“The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.”
Not bloody likely.
Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for “A Streetcar Named Desire” may amount to a mission statement and an artist’s credo but, 78 years after the play’s debut, they are no longer marching orders.
At any rate, no one follows them. The New Orleans neighborhood in which Williams set the action — called Elysian Fields, no less — has for decades been radically reimagined: as a shoe box, a hangar, a manga, a loo. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called that last one, directed by Ivo van Hove, “A Bathtub Named Desire.”
Now Rebecca Frecknall, whose Broadway production of “Cabaret” is no one’s idea of subtle, takes up the cudgel. In the revival of “Streetcar” that opened Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a transfer from London starring the ferocious Paul Mescal, she literalizes the idea of brutal relocation. You will not find a tender blue sky or even a white building, let alone any lyricism, on Madeleine Girling’s square, wood-plank set. Elevated on concrete blocks, in the gritty dark of the Harvey Theater, she makes the world of Stanley and Stella Kowalski — and of their frail interloper, Blanche DuBois — look like a boxing ring.
There is some justice in that: Stanley is, after all, Williams’s half-despised, half-beloved icon of a brute. He enters the first scene bearing a package of bloody meat, which he throws at Stella to cook — a gesture she finds briefly annoying but that also turns her on. No less than her husband, she looks forward to making what he calls “noise in the night” and getting “the colored lights going.” That’s his kind of lyricism. And when Blanche, Stella’s impoverished older sister, arrives in desperation for an indefinite stay, we see its flip side as he sets out to destroy her because he can.
Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can. Conceived in violence, his Stanley has but one decent emotion: fear of abandonment. (“Stell-lahhhhh!”) Everything else is conquest.
In Blanche he meets his opposite number and ideal victim. His famous line, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning,” is not, in Mescal’s reading, just about sex. And as played by Patsy Ferran, the faded belle is a more inviting target than usual. She arrives in Elysian Fields not merely a nervous “moth” (as Williams describes her) but clearly certifiable; sweaty and picky and unable to stop her tongue, she’s as voluble as Stanley. If you think there’s nowhere such a character can go from such a start, you’re wrong. Downhill with no brakes is a very scary ride.
This is all compelling; the play is so brilliantly conceived and plotted it can hardly be anything else. While Blanche, with her airs and long baths, works Stanley’s last nerve, he mercilessly needles her and debunks her claims. (She is no virgin, even aside from her early marriage to a doomed gay man.) Trying to keep the peace is Stella, who despite everything still loves her sister. (In Anjana Vasan’s excellent performance, we sense that love, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.) But as Blanche’s options foreclose on her — Stanley foils her chance to snag his one halfway-decent poker buddy as a husband — even Stella grows fearful, and the balance tips disastrously.
The director obviously deserves credit for shaping and supporting the actors’ fine work, including Dwane Walcott’s as the poker buddy. (The ensemble, too, is rich and detailed.) And though I’m no fan of Frecknall’s overblown “Cabaret,” I very much admire her small-scale work. As in her minimal, breakneck staging of Martyna Majok’s “Sanctuary City” in 2021, she gets Blanche’s more intimate scenes just right, especially the classic one in which she tries to seduce a baffled newspaper boy.
Yet the directorial interventions everywhere else overwhelm that delicacy; this is a “Streetcar” as if staged by Stanley. I don’t just mean that they are violent, but that they are glaring and obvious. Too many of Frecknall’s ideas seem to come from random spins of a Rolodex of contemporary staging clichés: the cast arriving as if for rehearsal, the soaking rainstorm, the dancer miming the ghost of dead love, the onstage drummer underlining what doesn’t need underlining.
And even if you can write them off as maker’s marks, the characteristic indications of an artist’s work, what of the marks of the original maker? Miller, no softy, wrote that the impression left by “Streetcar” was “of language flowing from the soul” — Williams’s soul. And so it was: Blanche is yet another translation, like Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” of Williams’s beloved but emotionally troubled sister, Rose, who eventually, like Blanche, was sent to a mental hospital. The play, Miller wrote, “made it seem possible for the stage to express any and all things and to do so beautifully.”
Beauty, in Miller’s sense, is not on Frecknall’s menu. Blanche’s costumes (by Merle Hensel) make no pretense of prettiness, just as the staging leaves her no dignity. The lighting (by Lee Curran) is harsh and the sound (by Peter Rice) harsher. The drums obscure some of the dialogue.
Indeed, it’s hard to hear Williams’s voice at all. The famous lines are often thrown away as if they were grandma’s embarrassing tchotchkes. The playwright’s identification with Blanche, reflected in her care with words, is all but drowned out. We are not invited to inhabit her hopes and fears but rather her brother-in-law’s animal glee.
This is certainly a way to see “Streetcar”; the world is, if possible, even meaner than Williams imagined. Decay has swallowed lyricism. And Stanley, we now know, has won.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.