A Streetcar Named Desire
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...
