Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a complex, sprawling play examining in detail the thwarted lives of its characters, particularly the tragic dissolution of its central figure, Blanche DuBois. It is not to be hurried. But at three and a half hours, unfolding at a languid rate, Sterling Playmakers’ production loses dramatic impact to tedium. Under John L. Geddie’s direction, the show’s pacing is packed with pauses. In a given actor’s speeches, there are often more frequent than necessary pauses between words and sentences. Exchanges between actors often have the nature of my line/pause/your line, not only slowing scenes but losing the sense of characters actively engaging with one another. Several lengthy scene changes impede the flow of the action and add to the production’s running time. Lauren Sunday as Stella and Eileen Marshall as Blanche DuBois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Photo by Courtney Garofolo. While not immune to the production’s overall pacing issues, Eileen Marshall’s performance as Blanche is the evening’s highlight. Blanche is a very large, hugely demanding role, requiring the actor to delve deeply into the psyche of a woman who, unable to deal with the effects of multiple traumas and the cruelty of others, descends into a world of fantasy from which she cannot escape. Marshall persuasively portrays the many facets of her character: her haughtiness based on a lost life of privilege and gentility, her fragility, her desperation, her sexual seductiveness. She seeks comfort in poetry, literature, and long, hot baths. Above all, Blanche lies. She lies to herself and to others, as she tries to draw them into her fantasies. Truth is very important to Williams. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, characters speak witheringly of “mendacity,” and Blanche, in a strangely innocent way — trying to create “magic,” as she puts it, and not to intentionally hurt others — is chronically mendacious. Marshall’s performance illuminates the self-destructiveness of Blanche’s lies. Her antagonist is Stanley Kowalski (Patrick Maloney). A working class, hard-drinking man filled with resentment of Blanche’s upper-class airs, Stanley sets about destroying her. Maloney is well cast physically for the role. Animalistic though he may be, as Blanche sees him, Maloney’s Stanley is smart and calculating. If not the erotic powerhouse of some interpretations, Maloney’s Stanley, by underlining his untutored intelligence, brings out an aspect of the character that is often lost amid the character’s outbursts of violent anger. in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Photo by Courtney Garofolo. Inspired by Huey Long’s “Every Man a King” slogan, Stanley insists on being king in his own house, physically abusing his wife, Stella (Laureen Sunday), Blanche’s sister, as well as ultimately assaulting Blanche. He is remorseful for the former but not the latter. Stella steadfastly stands by her man despite the abuse and Stanley’s hatred of her sister. Why, we may ask, does she do so? The times may have something to do with it. Streetcar opened in 1947, the same year as Carousel, another classic show featuring an abusive husband whose wife never questions his love for her. (If he has the needed vocal range, Maloney could make a fine Billy Bigelow.) But within the context of Streetcar, the bond between Stanley and Stella is one of desire. To make this dynamic work, the audience must feel the sexual frisson between them. In this production, while the words describing their visceral need for each other are spoken, the feeling of that overwhelming chemistry does not come across. A fiercer interpretation of Stella on Sunday’s part could have helped. In the fourth major role, Stanley’s genuine nice guy buddy Mitch (Tony Bonieskie) — a role analogous to that of the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie — gives Blanche moments of sweetness and brief hope, until Stanley’s revelation to him of Blanche’s sexual past ruins his feelings for her. His scenes with Blanche are among the show’s most effective. Streetcar includes several smaller roles. Among them, Ilan Komrad stands out for an energetic performance as Steve Hubbell, the Kowalskis’ upstairs neighbor. The play is ill-served by its physical production. The stage right wall to the Kowalskis’ apartment wavers visibly every time its door is closed. A plastic glass makes a distinctive clink against the wall when Stanley throws it. The sound design features musical underscoring that frequently seems unrelated to the scene in which it appears and can mask actors’ lines. For example, the audience should not have to struggle to hear Blanche’s lines over the music in a key scene with Mitch. Sound cues begin seemingly randomly and frequently stop abruptly. The lighting design is equally random. In some instances, a character who the script says is in the dark is brightly lit, and vice-versa. Actors are blocked to play parts of some scenes in the shadows. In the Kowalskis’ two-room apartment, lights sometimes come up on the room that is empty, rather than the one in which actors are playing a scene. The rapid switching back and forth of lights between the rooms is distracting. There is one very bright light, in the stage left room of the apartment, that shines directly into the faces of the audience members. When an audience’s focus is drawn to oddities of sound and lighting, rather than to the interactions of the characters, the play suffers. On the other hand, Kati Andresen’s costumes for Blanche, emphasizing her faded elegance and her use of clothing as armor to protect her threatened sense of self, are a real asset. Streetcar deserves its reputation as a great play: it’s about sex, class, power, and violence, a story of opposites attracting and repelling. Blanche and Stanley are people who, as Willams wrote, tragically share “a blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.” As Blanche, Marshall’s performance does justice to one of American theater’s greatest, most layered characters. These are reasons to see this production, notwithstanding its flaws. Running Time: Three and a half hours, including two intermissions. A Streetcar Named Desire plays through October 27, 2024, presented by Sterling Playmakers performing at Seneca Ridge Middle School, 98 Seneca Ridge Drive, Sterling VA. Tickets ($18) are available online or at the door.