Leslie Hayes to Appear in *Streecar Named Desire*
Palisades resident Leslie Price Hayes will appear as Blanche DuBois in a production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, presented by the Fellowship Theatre of Chatham in Chatham, New Jersey. Last year, Leslie appeared as Amanda Wingfield in Williams's The Glass Menagerie, stepping into that role just two weeks before opening night.
“I am grateful to have three months this time to explore Blanche, perhaps an even more complex woman than Amanda,” she wrote in an email interview. “As most of us know, Streetcar soars with lyricism even as it wounds with its brutality. Blanche DuBois is one of the most coveted female roles in theatre. The contradictions in her personality make her character so difficult to penetrate deeply, and present a challenge for the actress to portray Blanche’s majesty in all its manipulative, yet fragile dimensions. Tennessee Williams' monologues for Blanche are pure poetry and cut to the quick with their tenderness.”
Streetcar was first presented in New York in 1947 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948, among many other awards. The film version, directed by Elia Kazan, captured several Oscars. In an essay appearing in The New York Times, Tennessee wrote that, after the success of The Glass Menagerie, he lost himself in all the hoopla, the fawning, the grand hotel suites and sumptuous dinners, the different reverential tone in the voices of his friends.
"I checked myself out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success…My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed. Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called The Poker Night, which later became A Streetcar Named Desire. It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life…does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable."
A Street Car Named Desire opens Thursday, January 21, 20ll, curtain at 8:00 pm, and will run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights until its closing on Saturday, Feb 5. Call the box office at 908-489-4911 for reservations. Tickets are $16. Chatham is a pleasant 50-minute drive down the Garden State Parkway and has several good restaurants there if you'd like dinner before the play.