Paul Mescal as Stanley Kowalski and Patsy Ferran as Blanche DuBois face off in their simmering feud in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM.
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has one of drama’s greatest female roles—Blanche DuBois, perhaps only rivaled by Shaw’s St. Joan and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s a theatrical mountain that any serious actress would like to scale, and Patsy Ferran deserves credit for doing so, even if the Almeida Theatre production visiting BAM from London comes up short. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar also features the better-known Paul Mescal (of Gladiator II renown) as Stanley Kowalski.
Frecknall is presenting a highly stylized production that places demands on one’s imagination. The playing area is a square platform surrounded by a trough (which later catches rain in two storms); it’s devoid of furniture or props; those are supplied as needed by the other actors lingering around the perimeter. Early on a dancer moves onto the platform and performs moves that look like a blend of tai chi and yoga.
Blanche (left) comforts her pregnant sister Stella (Anjana Vasan). Photographs by Julieta Cervantes.
Angus MacRae’s score dispenses with the sounds of a piano, a “low-tone clarinet,” and the polka and blues that Williams specifies. Instead, a percussionist plays the drums and cymbals, sometimes banging loudly. The result unbalances the tension between Blanche’s romanticism and Stanley’s realism, weighting the sound design toward Stanley.
There’s a disconcerting age problem. Williams’s Blanche is 30, but Ferran at 35 registers as in her late 20s, which makes Stanley’s scoffing at her claim to be 27 fall flat. (The age element has dated particularly badly in the era of “Sixty is the new thirty.”)
Describing Blanche, Williams wrote: “There is something about her uncertain manner … that suggests a moth.” But after Blanche, arriving at sister Stella’s, is let in by the talkative, lingering landlady Eunice, the fed-up visitor bellows, “I’d like to be left alone!” If this Blanche is a moth, she’s one from the depths of the Amazon, with a huge wingspan. Shortly after, explaining the loss of Belle Rêve, Ferran delivers the speech virtually in combat mode, breathless and hysterical. Overall, the actress’s Blanche feels too robust for the fragile Southern belle.
Mescal’s presence as Blanche’s working-class, sometimes brutish brother-in-law Stanley, a star-making role for the young Marlon Brando, has made the production the hot ticket it is. The Irish actor makes a solid impression, equipped with a shark’s smile and an often affable nature, but a short fuse. When Stella says, “It’s always a powder keg,” she’s not wrong, and Stanley himself, in a throwaway line, describes a dust-up that he probably instigated: “No, I don’t wanta bowl at Riley’s. I had a little trouble with Riley last week.” Whether he’s hammering on about the Napoleonic code or snarling at Blanche in their big confrontation, Mescal hits the important notes.
Stella’s husband Stanley restrains her in a tense moment in Rebecca Frecknall’s production.
The male hormones among the extras are underlined by Frecknall with some unusual stylized movement that seems variously drawn from tai chi and yoga. Early on, a dancer repeats several subtly erotic moves at different points. He returns as the paperboy whom Blanche almost seduces, but he’s incongruously tall to be playing an impressionable high school student. The more rugged cast members at times crawl menacingly from the outer perimeter toward the stage, crouching low, as if they were Orcs sneaking up on Isengard. Still, the vibe of toxic masculinity is on target.
There’s a fine, tough, sexually liberated Stella from Anjana Vasan, who conveys the awkwardness of loving two diametrically opposed people and trying to be the peacemaker. She can be hard with Blanche—“Talk sense! How did you happen to get so low on funds?”—but also with Stanley:
Lately you been doing all you can think of to rub her the wrong way, Stanley, and Blanche is sensitive and you’ve got to realize that Blanche and I grew up under very different circumstances than you did.
Janet Etuk is a warm Eunice, but Frecknall has made a misstep in casting a black actor (Dwane Walcott), as Mitch. Although Williams writes, “New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively easy intermingling of races,” and although blacks might easily be among Stanley’s poker buddies, it’s inconceivable that Stanley would allow the white woman under his roof to consider a black man as a viable husband, or that Mitch would dare to look at her as a partner. It’s 1947, and the virulence of racism in the South persisted through the 1960s (see In the Heat of the Night, To Kill a Mockingbird). Unfortunately, this imposition of modern-day racial attitudes—or perhaps just wishful thinking—on the piece, is only one of the things that makes this production a disappointment.
The Almeida Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire runs through April 6 at the BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton St., Brooklyn). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit bam.org.
Playwright: Tennessee Williams
Director: Rebecca Frecknall
Scenic design: Madeleine Girling
Costume design: Merle Hensel
Lighting design: Lee Curran
Sound design: Peter Rice
Composition: Angus MacRae
