Television and film actress Dale Dickey made a quick decision when she got a call from Cal MacLean, the artistic director of Knoxville’s Clarence Brown Theatre, asking if she wanted to return to her hometown to play the role of Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Peter DeFaria (Mitch), Dale Dickey (Blanche) and artistic director Cal MacLean
“I never in my life thought I would be offered the role of Blanche DuBois,” she told the Clarence Brown’s advisory board Thursday. “It’s an incredible honor and opportunity to be in my hometown to do this beautiful play.”
She also made another decision fairly quickly. She didn’t want to have to wear a hot, itchy wig for the three-hour play. So she started growing her own hair long and had it dyed blond. “My husband doesn’t quite know what to make of it,” she chuckled. Dickey, a graduate of Bearden High School and the University of Tennessee, has most recently had a re-occurring part as “Patty, the daytime hooker” in the TV series, “My Name is Earl.”
Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, “Streetcar,” opens at the Clarence Brown next Friday. From all accounts, it has been an emotional roller coaster for the cast, which is made up of professionals and graduate students. But all involved believe the end result will be stunningly good. “It is a great big huge play deceptively appearing to be a little play,” MacLean said. “There is a delicacy to the play as if it is made of gossamer and butterfly wings. But there’s a muscular, violent other part of the play. And sometimes Mr. Williams likes to have them going on at the same time. Getting the balance right has been a challenge for the past three weeks. Sometimes it felt like I was pushing a mountain.”
“The point of the play is that there is no good and bad. It’s a miscommunication that people sometimes have when they try to connect,” said Dickey, who is playing the part Vivien Leigh played in the 1951 movie. “There is brutality and violence that people must have in order to survive sometimes, as well as the art and the poetry.”
Dickey is a little concerned that her 77-year-old mother, Missy Dickey, doesn’t really recall how raw and emotional the play is. It includes a rape scene, with Dickey as the victim, she reminded her mother.
The play will include a spectacular set, designed by Christopher Pickart, who told board members that he wanted to capture the feeling of New Orleans as almost a character in the play. “I wanted the feeling of the heat and humidity and water everywhere,” he said. “I wanted the feeling, metaphorically, that the whole thing is closing in around Blanche.”
Lucas Richman and Marianne Custer
The Clarence Brown’s talented costume designer, Marianne Custer, had to come up with about 72 different sets of clothes for the main characters and assorted other denizens of New Orleans. Many of the clothes are vintage outfits the theater already owned. But Custer said the play was very personal to her because even though she grew up in Minneapolis rather than New Orleans, the people in the play hit very close to home for her. “My father could have been a real life Stanley and my mother could have been a real life Stella,” she confided. So she looked at some old family photos and actually made two of the costumes from those pictures, which were taken the year she was born.
Another unique aspect of this play is the addition of special music, which resulted from an eerie coincidence. MacLean was meeting with Knoxville Symphony Orchestra‘s conductor, Lucas Richman, about an unrelated upcoming project when Richman, in passing, mentioned a piece called “Overture to Blanche” that the KSO planned to perform this season. “Do you mean Blanche from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire?'” MacLean asked, incredulously. “Yes,” Richman said. It turns out the piece was part of some incidental music Richman had composed for “Streetcar” when his own mother was in the play at a community college in California. Richman had been 17 when he wrote it. When he mentioned it, he had no idea MacLean was planning to produce that particular play. Of course MacLean asked Richman to recreate the score he had written all those years ago.
“Tennessee Williams has music cues on every other page,” Richman said. “Music was a constant backdrop in this play.”
I personally love Tennessee Williams and Dale Dickey and can’t wait till opening night. The play runs through Sept. 20. The box office phone number is (865) 974-5161.
