Trans actor finds personal connection with Blanche in ‘Streetcar’

When director Jeremy Seghers asked Indigo Leigh to play Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she had an immediate response: “Yes, please, yes.”

The character in Tennessee Williams’ 1947 Pulitzer prize-winning play has become iconic through the years, immortalized on screen by Vivian Leigh, who gave an Oscar-winning performance in the 1951 film adaptation.

For the Orlando performer, a trans woman, the complex role of a person struggling in a world that judges her as an outsider feels deeply personal.

“The way I know Blanche now is so much more painful,” she says. “It’s hard to feel how deeply she feels.”

The production will be staged at Orlando’s Timucua Arts Foundation, where Seghers had a hit with the thriller “The Woman in Black.” While the “Streetcar” script doesn’t directly issues of trans identity, the casting could inspire the audience to reflect on how they judge people different than themselves.

“Me being trans is just a facet of myself so it’s just a facet of Blanche,” Leigh says. “There’s no wink-wink-nudge-nudge to the audience.”

And both Leigh and Seghers see the casting as a natural fit.

“There is a tradition of queer people relating to Blanche,” Leigh says. “On paper there’s something campy about her … with her poems from her dead gay husband.”

Seghers sees it as part of the complexity of William’s writing.

“It’s there because Williams wrote in coded language because he was a queer writer,” Seghers says. “It’s more about the subtext.”

In the story, Blanche is a Southern teacher who has fallen on hard times. Her family fortune is gone, and her husband has killed himself after being caught in a gay tryst. After a scandal of her own making — an affair with one of her young students — she is drummed out of town and seeks refuge with her sister, Stella (played by Caroline Hull in Orlando), and her sister’s brutish husband, Stanley (Daniel Luis Molina).

While being judged by all around her, Blanche dwells on maintaining her appearance, overly concerned with femininity and genteelness.

“It’s so incredibly frustrating … and relatable,” says Leigh, who also feels the eyes of the world on her. “People think they are very slick when they are staring.”

The judgment of strangers is a constant in the lives of trans people, she says.

“People feel entitled by my transition. There’s a kind of invasion of privacy when you are an out trans woman,” Leigh says. “Is she ‘passing’? Has she had surgery? Will she get surgery? It’s none of their business.”

The real emotions she feels get funneled into her performance, often at a mental cost to herself.

“There’s a lot of care I have to take for myself, Indigo, when I put Blanche away for the night,” she says.

In the movie version, charismatic Marlon Brando pulled focus onto the character of Stanley, but Blanche is truly the center of the story. A flawed human, she can be her own worst enemy.

“It’s truly tragic because she had a chance in some ways to save herself, and in other ways she had no chance at all,” Leigh says.

Seghers thinks the different dimensions of the character make her interesting.

“It challenges the audience,” he says. “Do you feel bad for Blanche?”

Then after she makes another error in judgment: “Do you still feel bad for her?”

Blanche’s dubious choices make the role more interesting for Leigh, who is well aware of her flaws.

“She is the protagonist, not the heroine,” Leigh says with a laugh. “I have to create my own reasoning of why she makes those choices.”

But she has a soft spot for the troubled woman.

“I have to believe Blanche is going to do better,” she says. “In the end, what helps me is my love for many parts of her and the many parts of me I do see reflected in her.”

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

• Where: Timucua Arts Foundation, 2000 S. Summerlin Ave. in Orlando

• When: June 22-25

• Cost: $25 ($12.59 students, seniors and frontline workers)

• Note: Patrons must be 18 or older, no late seating permitted

• Info: timucua.com

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