The birth of tragedy from the spirit of daily life

Tramwaj zwany pożądaniem (A Streetcar Named Desire) is apparently a story as many others. A married couple, more or less happy, a sister/in-law arrives, she hasn’t been around for a long time and she is broke, for a moment life stops and switches to another track. But actually nothing is going on. However, Tennessee Williams wrote neither realistic stories, nor tales with a moral.

Texts by this exceptional American outsider, an eccentric, a declared homosexual weakly adapted to life within society, show a secular tragedy, being born from everyday life and its inconceivable rituals, breaking which threatens with a catastrophe. The tragedy can only be secular, though, and everything what happens to people, occurs on their exclusive responsibility. Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski and Stella Dubois, and Mitch on top of that are a triangle of violence, butchers and victims entangled in a fight. There are no present or future winners. The story, which we watch, started a long time before the William’s text and will end much later than Blanche’s departure to a psychiatric hospital.

Blanche Dubois is the personality of our times. You’d better watch her closely, before you can count only on kindness of strangers. Is her getting to the Champs Elyssesses only an address coincidence? After all, this is the place where heroes stay after death, it’s the best part of Hades. You can’t get here by chance. In A Streetcar…, a tension between death and love, between the tamed and the stranger throws all heroes on the sidelines. Emigrants, strangers, tourists, nomads – guys branded with bad luck in our happy new world.

- Piotr Gruszczyński

Production:

• Odeon-Theatre de l'Europe and Nowy Teatr
• Grand Theatre de Luxembourg, De Koninklijke Schouwburg den Haag, Holland Festival – Amsterdam,
• La Comedie de Geneve, spielzeit'europa | Berliner festspiele, MC2 : Grenoble

Produced in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Polish Institute in Paris.
Premiere took place on February 4, 2010 in Parisian Odeon.
April 30 - May 2, 2010, Warsaw, Teatr Polski
Duration: 2h35

„A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams Copyright C 1947, 1953 renewed 1975, 1981 The Uniwersity of the South"

Tournee:

• 5-9.12.2010 - Grenoble
• 15-16.12.2010 - Luksemburg
• 2-4.06.2011 – Amsterdam
• 14-19.06.2011 – Genewa
• 23-25.06.2011– Haga

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