A Streetcar Named Desire

Early Stages students at A Streetcar Named Desire

Early Stages students have been swept into the underbelly of New Orleans’ French Quarter in Broadway’s new revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Interest in the play was so great that students made the effort to go even though they were on spring break.

The characters of Stella and Blanche, while older and from a different era, resonated with Early Stages students.  Juana, a senior at Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design, could even “relate to how Blanche didn’t have a place to call home anymore. I will always remember her last line which symbolized the fact that she had never really had true companions.” (For those of you who can’t recall high school English, she says “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)

Early Stages students at A Streetcar Named Desire

The themes of this play – love and death, fantasy and reality – affected several students.  Al-Jameelah, a senior at Queens High School for the Sciences, learned that “A Streetcar Named Desire is the epiphany that the opposite of death is desire.” Here at Early Stages, we too had an epiphany: Sometimes all you need is a revival to come around and allow the relevance of the past to show itself once more.