Theater review by Adam Feldman
“I don’t want realism,” says Blanche DuBois, the cracked libertine belle of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 masterwork, A Streetcar Named Desire. “I'll tell you what I want. Magic!” The Streetcar revival now playing at BAM, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, doesn’t have much truck with magic; it does not invite the audience, even momentarily, to share the nympho- and dipsomaniacal Blanche’s delusions of gentility. But neither does it go for realism: There is barely any set, and nearly all of the action is squeezed onto a central square platform on cinderblocks that suggests a boxing ring minus the ropes; an onstage drummer sometimes bangs loudly on his kit, like a migraine in Blanche’s head, and there are occasional shifts into dancey stylized movement.
What this Streetcar does have is the gifted Irish actor Paul Mescal, whose star has risen swiftly from his breakthrough role in the 2020 Hulu series Normal People to the leading fighter in last year’s Gladiator II. The Mescaline Conquest now finds him playing the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Blanche’s brother-in-law and nemesis Stanley Kowalski, the part that made Marlon Brando a star, and he takes off his shirt more than once. The rest of the principal cast from London’s Almeida Theatre—where Frecknall’s Streetcar premiered in 2022—has also made the trip: the birdlike Patsy Ferran as Blanche; Anjana Vasan as her protective younger sister, Stella; and Dwane Walcott as Stanley’s poker buddy Mitch. But the prospect of seeing Mescal as Stanley is why tickets to the show are so rare and so very expensive. (The few seats left through BAM ticketing start at $274, and there’s no use relying on the kindness of scalpers: Top seats in the secondary market would currently set you back as much as $984.)
A Streecar Named Desire | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
Yet it is Ferran’s unconventional Blanche, not Mescal’s straightforward Stanley, who dominates the production. This is somehow a Blanche without Southern charm. Au contraire, she’s annoying: utterly mad, and utterly maddening, from the moment she arrives to stay at her sister’s cramped New Orleans apartment. Effectively homeless after losing ownership of the family’s Mississippi plantation, Belle Reve (which is French for beautiful dream), she drinks unremittingly and without hiding it well. Despite soaking like a teabag in her sister’s bath, she’s a bundle of exposed nerves—she seems at risk of being startled at any given moment—and she talks up an unrelenting storm, nattering and rattling away without lingering on the poetry that Williams weaves through her lines like flowers on a trellis. The performance is almost businesslike in its display of hopeless neurosis; it has time for little else.
This is not a take on Blanche that I would like to see become standard, or indeed that I would like to see ever again, but Ferran pulls it off. It takes a while to adjust to her—and it is hard to compete with the memory of Cate Blanchett in the 2009 Liv Ullman production, the last time Streetcar was at BAM—but her choices are original and she commits to them completely. Ferran’s costars react to her extremity in interesting ways: Vasan brings out a knowing and maternal side of Stella, whereas Walcott hits Mitch’s mama’s-boy sweetness. The dynamics among these characters are a highlight of Frecknall’s staging, which is elsewhere sometimes burdened with the heavy hand she brought to Broadway’s Cabaret last year: The drums beat home points we already get, and the exaggerated movement can feel corny, as when Blanche’s tragic dead husband appears as a ghost and stretches backward as though buffeted by a very slow wave. I’m not sure what is gained by a framing device of the actors rehearsing, but I did enjoy the production’s impressively precise use of rain.
A Streecar Named Desire | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
What doesn’t come through very strongly, oddly enough, is the thing that many people associate most strongly with this Streetcar: the sexual heat between Blanche and Stanley that boils over into violence by the play’s end. Mescal is less imposing than Brando was; there’s a sensitive, even thoughtful quality to his Stanley. But he’s at his best when he’s at his most bestial: prowling the floor in his pajamas as he corners Blanche in the climactic scene, a jungle cat stalking his prey with the lust of the kill in his eyes. But prior to this moment, there’s no palpable sense of desire from either of them—just crowded, bumpy streetcar of mutual distaste and, on his part, increasing irritation. It’s not even a game of cat and mouse; it’s more like swatter and fly. Though his American accent is not always on point—the hard r is hard to get right—Mescal gives a fully creditable performance in what is here a secondary role. Mescaline addicts can get their fix at BAM, but for others the trip may not quite be worth the cost.
A Streetcar Named Desire. BAM Strong Harvey Theater (Off Broadway). By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall. With Patsy Ferran, Paul Mescal, Anjana Vasan, Dwane Walcott. Running time: 2hrs 45mins. One intermission.
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A Streecar Named Desire | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
