THEATER REVIEW ‘A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE’ : Just the Ticket : The Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of a 44-year-old classic is skillfully acted and well paced.

Walk into one of the antique shops along Royal Street in New Orleans and you’re bound to come across the debris of once-expansive Southern estates languishing in dust and tarnish.

It was in these remnants of a social ideal that couldn’t stand the test of reality, decaying amid the bawdy, raucous backdrop of the French Quarter, that Tennessee Williams found the wellspring for his enduring reflection on our uniquely American brand of faded dreams, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

It’s a work that still hits us where we live--right in our illusions. And in the capable hands of The Ensemble Theatre Company, the play retains its soul-stirring, devastating impact.

This despite the jaded familiarity wrought by innumerable productions, from the silver screen to high school gyms, since its premiere in 1947.

Much of the success here is due to a haunting performance by Gretchen Evans as Blanche Dubois, the fading Southern belle whose last desperate grasp for happiness lies at the center of Williams’ drama. Evans sketches her character skillfully enough to evoke all the ambivalence of real life.

Every inch the devious manipulator, Blanche arrives at her sister’s seedy New Orleans apartment spouting endless lies about her life after the loss of their ancestral manor.

When an eligible gentleman shows interest, she explains with utter calculation, “I want to deceive him enough to make him want me.”

Playing down Blanche’s fragility (at least on the surface), there is much of the hard-bitten survivor in Evans’ performance.

And yet she makes it clear that beneath Blanche’s limitless capacity to deceive herself and others lies a more compelling need than brute survival.

“I don’t want realism, I want magic,” she declares in unswerving allegiance to the poetic core of life, the rose-colored paper shade hung over a naked light bulb.

It’s this vulnerable passion that makes us care for her, just the way the playwright intended.

We watch with a terrible sense of inevitability as her inability to balance the romantic voices of her own fantasies with the demands of the real world exact their heavy toll.

She’s pitted against brute realism incarnate in the form of her crude, brawling brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, played by Craig Taylor Peoples with sullen craftiness that lashes out from time to time like a severed piano wire.

Simply watching Peoples stand there with narrowing eyes as he overhears Blanche’s diatribe comparing him to an ape, we feel the rage begin to coil inside.

“What do you two think you are? A pair of queens?” he bellows later to the sisters, hurling his glass to the rear of Thomas Buderwitz’ marvelously detailed tenement set. “That’s how I clear the table!”

Stanley relishes indulging his basest impulses that have none of the genteel trappings that are so essential to Blanche. They are like oil and vinegar, and their confrontation, in Stanley’s words, is “a date we’ve had with each other from the beginning.”

Director Robert G. Weiss wisely resists the temptation to dilute a perfectly crafted script with anything like quirky revisionism. Instead, he stays close to the text and illuminates its far-reaching corners with admirable sensitivity and insight.

Despite its three-hour running time, the piece is immaculately paced except for a few exchanges in Act I that feel a little rushed.

Rounding out the production are two riveting supporting performances that make this a true ensemble experience, not simply a vehicle for star turns in the leads.

Michael Rathbone plays Blanche’s potential suitor with a poignant sincerity, showing both his enchantment by her otherworldly charm and his later sense of betrayal.

And Ventura’s own Peggy Steketee makes Blanche’s sister Stella much more than a foil for the conflict between her sister and husband.

In her own way, she also treads that fine line between illusion and realism, and makes her own compromises.

In the end, when she says, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley,” she speaks for all of us who sometimes find ourselves believing not what is, but what we have to.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“A Streetcar Named Desire.” Performed through Nov. 9, Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. except for a 2 p.m. matinee on Nov. 3; at the Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara. Tickets are $14 Fridays and Saturdays, $12 Thursdays, $10 Wednesdays and Sundays. For reservations or further information call 962-8606.