Thursday, April 30, 2026
“Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands — and who knows what to do with it?”
Rainy or not, here’s one answer to Blanche DuBois’s rhetorical question: Make your way to Dupont to catch “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Minutes” or both. The near neighbors are two of the D.C. theater season’s most provocative productions.
The final performance of “The Minutes” is this Sunday, May 3, at 3 p.m. The end of the line for “Streetcar” is Monday, May 4, at 7 p.m.
To arrive at the Streetcar Project’s traveling version of the Tennessee Williams classic, one descends a staircase at 10 Dupont Circle NW to the abandoned streetcar station turned arts center called Dupont Underground. Big Band music plays as audience members meander along the curved former platform to their seats.
Playing east of the circle at 1742 Church St. NW, home of the Keegan Theatre, is “The Minutes” by Tracy Letts, author of “August: Osage County.” Designers Josh Sticklin and Cindy Landrum Jacobs have transformed the Keegan stage into Big Cherry’s plush council chambers. Mayor Superba presides, with four council members (and an unoccupied spot) to his left and four to his right, the clerk at the far end.
The Williams play is a “four-hander” (as adapted) and the Letts has a cast of 11. A “break all the rules” production, this “Streetcar” in a tunnel has no set whatsoever. Done “by the book,” the D.C. premiere of “The Minutes” comes to life on Keegan’s proscenium stage in a set of stylized realism.
In dramatically different ways, “Streetcar” and “The Minutes” hold up a troubling mirror to our tribalism. And in each case, it’s an eyeful.
Those strong impressions can be credited to top-notch acting and direction — by Nick Westrate of “Streetcar” and by Keegan Artistic Director Susan Marie Rhea of “The Minutes” — which aim to make the most of a rare asset: exceptional writing.
“Williams is actually a language playwright,” explains Westrate, an actor who co-founded the Streetcar Project three years ago with Lucy Owen, who plays Blanche. Their goal was to see “if we could treat Williams like Shakespeare.” Letts is “very smart in the way he uses language,” remarks Ray Ficca, who plays Mayor Superba. “His writing to me is a great breath of life to the modern theater.”
The tone of the first hour or so of “The Minutes” — which runs without intermission for about an hour and a half from the opening clap of thunder — is comic.
When Barbara Klein, as Ms. Innes, declares, “I think everyone here knows how much I adore low-income children,” she sounds like Mrs. Shubert, the Georgetown matron in “Shear Madness.” The ensemble acting, with barbed repartee and a bizarre mimed pageant midway through, is as entertaining as in the long-running Kennedy Center farce, minus the topical ad-libbing.
The straight man, more or less, is sachel-carrying, community-minded pediatric dentist Mr. Peel, played by Stephen Russell Murray, a Big Cherry transplant (his wife grew up there) who faces off with Mayor Superba, among others.
Partly because the council members and clerk are “types,” it’s surprisingly easy to keep them distinct in our minds; we all know people like hoity-toity Ms. Innes, cranky Mr. Oldfield, prickly Mr. Assalone and so on. But Letts, Rhea and the cast make the characters human enough that, after laughing at them, when “the tone shifts very, very dramatically” (Rhea’s words) we take their actions and reactions to heart.
Another thunderclap and blackout signals a flashback to the prior council meeting, at which the absent Mr. Carp, portrayed by Michael McGovern, became, in the eyes of the majority, a dangerous whistleblower. Maybe you know the expression, “It’s your funeral.”
That’s it for spoilers, but I promise that, when “This Land Is Your Land” plays as you leave, you won’t feel like singing along.
Though it also contains humor, “Streetcar” doesn’t let the good times roll either. Over the course of nearly three hours, including an intermission, Blanche fights a valiant but losing battle with alcoholism, mental illness, her sister Stella’s brutal husband Stanley and her own tragic and lately sordid past.
Positioned in and around a double-barreled, long-armed U of seats in Dupont Underground, Owen, Mallory Portnoy as Stella, Brad Koed as Stanley and James Russell as Blanche’s presumptive suitor Mitch (and minor characters) shoulder the entire production.
“When we removed some of the trappings, things about the play were revealed to us,” says Owen. What she and Westrate have done — to the extent possible and, in fact, pushing the envelope — is freed the text from its moorings in postwar New Orleans, while keeping the jazz joints, the L & N railroad tracks and the Mississippi warehouses symbolically nearby.
This is a “Streetcar” for audience members willing to follow them underground (and to other atypical venues, such as an airplane hangar, a Baptist church and a SoHo boutique) for a contemporary, one might even say postmodern, take.
The staging is both immersive and, sometimes, at a distance. The cramped Kowalski flat is blown wide open. Example 1: Stella flees from Blanche’s accusations along a narrow passage between the seating area and the wall. Example 2: The poker game takes place in an alcove almost out of view of the audience. Example 3: Stanley and Stella talk sitting opposite one another on the floor past one end of the seating area while Blanche, bathing, sings “Paper Moon” past the other end. Maybe bring your opera glasses.
Louder — with a score of music, train sounds, cat screeches, gunshots, clapping and occasional dialogue — and more openly sexual than most, the production declines to pull any punches. If not everything “works” (a matter of opinion), everything serves to crack open a play in danger of being stuck in a Brando rut or simply taken for granted.
All four actors rise to the occasion, but Owen’s performance is the most original. She takes risk after risk, giving us a free-spirited Blanche who flaunts her acquaintance with the gutter — Westrate describes Blanche as “a homeless sex worker” — and goes toe-to-toe with Stanley until all is lost. As personified by Owen, Blanche is less sympathetic, perhaps, but more heroic.
After she flees onto the tracks (a variation on the original ending), with Stella on the floor weeping, the men go back to their cards and we hear the coldest of closing lines: “The game is seven-card stud.”