Blanche Survives Katrina in A FEMA Trailer Named Desire January 29, 2009

Mark Sam Rosenthal, a comedic improviser trained with New York's renowned Upright Citizens Brigade, wades into the swamp of his Louisiana roots with a politically incorrect, gender-bending new solo show, that imagines Tennessee Williams' tragic heroine, Blanche DuBois, has neither aged nor left New Orleans. She was there when Katrina hit; she was sent to the Superdome; she was evacuated to Shreveport and entangled in the heartless bureaucracy of FEMA. She gets involved with drugs, is adopted by an Arizona megachurch and is "job-placed" at a Popeye's cash register, having for good reason been permanently barred from teaching young schoolboys. Hers is a refugee story whose politics and pathos you have read but never experienced through the eyes of the desperately deliberately fragile, alcoholic, codependent, sex-addicted Blanche DuBois, America's most broken woman.