Through the Elevated Line honors Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire,” writes Silk Road Rising artistic director Jamil Khoury in a program note, “yet it was never intended to be an adaptation.” Well, intended or not, an adaptation is what the thing’s turned out to be—to its great detriment. Novid Parsi’s new play so slavishly mimics each plot point and set piece in Streetcar that if you’re at all familiar with Williams’s 1947 masterwork you find yourself spending its 135-minute running time just counting up the equivalences.
Yet still that’s not all. Parsi’s homage extends to putting new
spins on subsidiary scenes from Streetcar. Most egregiously, where
(in one of the most delicate passages in any play ever) Blanche kisses a
young man who’s come to the door collecting for the Evening Star
newspaper, Razi allows himself to be seduced by a construction worker who
tells him, “Blow me, señor.” Now I’m going to have to live with the memory
of that line the rest of my life.
Through 4/15: Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 4 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Silk Road Rising, 77 W. Washington, 312-857-1234, silkroadrising.org, $17.50-$38.
