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      Keegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a Laugh

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a LaughHis new 10-part podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is a surprising and earnest defense of a relatively unsung art form.Keegan-Michael Key in 2018. His new podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” involved a lot of research. “I loved school,” he said, so delving into a subject “kind of lights my fire.”Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 4:33 p.m. ETThere are people who enjoy comedy, people who are nerdy about comedy and then there is Keegan-Michael Key, an actor and producer whose deep and affectionate connoisseurship of jokes puts him closer to the realm of a jurist or sommelier.On Key’s new Audible-exclusive podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” he plays resident historian, taking listeners on a laugh-laden and discursive journey — from ancient Sumer to 16th-century Rome to Abbott and Costello — in a lighthearted but earnest attempt to demonstrate the enduring power and understated complexity of the art form.For Key, who has spent the half-decade since the end of his award-winning TV show “Key & Peele” zigzagging between interesting projects onscreen and off, the podcast was a labor of love. It was directed by and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, last year. On a recent phone call, he discussed the impetus for the show, performing without a true audience and the role his adoption played in his love of comedy.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you hear about a celebrity starting a podcast, you generally think of something personality driven, or an interview show with other famous people. You don’t think of an in-depth, 10-part history lesson. What made you want to do this project as a podcast?KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY Well, one of the things that brought me and my wife, Elle, together is our love of humor and of comedy, even the science of it: What makes a good turn? What makes the joke work? I’m an academically minded person — I loved school. So being able to do research and delve into a subject and turn that around and share with other people is something that kind of lights my fire. For years, Elle has been suggesting that with all of the combined knowledge and passion for this art form that we have, we should figure out a way to share it with others. And when the pandemic started, we used all of our time in quarantine to put it together. Her pitch to Audible was: “If Keegan-Michael Key was a guest lecturer at N.Y.U. doing a 10-week course called ‘The History of Sketch Comedy,’ it would be a very popular class.”Have you always been a student of the history of sketch comedy?KEY That’s something that started in my 20s probably, when I was an undergrad fine arts and acting major [at the University of Detroit Mercy]. I never gave much thought to the history of comedy until I started studying commedia dell’arte. I was like, “Wait a second, you mean there are archetypes? Warner Brothers didn’t just invent the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny? The primary characteristics [of Bugs] have existed for hundreds of years?” When my professor said that, my mind got peeled back. I wrote a paper [in graduate school, at Pennsylvania State University] making a comparison between vaudevillian poster advertisements from the late 19th century and the images that you would see on Greek and Roman friezes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Aristophanes, just because that kind of stuff fascinated me.Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key, who directed the podcast, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last year.Credit…Danny Moloshok/ReutersHad you done much comedy of your own at that point?KEY Yeah, I think comedy afforded me social currency. You don’t have to be particularly athletic, you don’t have to be super strong and you don’t have to be on the dean’s list to be able to execute a pratfall or tell a funny joke or do a dead-on impression. That was the route that I went as a painfully shy, very skinny kid. That was the only power I knew how to wield. I remember once, when I was a kid, seeing my father, who was this very large, stoic, soft-spoken guy, guffawing at this impression. It was revelatory to me that a person could have that kind of power over somebody who was a thousand miles away, or 10,000 miles away.Did you try and make him laugh yourself?KEY I would try to impress him. If I had gone to see a movie, I would go home to my mom and my dad and act out the movie. Or, if they hadn’t seen a trailer for a movie, I would act out the trailer. Sometimes I would also use that as a kind of pre-Power Point presentation, trying to convince them to let me go see the movie if it was rated R. They were thoroughly entertained, but alas, it did not work.That’s really funny given what you ended up doing for a living, especially all the movie-inspired sketches of the “Key & Peele” show.KEY Exactly. It’s not a surprise at all. Also, I’m adopted; so to say that I spent a lot of time trying to get my parents’ approval is kind of an understatement. I’ve been acting since I was born, you know what I mean? I’ve been putting my tap shoes on for people’s approval for a long time.You chose an interesting starting point for the show, going all the way back to a Sumerian fart joke from 1900 B.C., which I couldn’t believe was real. How did you decide how far back to go?KEY It started with the joke from the film “Airplane.” Lloyd Bridges storms in and he goes: “All right, everybody. I need this piece of information. I need that to happen over there, this to happen over here, and we have to start at the beginning.” And then the guy says to him: “OK. Well, first, there was dinosaurs, and then …” So we actually decided to use that joke as the basis for the beginning. Like, “What would it look like if we start at the beginning? Let’s talk about hieroglyphics.” And then the hieroglyphics brought us to the Sumerians. I think, at our most basic level, the way we captivate each other as human beings is through explaining the journey or the ordeal that one goes through. Literature, cinema, theater — they’re all basically the same at the core, but we express them in a different way.The series begs the question of just what is a sketch. I’m curious how you define it.KEY I think one of the biggest components of sketch is brevity. The modern definition is: premise plus escalation equals sketch, or premise plus escalation equals comedy, which means that a sketch is just kind of an elongated joke that builds on itself. So I was trying to affix that measuring stick to these other pieces of art throughout history. There are lots of scenes in movies and plays where you could move it surgically out of the larger piece, and it could stand as its own piece of comedy. To me, that’s sketch.How did you approach doing all the research for the show? Did you have to brush up on your William Dunlap or your Mathurine de Vallois?KEY Well, a lot of what Elle did is that, as we were putting the structure together, we started to go through history and just say, “What do we know about comedy and where there were comedic performers in history?” Then we just started putting them on the timeline. I discovered through our research about female jesters — was not aware that they existed. There are a lot of wonderful things that I discovered, like the “rural purge” and Beyond the Fringe.Putting all that on a timeline and then being able to kind of zoom out, did it make you see comedy in a different way? Or affirm things you already knew?KEY I think that it probably affirmed things. One of those affirmations was the basics: that people figured out tens of thousands of years ago that it was satisfying to watch someone overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. That is somehow inherent in our programming, to excite us and bring us meaning.Yours is the only voice we hear in the series, and you act out a lot of the sketches you discuss. Was it strange to perform without an audience?KEY Technically speaking, I wasn’t alone: I had Elle in the booth, the engineer and a production assistant. I’d be in the booth looking at them [while performing], and I’d see them start to smile. To me, if I start improvising and I see people start to grin, that’s chum in the water and I’m a great white shark. I’m going to go right the [expletive] off script and do everything in my power to make them burst out in laughter. In certain episodes, you actually hear me talking to Cameron [Perry], the engineer. I go, “Right, Cameron? I mean, it’s a pretty filthy joke, but you’re laughing. Everybody, Cameron’s laughing.”What have you liked most about working in audio?KEY One thing I like is the fact that sometimes it allows you to go bigger. It allows you to be broader, more energetic, because you have to convey something through a microphone. Especially when you’re doing animation work — the figure of what you’re performing with your voice is often so exaggerated that it gives you license to be peculiar or over the top. You can say to the director, “What if I just was like [yodels loudly and cartoonishly]?” And the director will go: “That might work.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In Four Audio Plays, No Stages but Lots of New Voices

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Four Audio Plays, No Stages but Lots of New VoicesA big-box store, a hotel for transgender women and a dinner party gone awry are some of the places your ears will take you to.Clockwise from top left: Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Isaac Gómez, Ike Holter and Shakina Nayfack.Credit…Clockwise from top left: via Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theatre, Juli Del Prete, via Studio Theatre and via Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreMaya Phillips, Jesse Green and Dec. 30, 2020When actors can’t gather onstage, they can still make drama with their voices. Our critics review four recent audio plays.I Hate It Here: Stories From the End of the Old World(Through March 7; studiotheatre.org)Top row, from left: Luisa Sánchez Colón (stage manager), Jennifer Mendenhall, Sivan Battat (assistant director) and Jaysen Wright. Middle row: Adrien-Alice Hansel (dramaturg), Sydney Charles, Tony Santiago and Behzad Dabu. Bottom row: Gabriel Ruiz, Mikhail Fiksel (sound designer) and Ike Holter (playwright and director).Credit…Studio TheatreI wonder if there’s been a play that channels the discontent and despondency of 2020 as perfectly as Studio Theater’s sharp and satisfyingly foul-mouthed “I Hate It Here: Stories From the End of the Old World.” I’d wager not. Written and directed by Ike Holter, “I Hate It Here” is a collection of vignettes from people who, after a year of disease and death, are done with pleasantries.A woman who has carried on her mother’s legacy of protesting confronts her friend and his partner for not doing enough; a teacher reflects on the racist parents of a white student in her class; a middle-aged couple who started the pandemic “glamping” realize they’re now homeless in the woods; and a man struggles to accept the fact that his mentor is a sexual harasser. Issues of race, class, accountability and political engagement come up at a catering job, a fast-food restaurant and a pandemic wedding — with 18 characters (performed by a cast of seven) having conversations or speaking monologues to an unknown listener.Holter has a well-tuned ear for language; his dialogue is sparky and cynical, confrontational and personal, so monologues feel like the casual dinner conversation you’d have with a friend. But just because Holter’s text is fluent in the disillusionment that’s overtaken this year doesn’t mean that it lacks humor or wit. His characters speak in phrases that contort idioms and rhyme and pun and string expletives together like jewels on a necklace — yes, his unprintables are as elegant as that (disciples of the profane would be proud).“I Hate It Here” gathers great momentum, especially early in the nearly 90-minute production, as shorter vignettes are delivered in quick succession. Later, some longer sequences start to drag and could use snips in the dialogue, but ultimately these deliver the stories with some of the most heft. The intro and outro music, composed and directed by Gabriel Ruiz, who also stars, could be nixed. And occasionally the actors play the text too loud, so to speak, but it’s forgivable, especially given the language’s perverse gambols — who wouldn’t be carried away by these lines?At the end, a woman, recounting the losses she’s faced, says she’s done pretending things are fine. “I hate it here!” she screeches, culling it from the tips of her toenails. Then she pauses briefly, and is suddenly renewed. That’s the sound of catharsis, and I felt it, too. MAYA PHILLIPSChonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club(Ongoing, audible.com)Even when the performers have utterly distinct voices, audio plays can be difficult to follow. Absent are the clues of countenance and costuming that usually help viewers track who’s who and what their story is. The best way to approach the genre is often just to succumb to the confusion and listen, turning off the part of your brain that wants instant clarity.That’s probably also the best way to approach new subjects when they finally hit the stage, or in this case hit your headphones. “Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club,” by Shakina Nayfack, is that kind of play, telling the story of seven transgender women awaiting, recovering from or seeking to improve the results of gender confirmation surgery. As drama, it may be confusing, even if beautifully cast for vocal contrast. But as a bulletin from the front lines of identity, it’s ear-opening.The “butterflies” emerging from their cocoons at the (fictional) title hotel, in Thailand, are drawn with heavy outlines to emphasize the diversity of transgender life. Sivan (Kate Bornstein) is an astronomer from Hawaii, joined in Chonburi by her cisgender wife. Jerri (Bianca Leigh), from Australia, also brings her wife, as well as their surprisingly chill 15-year-old son. Dinah (Dana Aliya Levinson) is a retired racecar driver; Van (Angelica Ross), a video game designer; Yael (Ita Segev), a former soldier in the Israeli army. You could imagine them in a lifeboat story, and in a way they are.Needing rescuing most is the newcomer Kina, played by Nayfack (“Difficult People”) and based to some degree on her own experiences as a transgender woman who crowdfunded her surgery in Thailand with what she calls a “kickstart her” campaign. At first standoffish, and later in pain and anguish, she finds solace in the sisterly ministrations of the butterflies and in the care of a nurse and a bellhop whose back stories conveniently dovetail the main plot. Kina even gets an ambiguous romantic arc, with a Thai sex worker she hires for one last pre-op fling.“Chonburi,” a coproduction of Audible and the Williamstown Theater Festival, is not one of those plays that’s about too little. Though its director, Laura Savia, gives it a fast-talking sitcom spin, with jaunty interstitial music, its origins in autobiography make it difficult to shape. Discussions of spirituality, parental rights and the occupation of Palestine, let alone the Thai coup d’état of 2014, quickly come to feel like tangents.Other scenes, like the one in which Jerri gives Kina (and us) an explicit post-surgery anatomy lesson, are riveting. It’s here, in the central story of transformation — how each woman puts her “body on the altar” to free herself — that “Chonburi” achieves the kind of focus it needs to do the same. JESSE GREENAnimals(Ongoing, audible.com)Clockwise, from top left: Jason Butler Harner, Madeline Brewer, Aja Naomi King, Whitney White (director) and William Jackson Harper.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreTwo couples — one a bit more seasoned, the other still fresh — get together for a night, and amid too many drinks and dredged-up histories, they turn to a feast of insults to sate their appetites. Everyone’s bitter. Everyone’s unhappy. And it’s pretty clear none of these people should be within 50 miles of one another. They are, as the young girlfriend in the new couple observes, animals.No, this isn’t an Edward Albee play, though that’s an understandable assumption to make. “Animals,” written by Stacy Osei-Kuffour and directed by Whitney White, has much of the same DNA — lust, longing and resentment among lovers and friends, as well as alcohol — but instead of improving the formula, it ends up feeling like a rote reconstruction.There is one notable divergence: “Animals,” also on Audible as part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, brings in the matter of race. Henry (Jason Butler Harner), who’s white, proposes to his longtime girlfriend, Lydia (Aja Naomi King), who’s Black, before a dinner they’re hosting — but the timing is suspicious: The occasion for the event is Lydia’s “anniversary” with her old friend and amour Jason (William Jackson Harper), who’s also Black. With Jason is his latest young white girlfriend, Coleen (Madeline Brewer).Henry notes Lydia’s code-switching and resents her inappropriate familiarity with Jason, who has renamed himself Yaw in an Alex Haley-esque a-wokening after a trip to Africa. Jason, a pedantic New York University professor, judges Henry, especially when the topic of race comes up, as Lydia attacks Coleen and moons over Jason. This is a therapist’s nightmare: There are more deflections and projections than in a carnival house of mirrors.But “Animals” feels burdened with effort; it’s too quick to get to the worst of its characters, giving the roughly 90-minute production nowhere deeper to go. No foreplay of nuanced chitchat here, just a relentless barrage of aspersions, which led me to the thought: Do I really believe these people sneering their way through this evening? Not for a second. The interlocking links of insecurity and codependence that supposedly chain these characters to this truly horrendous gathering are less apparent than the play seems to believe.Even during the characters’ most bitter invectives, the cast’s performances similarly skate over the surface, more ornamental than immersed. It feels like a symptom of the play’s inability to extricate itself from the clichés of its genre and successfully surface its more novel elements. Lydia and Jason are connected not just through their history but by their racial experience, and simultaneously want to keep that but also shelter within the privilege and status of their white partners.Interracial sexual politics is a vast McDonald’s-style playground for a writer to explore (just ask Jeremy O. Harris, whose characters certainly play in his “Slave Play”). But “Animals” struggles to parse out how its characters’ racial identities connect to their desires and shames in and out of the bedroom. For large swaths of the play, the white partners feel like afterthoughts, but it also doesn’t fully commit to investigating the Blackness of Lydia and Jason and how much of their intimacy is tied to that. When the play reaches its conclusion, it’s unclear of its upshot.Proposals and retractions, propositions and rejections, someone breaking something and someone storming off: “Animals” plays the standards but this cover of the theme “misery loves dinner company” doesn’t chart. MAYA PHILLIPSWally World(Through Aug. 31; steppenwolf.org)Inside Wally World, it’s one of the most frantic times of the year — and that’s saying something for a big-box store so vast that thousands of customers prowl its aisles each day. Chaos comes with the territory, especially on Christmas Eve.So it’s a bit of a mystery that Isaac Gómez’s audio play, “Wally World,” is such a pleasantly relaxing experience, even as it thrives on workplace tensions. From the first notes of holiday music at the top of the show (the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy “O Tannenbaum,” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas”) and the first static off the walkie-talkies that keep the store’s management team connected, we sense that we’re in good hands.Like many a Christmas tale, this sprawling ensemble dramedy — directed by Gómez and Lili-Anne Brown for Steppenwolf Theater Company — has at its center someone who has lost her way. Andy (Sandra Marquez) has spent 23 Christmas Eves at this Wally World in El Paso, Tex., working her way up to store manager, fearsomely bossing a whole team of deputies. Trouble is, the rigor that helped her rise now clouds her vision and stunts her sympathy.A cousin of sorts to the sitcom “Superstore,” “Wally World” hits its mark much better than the Off Broadway musical “Walmartopia” did. This play is a fiction, yet for Gómez (“the way she spoke”), a very personal one: His mother, too, worked her way up from cashier to manager at a Walmart in El Paso. “Wally World” is a portrait of a place he knows — so well that he neglects to explain some of its jargon.On this Christmas Eve, Andy’s store is short-handed. You might think the added pressure would send everyone scrambling, but that’s consistently true only of the no-nonsense Estelle. In a standout performance by Jacqueline Williams, she is the character we root for hardest — especially when she reports “actual velociraptors destroying our store.”A close second is Jax (the terrific Kevin Curtis), an assistant manager who begins his workday with aplomb by insulting the higher-ranking Mark (Cliff Chamberlain), who is a sexual-harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.Spiked with sociopolitical point-making and rather a lot of day drinking, “Wally World” (which runs two hours and 20 minutes) has a cast of 10, which might have threatened to overwhelm the medium: so many voices to learn. But the performances are almost uniformly strong, and Aaron Stephenson’s sound design is remarkably thoughtful.So it’s easy to follow along, though Janie (Karen Rodriguez) isn’t credibly written as the barely functioning alcoholic of the bunch, while Karla (Leslie Sophia Perez), the sole sales associate we meet, seems more plot device than person. There is, however, a charming romantic subplot, and the ending is satisfying without being too sweet.Warning: You can’t buy single tickets to “Wally World.” It’s only available as part of a virtual membership. Essential workers, however, are among those who can get a hefty discount. Well done on that, Steppenwolf. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its Destination

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its DestinationAudra McDonald stars as Blanche DuBois in a radio-like production of the Tennessee Williams classic that still has a way to go.Audra McDonald, left, and Ariel Shafir in a rehearsal for the Williamstown Theater Festival and Audible Theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreDec. 3, 2020When a great play like Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” gets a major revival with an ideal star like Audra McDonald, but the result is nevertheless a blur, you might be tempted to fault the director, in this case Robert O’Hara.But don’t blame O’Hara so fast. As a stager of revivals, he is probably perfect: both a bomb-throwing activist and a strict constructionist. His production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” for the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer was faithful to the text yet, with just a few theatrical gestures, managed to graffiti over Hansberry’s slight optimism with an awful truth for our times. My colleague Ben Brantley aptly wrote that O’Hara burned “a hole right through” the 60-year-old play.So I was more than eager to see what O’Hara would do at Williamstown this summer with “Streetcar,” a play so overripe with opportunities for rethinking that it almost seemed like low-hanging fruit. Since its debut on Broadway in 1947, it has graduated from American classic to cultural touchstone, many of its lines even better known (thanks in part to the 1951 movie) than the story that gave them birth.Yet that story — of the “apelike” Stanley Kowalski and his “delicate” sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois — was problematic enough to make the first major production after the #MeToo movement a rich opportunity. Its atmosphere of perfumed longing for a past that included Black servants working on white people’s crumbling plantations made it singularly vulnerable, too.McDonald, left, rehearsing the play with Robert O’Hara, the director.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat O’Hara’s Williamstown production was to star McDonald, our leading vocal tragedienne — in a part that, though spoken, seems like one long, ascendant aria — made this “Streetcar” a must-see event of the summer.But of course it could not be seen, not then and not now.After the pandemic forced the cancellation of its live season, Williamstown took the novel and in many ways noble route of reconfiguring most of its planned offerings as, essentially, radio dramas, produced with Audible Theater, the audiobook and podcast division of Amazon. “Streetcar,” the first out of the gate, was released on Thursday; three other titles will follow this month, three more in the new year.Most of those upcoming plays being new works, they may not suffer as much as “Streetcar” does from the unasked-for translation to a medium in which it is literally impossible for a director to show us anything. And it turns out that Williams’s pungent language, full of poetic touches for Blanche and brutal ones for Stanley (Ariel Shafir, replacing the better-suited Bobby Cannavale), needs more showing than prosaic plays do, not less. Without faces and bodies to anchor them, and despite McDonald’s willingness to go anywhere emotionally, the lines too often float away or, in Stanley’s case, sink with a thud.What remains isn’t so much bad as flat. Even with sophisticated engineering, audio has a difficult time detailing subtle emotional contours: Everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once. That problem is exacerbated by a podcast limitation O’Hara discovered during rehearsals: “Silence doesn’t help you,” he recently told my colleague Alexis Soloski. “Most times it sounds like someone missed the line or there’s a been a mistake.”Skipping over those aurally unhelpful empty spaces makes for a swift production; it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, with the play’s three acts combined into one uninterrupted sequence. But haste also eliminates many of the inflection points in the characters’ development as they hustle from high point to low. Carnality, so central to the story — “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation,” Blanche laments — gets lost in the shuffle.Carla Gugino, left, stars as Stella alongside McDonald’s Blanche DuBois.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat’s particularly injurious to our understanding of Stella (Carla Gugino): the fulcrum keeping Stanley and Blanche, her husband and sister, in tenuous balance. Her own swings of affection are almost impossible to register without some of that uncomfortable silence to frame them. And why in any case should we be comfortable about her returning to Stanley after each of his violent outbursts? Williams wants us to struggle with that contradiction.As O’Hara has demonstrated in staging his own work — and in his Tony Award-nominated direction of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” — he usually relishes discomfort and contradiction. But for most of this “Streetcar,” he seems surprisingly hands-off, following Williams’s elaborate instructions about music and sound (rendered for this production by Lindsay Jones) a bit too obviously. If someone is eating, we’re sure to hear the slurp.Only in the climactic scene between Stanley and Blanche, when Stella is at the hospital about to give birth, do things begin to get usefully wild. As Blanche succumbs to panic — and then to Stanley’s sexual violence — O’Hara amps up the expressionism inherent in Williams’s script and lets loose with a hooting, cackling, grunting soundscape of terrifying nightmare noise.This characterization of Stanley as a jungle animal, and Stella as his prey, struck me as a neat reversal of the racist trope usually aimed at Black men, turning it instead into a comment on white men’s violence against women in general and, because we know McDonald is Black, against Black women in particular. To the extent that the playwright’s obvious sympathy for Blanche can sometimes drive “Streetcar” dangerously close to antebellum nostalgia — the DuBois plantation was, after all, called Belle Reve, or “Beautiful Dream” in French — O’Hara’s choice rebalances the picture and subtly detoxifies the narrative.It’s that kind of theatrical activism I expected to hear more of, and that I hope O’Hara gets to explore more fully in a live production with McDonald. She has all the elements of a great Blanche in place, just not the place itself.Onstage, she and O’Hara might also get closer to the molten core of the drama, which isn’t just about the tragedy of the modern always supplanting the antique, the dynamic overcoming the delicate. It’s also about not letting regret for those facts blind you to their necessity. Blanche, however the world has harmed her, has harmed plenty of others. Plantations weren’t pretty; they were sites of violence. If O’Hara can steer “Streetcar” further in that direction, it’ll really be something to see.A Streetcar Named DesireAvailable on Audible; audible.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More