Entr'acte

Waiting for my Airborne to fizz (c’mon, save me Airborne, you can do it!).

I had to make a hard decision this week about where intermission will come. For the Broadway premiere in 1947, Kazan and Williams used two intermissions, after scenes 4 and 6. But audiences aren’t used to 2 intermissions anymore (although I did use 2 in Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind but there was a live country band for entertainment and energy). So I’ve been working with it coming after scene 6, the scene with Blanche and Mitch after their date, when Blanche reveals what happened to her young husband. But that makes for a very long first act (about 80 pages to 40 pages). And scene 6 is a lengthy and somewhat introspective scene. So I just made the decision today to change intermission to being after scene 5 (just after Blanche’s encounter with the young newspaper collector.) It doesn’t have quite the climactic kick that scene 6 does, but I think the audience will be less antsy and that counts for a lot these days.