A New DC Streetcar Pulls Into Dupont Underground
Actors Nick Westrate and Lucy Owen have put a unique twist on Tennessee Williams’ American classic A Streetcar Named Desire with The Streetcar Project.
By D.R. Lewis
April 10, 2026
This review originally appeared in Washington City Paper.
It’s been a little over a week since the DC Streetcar completed its last trip on H Street NE, but a new one is about to pull into Dupont Underground. In a stripped-back version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which will play in the tunnel from April 20 through May 4 under the direction of locally recognized actor Nick Westrate, Blanche DuBois will step onto the platform very much alive and characteristically unwell, but probably unlike you’ve ever seen her before.
Williams’ tale of a down-and-out Southern belle enduring the abuses of her pregnant sister’s brutish husband is an undisputed American classic—the 1951 film adaptation is credited for launching Marlon Brando’s career and earning Vivien Leigh the Oscar for Best Actress, while theater productions have drawn some of the biggest celebrities of the past century to the stage, from Cate Blanchett to Jessica Lange. But the origins of Westrate’s stripped back, nomadic visiting production—a treatment they’ve christened “The Streetcar Project”—are rooted in stark contrast to the glint of such star-studded revivals.
Frustrated at the improbability of being cast in the role, Westrate’s co-creator, actor Lucy Owen, took matters into her own hands, rehearsing the part of Blanche in her apartment and inviting several friends, including Westrate, to perform it with her there. With nothing between themselves and the text, Westrate saw the story through an entirely new lens.
“For years, the culture has thought this was a play about a sexy guy in a T-shirt, and it’s really a play about two sisters,” Westrate tells City Paper. “The play ends with Stella screaming the word, ‘Blanche.’ But we had a generation of young men growing up dreaming of screaming the word, ‘Stella.’” He and Owen began workshopping the play in earnest and staged it in February 2023 with four actors in a Hudson Valley barn for two dozen friends .
“We asked the question: what if you treated Tennessee Williams like Shakespeare?” says Westrate. “Stripping away all of the context clues and just letting the words speak for themselves, it really allows the play to come into today.” With nary a trace of the now-standard effects imposed by original Broadway and film director Elia Kazan, the audience in the barn felt the same spark Westrate and Owen did. The pair have since staged the production in a Kips Bay Baptist church, a SoHo clothing store, an upstate New York movie theater, a Los Angeles airplane hanger, and Asbury Park’s famed Carousel Building, among other venues. The costumes are modern, the lighting is rudimentary, and the props are scarce. Even Leigh’s syrupy Southern accent, which was a hallmark of Williams’ public persona, is a casualty.
“What you usually get is this very wilting flower of a Blanche DuBois,” Westrate says. “When we didn’t use the dialect, Blanche stopped seeming insane and started seeming like the smartest person you’ve ever met. She’s like Hamlet. She has terrifying dreams that she’s running from, she’s afraid of death, everyone thinks she’s nuts … I had never seen, until Lucy Owen started performing it in front of me, a Blanche who is one of the smartest characters in literature … The beautiful thing about Williams is that his heroes are always the most creative and hardest hit by life. They’re the homeless, the artists, the poets.”
To Westrate, such a significant reframing of a famous character can only come with the sustained rehearsal and production process the Streetcar Project has enabled. Returning to a role over and over with the benefit of time between productions allows an actor to approach the same scene from new viewpoints. A performer’s subconscious can also parse a character’s biography and emotional arc during off-periods between stagings.
“There’s a difference between seeing a play where people have been rehearsing for five weeks—if they’re very lucky—and a play where you’re seeing performers who have been with roles for three and a half years,” he says. “These actors continue to excavate these parts and every time we do it in a different space, we restage it, so there’s nothing taken for granted.” The cast and crew have adopted what Westrate calls “a Russian way of rehearsing,” though he is no stranger to the harsh realities of an American acting career.
“The actor is almost always the last person invited into the process,” he says. “You’re presented with a production and you have to find your little, tiny sliver of humanity within that … I really believe that the people who run the poetry through their bodies know the most about the poetry.” A veteran performer with several Broadway credits and a string of recent successes on D.C. stages, Westrate is, by his own admission, no celebrity. He’s a working-class artist. And the Streetcar Project is as much an artistic experiment as an economic one. In embracing nimbleness, making a lot from a little, and building flexibility into the production, all of its artists have managed to earn a living wage from the production.
That spirit of the actor-driven theater and the volume of stages in the Washington region (nearly 90 by a recent Theatre Washington count) are two of the reasons Westrate has made the area an artistic home in the past few years. Workshops of Streetcar bookended his performance as Prior Walter in Arena Stage’s 2023 production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, which earned him a Helen Hayes Award nomination. He’s since starred in Frankenstein and The Wild Duck at Shakespeare Theatre Company, founded by one of his mentors and eminent Williams interpreter Michael Kahn. Angels in America director János Szász was the first to introduce him to Dupont Underground.
“The idea of doing this play on an old streetcar track was just too good an opportunity to pass up,” Westrate says. He’s worked closely with Dupont Underground CEO Ana Harvey to configure the space for the production, forgoing the typical built stage so the actors can perform directly on the platform. There’s some inherent risk in staging a classic (that would typically appeal to the patrons of the region’s resident theaters) in an unconventional space and manner, but Westrate is confident D.C.’s robust theater scene has conditioned audiences to step out of their comfort zones.
“Whenever I talk to audience members in D.C., they approach [a play] as if they’re going into it for the first time, even if they’ve seen the play before or have preconceived notions,” he says. “With boundary-pushing theaters like Woolly Mammoth, Taffety Punk, and Spooky Action, they have a really diverse well of theater that they see.”
Westrate hopes for a sold-out run in Washington, but the Streetcar Project is already cemented as a highlight of his career. He’s committed to continuing this model of producing, too, though not ready to say what’s next.
“We don’t need to sit around and wait for an artistic director to decide it’s ‘our time’ to do something,” he explains. “If we would have stopped doing Streetcar that day in the barn after we finished it, it still would’ve been one of the most artistically fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life.”
The Streetcar Project presents a new staging of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, running April 20 through May 4 at Dupont Underground. thestreetcarproject.com. $85–$125.
Lucy Owen and Brad Koed in A Streetcar Named Desire produced by the Streetcar Project at an East LA airplane hangar. Photo credit: Walls Trimble