You might think that asking undergraduates to crawl into the rather adult skins of alcoholism, class anxiety, and sexual tensions found in some of the plays of Tennessee Williams is a little too much. And you’d be right. There’s just something about the taste of failure, personal compromise, and the resignation of self-delusion that hasn’t entirely invaded young people that might keep some of the more maudlin recesses of Williams’ work a little remote. So what’s noteworthy about the MICA undergraduate company Rivals of the West’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire isn’t that it doesn’t capture all of the play’s sometimes overbearing melodrama; what’s impressive is just how close the production comes to getting there.

Christopher Shipley, chair of the Language, Literature, and Culture Department, started Rivals of the West in 2009, growing out of his year-long class “The Play’s the Thing.” That class’ students handle every aspect of the play’s production—front- and backstage, from publicity to costume, props to stage construction—and for three years running now the students have put together commendable versions of some standard fare: Hair in 2009, A Midsummer’s Night Dream in 2010. This year Rivals has doubled its efforts, staging Streetcar in honor of Williams’ centenary, and following it up with Amiri Baraka’s racially fraught Dutchman April 14-17. The Age of Aquarius and Shakespeare these plays are not.

Streetcar, of course, is the sexually charged clash between one Blanche DuBois (Allie Stephens) and her sister Stella’s (Meghan Morrison) husband, Stanley Kowalski (Will Grenier). Blanche considers herself a proper Southern Belle, a high school English teacher who prides herself on her upstanding civility and upbringing, the product of a genteel Southern plantation in Laurel, Miss. Stanley is a working-class cretin who talks loud, treats women as crudely as the words he chooses, smokes and drinks almost constantly, and in general acts the alpha-male fool even though he knows he can’t really function without Stella. Stanley and Stella maintain a volatile relationship, and it’s into their lives that Blanche arrives over one steamy New Orleans summer.

Unsurprisingly, Rivals once again delivers an impressive set. Kel Millionie and the stage crew created a two-room flat that nicely approximates the French Quarter’s mix of former grandeur and somehow-still-standing dilapidation. Walls rise and then end in crumbling plaster, as if they’ve been exposed to the elements. The gold(ish) and tobacco-hued wallpaper looks crumbling and perhaps even humidity warped. Windows’ shutter slats are no longer parallel, each trying to choose its own way as much as the characters play. Hardwood floors creek and groan under foot; beer after beer after beer gets pulled from the period-appropriate icebox.

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