “worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Abby Parker’s ostentatious costumes take us out of the scene, too. Never mind Blanche’s illogically ornate wardrobe. Who knew that the “working-class bum” Stanley might look so debonair in a nice new suit? And even the put-upon Stella, his wife and her sister, gets to wear a lot of anachronistic bling. (Poor Ann Marie Gideon is wasted in the role.)

Although the play is traditionally situated in the late 1940s, when Williams wrote it, Clowdus’ production lacks any specific sense of period ambience. In the show’s vague context, it’s almost laughable that Blanche wouldn’t know how to dial the operator on a phone. When she pines for the family’s lost plantation or her dead husband, it feels disjointed — ancient history as opposed to a fresher wound, like someone else’s story as much as her own.