THE BOOK

Depression and an eventual nervous breakdown sidelines her dance career at 24. Stripped of a sense of self after losing the only thing she loves, Susan succumbs to abusive relationships as self-defeating punishment and odd jobs as a way to survive.  This is Susan's story of rediscovering herself without the veil of ballet. 

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FORWARD 

Susan Priver in A Streetcar Named Desire

When I was twenty-three, I dated a man form the Actors Studio before I went off to Cleveland for my last professional job as a ballet dancer. My going-away present was a stack of plays by Tennessee Williams. My friend said, "I think you'll like these. Read them in your spare time." And I did. 
Although I never thought of myself as someone using words as a vehicle of expression, I read voraciously each play I was given. My friend, the actor Robert Viharo, knew something about me that I didn't quite know myself. 
Something about the longing of the human spirit. Something that Tennessee brought to poetic life in almost everything he wrote. In my early dance life, I knew intrinsically that I couldn't live without. The great dancer Anna Pavlova said, Once you've tasted the fruits of the theater, you can never go back. And when I fell from grace, as many artists eventually do, my search, my entire journey, has been to find some way back. 
It is the summer of 2019 and I have just concluded a six-week run playing one of the greatest and most challenging roles ever written for a woman: Blanche Du Bois, the central character in Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire. ​​Everything I've experienced in my life contributed to towards my research to find a way to get under the skin of this multi-dimensional character, so beautifully realized by Tennessee, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Perhaps this tale of my personal unraveling filled Blanches's shoes in a poetic way. 

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