There's nothing like a hot and steamy play, set in a late 1940s New Orleans summer, when it's actually below freezing outside. Stuck under all your layers and sweating in your own right, you might find yourself transported into Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
Within the bright and versatile set design of Imago Theatre, Southern belle-fatale Blanche DuBois (Meghan Daaboul) appears. She steps off the titular streetcar, makes a transfer to "Cemeteries," and eventually finds the way to her sister Stella (Jaiden Wirth)'s apartment in an area called Elysian Fields.
Desire, Cemeteries, and Elysian Fields were all real transit and place names when Williams was writing the work—he lived just a half block from the Desire Line (later replaced by the Desire Bus)—but he uses them in Streetcar to obvious allegory. Blanche follows desire to the hazy, eternal summer of the afterlife—metaphorically.
Immediately stunned by an uncouth neighbor who asks if she's lost, even this is all too much for Blanche. She discovers her sister has a very small apartment, and a feeling of doom sets in, leading us into the story of genteel decline and the mannerly death of her spirit.Â

Streetcar is a story woven so deeply into US culture that it's difficult to spoil. Even if you haven't seen it, you've likely still seen a TV show riff on it. If you've never understood why shirtless men perpetually scream, "Stella!" across our movies, shows, and comedy sketches, you may want to catch up, just for the references.
Far from a heroic figure—she's actually pretty toxic—Blanche still doesn't deserve what's coming to her at the hands of her sister's husband Stanley (Max Bersohn). But while Streetcar should belong to Blanche, the power of the performance always seems to come from Stanley. Marlon Brando famously stole the spotlight in the play's critically-acclaimed 1951 movie adaptation. For Imago, Bersohn handles his role's shifting temperaments deftly, keeping a suffocating slow-boil of rising fury. There's some Jeremy Allen White in The Bear energy coming off Bersohn—even if you don't view that character as a villain.

If you find yourself transported into a 1947 New Orleans summer, it will happen despite the cast's running stumble at New Orleans' accents. Bersohn alone pulled his off, and that might be because he used it lightly. But either everyone improved as they went, or we noticed it less as the show sank into its three-hour and 20-minute runtime.
Everything about this staging seemed to improve with time. The opening act felt like a slog of slow delivery, but the cast's energy had started to heat up and gel by the first of the staging's two intermissions. Streetcar is a legitimately long play. And it stays a long play because it's good, even in the hands of ordinary ensembles; it's devastating with strong ones.Â
A Streetcar Named Desire plays at Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th, through February 2, $30, tickets here, content warnings for sensitive topics, like abuse, assault, and suicide.