mbedded: “she” is a woman played by a man who imagines herself not just as Williams’s Blanche DuBois, but as Vivien Leigh (like Bette Bourne, a Brit) playing the role of Blanche in Kazan’s movie. These multiple visible “texts” of Blanche depend in part on being hyperbolic: just as the “original” Blanche embodies her sexuality through the near-caricatured imagery of the Southern Belle, Belle Reprieve’s Blanche has an identity composed of surfaces, of costumes, of performances, such that when Stanley says he is going to look through the contents of her trunk to determine who she is, she tells the audience, “And so it was that I set out to prove to the world that I was indeed myself.” Stella says, “She threw herself at the feet of an unforgiving world to prove her identity,” and Mitch adds, “The answer was somewhere in that trunk” (9). In other words Adv. 1. in other words – otherwise stated; “in other words, we are broke” put differently , in a postmodern theatrical universe, “Blanche” is inseparable from the costumes, the odds an d ends, the fragments that make up the performance of her “identity.” Williams’s Blanche, herself, is a consummate actress and role-player; Bigsby, among other critics, has characterized her as “construct[ing] her own drama, costuming herself with care, arranging the set, enacting a series of roles, developing her own scenario” (61). And if Bette Bourne as Blanche in drag is a comment on what Clum and others would see as the original ‘drag act’ of Williams’s Blanche, it is worth keeping in mind Judith Butler’s argument in Bodies that Matter that drag is predicated in part on an awareness of the performance of difference: “What is ‘performed’ in drag is, of course, the sign of gender, a sign that is not the same as the body it figures, but that cannot be read without it” (237). In Belle Reprieve, Blanche describes herself as feeling like “an old hotel. Beautiful bits of dereliction dereliction n. 1) abandoning possession, which is sometimes used in the phrase “dereliction of duty.” It includes abandoning a ship, which then becomes a “derelict” which salvagers can board. in need of massive renovation” (28). As a ‘renovation’ of the text of Streetcar, Belle Reprieve itself reassembles the fragments o f Blanche into what are still fragments, but ones that allow us to read them (and hence her) differently. Stanley says to Blanche in what replaces the “rape scene,” - See more at: http://blog.richmond.edu/script_analysis_2010/2010/10/17/some-interesting-reviews-and-analyses/#sthash.lpf06OVk.dpuf