Blanche the tormented focus of a fractured world

In this production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the classic Tennessee Williams drama of human relationships, gone are all the hues and shades of human relationships bar one — the relationship of its “heroine,” Blanche DuBois, to the fragmented and fragmenting world she inhabits. As staged by director Satoshi Miyagi and the Ku Na’uka (Towards Science) Theatre Company he founded in 1990, all the other characters are mere ciphers in Blanche’s unresolvable, unending daily drama of the conflict between her need for security, however confining, and her lust for life.

The center of this production is not the melancholy Blanche that directors typically portray, a woman who has come down in the world and is living in the past. Instead, Miyagi’s Blanche, played by actress Mikari, is a woman “of a certain age,” living in reduced circumstances but still driven to experience life in all its vivid, clashing fullness. As the director puts it in the program: “A woman fallen to ruin is the general image of Blanche, but in my production I would like to focus on the power of her desire to survive and experience life — to show that Desire [the streetcar Blanche takes to her sister Stella’s house] is the opposite of Death.”