At his Provincetown retreat, Tennessee Williams (Robin Lord Taylor) offers a script of A Streetcar Named Desire to Marlon Brando (Brandon Flynn) to read, as Jo (Ellie Ricker), a hitchhiker Brando has traveled with from New York, looks on, in Gregg Ostrin’s Kowalski.
It was the summer of 1947, and Tennessee Williams needed a man—a leading man, that is, for his newest work, a feral little melodrama called A Streetcar Named Desire. Veteran film star John Garfield was the top contender for the part, but as posited in Kowalski, Gregg Ostrin’s seductive, and occasionally true new play, a 23-year-old Marlon Brando won the role of Stanley over the course of a single, drink-filled evening at Williams’s bungalow in Provincetown, Mass.
Williams dedicated all of two pages to this encounter in his 1975 autobiography, Memoirs, fodder enough for Ostrin to cook up an entertaining tale, a roux consisting of the specifics as Williams remembered them, along with purely imagined dialogue and heated physicality. The meeting of these two men, and their very different sensibilities, pairs an intellectual, effeminate writing savant with a sensitive ruffian of few words and ample machismo.
Jo (Ricker), a fellow hitchhiker, falls into the arms of Marlon Brando (Flynn).
The opening scene of Kowalski takes place in 1977, with a 66-year-old Williams (Robin Lord Taylor) being interviewed about meeting Brando for the first time. Thus the work fittingly becomes a memory play, a genre that Williams adored. But the action quickly transitions to 1947 to find Williams quizzing his houseguest, the director Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet), over how she likes the script for Streetcar. “Blanche is astonishing,” she observes, “so frail. So melodramatic. So ... well, so you, my darling boy.” Indeed, Williams’s attraction to brutish men is driven home in several scenes, beginning with the entrance of his lover at that time, Pancho Rodriguez (a threatening Sebastian Treviño). Violent, drunk, and the apparent inspiration for the character of Stanley, he rages at Williams before beating it to a nearby bar. Margo, perhaps too conveniently, also decides to go out for a drink, leaving Williams alone for the moment.
When Brando (Brandon Flynn) arrives, he is not so gentlemanly a caller, letting himself in and helping himself to snacks from the kitchen. He is also three days late. Having had an audition appointment arranged for him by Elia Kazan, he pocketed the money Kazan had given him for bus fare from New York, and slowly hitchhiked his way up instead. Williams, upon laying eyes on him, assumes he is a piece of “rough trade” looking for Pancho, then pivots to believe he is there as a Williams super-fan. After Brando playfully kisses his hand, Williams sighs, “I have never had such a handsome young man travel so far to gain an audience with me.”
Williams (Taylor) seeks reassurance about his new script from his friend, the director Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet).
Once Williams realizes Brando is his tardy auditioner, their dynamic again changes and the drinks begin to flow. Brando endears himself by fixing a faulty fuse box then unclogging a bothersome toilet. In these kindnesses to a stranger he is clearly a man of spontaneous action and, less clearly, a man playing the long con on his host, one moment feigning ignorance when discussing Streetcar, then quite knowledgeable the next. Verbal sparring leads to a tentative bonding amid some wicked mind games, all of which are interrupted by the arrival of Jo (Ellie Ricker), a girlfriend Brando has brought along with him, confusingly having left her behind at the bus station even though they had hitchhiked together.
Just as Williams drew from his own life for many of his plays, it follows that his plays might pop up in a work about his life. Jo gives off strong Cat on a Hot Tin Roof vibes, prancing like Maggie, turning Brando into a cold Brick, and kissing up to Williams like he was Big Daddy. The Glass Menagerie echoes throughout as well, including a scene where Williams explains how his sister was the inspiration for that play’s Laura. Even David Gallo’s set design seems to reflect Menagerie with its frumpy center stage sofa.
Brando (Flynn, left) and Williams (Taylor) match wits. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
Under the direction of Colin Hanlon, Flynn turns in an excellent performance as Brando. Devoid of camp, full of vigor, he is as menacing as he is an object of desire. Taylor, who was mesmerizing in his five-year stint playing The Penguin on the Fox hit, Gotham, embraces the coy and feminine aspects of Williams, though his accent and demeanor lack the playwright’s truly Southern gentility.
It would have been a shame if Brando’s most famous moment in Streetcar, Stanley’s desperate screaming of “Stella!” as his wife escapes his clutches, went unheralded here, even if it meant bending the timeline. Ostrin finds a surprising and hilarious solution to the problem, featuring a dead-on delivery by Flynn and a silent reaction by Taylor that speaks volumes.
Kowalski plays through Feb. 23 at The Duke on 42nd Street (229 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit kowalskionstage.com.
Playwright: Gregg Ostrin
Direction: Colin Hanlon
Sets: David Gallo
Costumes: Lisa Zinni
Lighting: Jeff Croiter
Sound: Bill Toles
