New York — Theater lovers undaunted by astronomical ticket prices are flocking to the Brooklyn Academy of Music‘s Harvey Theater to see Paul Mescal as Stanley Kowalski in the Almeida Theatre Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The 29-year-old Irish actor, who shot to fame with the TV adaptation of “Normal People,” earned an Oscar nomination for his stunning work in “Aftersun” and became a global megastar with “Gladiator 2,” flashes his acting chops along with his abs in a revival that reignites Williams’ classic.
Marlon Brando’s watershed performance has seemingly set up all subsequent Stanleys for failure. A few have sneaked in a success, most notably Joel Edgerton, who starred opposite Cate Blanchett’s Blanche in the Liv Ullmann production that came to BAM in 2009.
But Brando’s ghost has a way of hovering over productions of “Streetcar.” No actor could vanquish the memory preserved for posterity in Elia Kazan’s film. Comparisons are inevitable as soon as Stanley starts bellowing his wife’s name as though his guts were pouring out of him.
Paul Mescal with the cast of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
(Julieta Cervantes)
Mescal, shrewdly, doesn’t even try to compete. He gives us a Stanley preoccupied with his buddies. The women are accessories to a life lived first and foremost among men. The factory plant, the bowling alley and poker night are, along with the bedroom, the main points of his existence. He can’t live without Stella but he knows he has a hold on her when the lights are off.
The social context that formed Stanley’s character is rendered visible in Mescal’s performance. “Streetcar” presents a portrait of postwar America in which masculinity was testing how far it could outrun the determinations of class. Mescal’s Stanley is incontestably the leader of his pack, but he’s content to fade chummily into the background — a baseball star who’s happiest when surrounded by his team.
As a result, the balance of theatrical power shifts decidedly to Blanche’s advantage. Patsy Ferran, who plays Blanche, is the true revelation in the cast. Her performance restores her character’s centrality, so that not even Mescal at his roaring, shirtless best can threaten her standing.
Rebecca Frecknall, who directed the recent Broadway revival of “Cabaret” that made a choppy Atlantic crossing, has brought to Brooklyn the best revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” of my lifetime. The production had two touted West Ends runs, but I didn’t expect to hear Williams’ play as if for the first time.
Patsy Ferran and Jabez Sykes in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at BAM.
(Julieta Cervantes)
Lines that I could recite alongside the actors resonated in ways that I never expected. The great majority of them are spoken by Ferran, who triumphs where such incandescent talents as Jessica Lange, Blanchett and Natasha Richardson could find only sporadic magic.
Until Ferran, the Blanche who left the most potent impression on me was Elizabeth Marvel in Ivo van Hove’s 1999 off-Broadway production at New York Theatre Workshop. That was an auteur take on the play that nearly drowned Marvel’s Blanche in a bathtub, but her performance was galvanized by the deconstructive assault.
What sets Ferran apart is the way she balances the play’s poetry and realism, moving with lightning reflexes from crushing naturalism to bold expressionism. Heralded for her Olivier-winning performance as Alma in Williams’ “Summer and Smoke,” Ferran, a Spanish British actress, is completely fluent in the playwright’s grand, streetwise lyricism. Accent and idiom are firmly in command as she transitions from Southern Gothic to surrealist horror, never losing sight of a character who’s as fragile as she is formidable.
Ferran’s ragged butterfly Blanche looks at first glance as if she might be blown to smithereens with one gust of Stanley’s ferocious lung power. But don’t let the wispiness fool you. Pound for theatrical pound, she pushes Mescal’s Stanley to the ropes, an apt metaphor for a production that takes place on a raised platform resembling a boxing ring.
Dwane Walcott and Gabriela Garcia in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
(Julieta Cervantes)
Like Blanche, Frecknall doesn’t want banal realism. A percussionist (Tom Penn, who also plays the doctor in the play’s final stretch) and a singer (Gabriela García, who takes on the roles of the nurse and the flower seller) infuse the production with Angus Macrae’s moody, jazz-inflected compositions. The music endows the revival with a fluidity that is made all the more haunting by the otherworldly echoes of Peter Rice’s sound design.
Set pieces are minimal. Chairs are moved around by actors to create new geometric patterns in Madeleine Girling’s scenic design. A bottle of booze taunts Blanche on a stage that doesn’t give the characters (or the actors) any place to hide.
The cast is unshackled from literal realism. At the start of the production, when Blanche arrives at her sister’s dumpy apartment, a lithe young man (Jabez Sykes) contorts himself in abstract choreography. It’s the ghost of Blanche’s husband, who shot himself after she shamed him for his dalliance with another man. This interpolation of Blanche’s traumatic memory is one of Frecknall’s heavier-handed liberties. But the figure vanishes with the same dreamlike alacrity with which he arrives.
In an encounter I had last fall with “The Streetcar Project,” a bare-bones production of Williams’ play, the dramatic poetry was undermined by an exacting TV realism that only threw into relief the weirdness of the story. Frecknall’s synchronized ensemble, by contrast, respects the manifold variety of Williams’ playwriting.
Allegory and brute fact coexist on stage. The characters are grounded in recognizable emotions even as their conflicts are raised to a mythic level.
Anjana Vasan, left, and Patsy Ferran in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
(Julieta Cervantes)
Anjana Vasan’s Stella doesn’t hold back when she tells Blanche about her sexual connection with Stanley. She boldly celebrates the Dionysian dimension of her marital bond. Yet Stella’s pregnancy isn’t merely a symbolic plot point. Vasan, who is as supple as she is solid, is costumed to accentuate the physical reality of a woman about to give birth. (Merle Hensel’s costume designs take inspiration from the play’s stylistic freedom.)
Dwane Walcott’s “Mitch,” as he is known to friends, has a diffidence that in Blanche’s eyes makes him seem almost gentlemanly among Stanley’s boorish friends. She’s desperate to find a refuge for herself, “a cleft in the rock of the world” that she could hide in, as she tells him after her secrets have been exposed. Walcott doesn’t play Mitch as a slab of granite. He’s soft, easily confused, Oedipally arrested and no saint himself. His masculinity, though less volatile, is as stunted as Stanley’s.
When Blanche levels with Mitch about her sordid past, Ferran drops the façade in a way I’ve never seen done before. Here, at BAM, it seems painfully true that the death of Blanche’s husband really did drive her to intimacies with strangers. She’s not just making excuses to hitch a husband. “I never lied in my heart,” she tells Mitch, in words that seem plucked from Williams’ own soul. Mitch’s cloddish rejection of her is all the more devastating after all that she has courageously bared to him.
The cast of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at BAM.
(Julieta Cervantes)
The clash with Stanley that topples Blanche’s mind after Stella has gone into labor is just as freshly conceived. Ferran’s Blanche puts up a vicious fight, but Mescal’s Stanley relishes the roughhousing. He crouches on all fours in his silk pajamas like a panther ready to pounce. No broken bottle is going to keep him from ravaging his prey. The rape scene marks the point of no return in Blanche’s tragedy.
Her famous parting words as the doctor leads her away, “Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” scalds anew. They are a sighed indictment of a broken world. Ferran, whose theatrical octave range is nothing short of astonishing, earns the sentiment in a way that I wasn’t sure was possible at this stage of the play’s existence.
Stella’s admission that she couldn’t believe Blanche’s “story” and continue to live with Stanley constitutes an epic betrayal. This self-serving denial, Frecknall’s revival suggests, doesn’t bode well for Stella’s own future. Those carnal delights hardly seem worth it given the violence and mendacity Stanley has shown himself capable of.
“Streetcar” is a domestic drama but also a national one. At BAM, Williams’ most famous play is once again diagnosing our spiritual rot.
