The British director Rebecca Frecknall has unearthed new depths in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, turning a classic that can be played as maudlin melodrama into a kinetic prize fight between two mismatched sparring partners. Frecknall leans into that idea with her stripped-down staging, which places the actors on a raised square platform like a boxing ring (designed by Madeleine Girling and strikingly lit by Lee Curran). When they’re not in the arena, the cast circle the action and insert the occasional props onto the edge, like sidemen offering a towel or refreshment between rounds. A drummer (Tom Penn, who doubles as the doctor in the final scene) is perched just above and behind the stage, offering propulsive color commentary in the form of jazz-inflected beats that accentuate the offbeat rhythms of the conflict below.
The tension between the brutish, working-class everyman Stanley Kowalski (Paul Mescal) and his hoity-toity, Southern belle sister-in-law., Blanche DuBois (Patsy Ferran), surfaces right away in this production, which plays at BAM’s Harvey Theater after an acclaimed London run last year. (Fair warning: The remaining performances appear to be sold out, though BAM’s website teases that a limited number of seats for sold-out shows are available to BAM Patrons who donate at least $2,000 to the nonprofit.)
Mescal, a rising Hollywood star whose onscreen work in Normal People and Gladiator II has marked him as sex symbol in the sensitive jock mold, expands his range with some muscular menace as Stanley. He’s a feral man-child, undisturbed by the social niceties and pretensions that Blanche represents and eager to bring her and anyone who challenges him down to his level.
But the real revelation here is Ferran, who strays from the traditional Blanche in a multitude of ways that allow us to see the character in a fresh light. She’s younger than most Blanches, closer to the 30ish woman of the text, and less of a sultry looker with her messy brunette mop of hair and frail, waifish frame. She’s more desperate spinster than past-her-prime seductress, which makes her furtive attempts at flirtation — with Stanley’s buddy Mitch (an excellently understated Dwane Walcott) or a teenage newspaper boy (Jabez Sykes) or Stanley himself — all the more affecting. She’s also a bundle of raw nerves, with a tremulous energy borne of running through familiar routines out of habit rather than genuine emotion, and sustained only by surreptitious slugs of the booze that she dare not admit she requires to achieve equilibrium.
Ferran brings a kind of radical empathy to a role that is so often played in very broad strokes. We can see how this woman, raised to be a society lady on a plantation and now on the edge of destitution, clings to any opportunity to exert some control over her life — she nitpicks about the humble state of Stella’s home, gulps down alcohol on the sly, spins fantastical stories to cast herself in a better light, and uses her sexual charms to gain any advantage she can. But there’s nothing lusty about her overtures toward Mitch or the teenage boy; these are less advances than retreats, seductions performed almost entirely through muscle memory.
The rest of the cast is equally strong, especially Anjana Vasan as Blanche’s hardier and more pragmatic sister, Stella. You can see why she’s drawn to the raw, sensual masculinity of Mescal’s Stanley despite the physical blows he occasionally delivers to her; you can also see the maternal instincts that drive her to want to protect her more fragile sister as well as the unborn child she will soon bring into the cramped studio apartment in a dingy alley of New Orleans.
Not all of Frecknall’s directorial flourishes work; there’s sometimes an obvious disconnect between the stage images she conjures and the text that the actors are reciting. And yet there are moments of visual poetry here, as in the climactic face-off between Stanley and Blanche at the end. For me, though, the more powerful moment comes earlier as Blanche wistfully reprises the Depression-era tune “Paper Moon.” She’s circling the periphery of the main stage, singing to herself, while Stanley triumphantly exposes his sister-in-law’s many lies and misrepresentations to Stella in their home. We can see how and why Blanche clings to the fantastical hope for a better life, whether in a red paper lantern to ornament a naked light bulb or a paper moon to comfort her in the looming darkness. She’s clinging to the idea of the life she used to have and that now seems increasingly out of reach. Yes, as the song goes, she’s as phony as she can be. But it wouldn’t be make-believe if we actually believed in her anyway. If we set aside the realism that this play so brutally exposes, and embraced the magic. ★★★★★
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn
Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 6 (tickets: $234-$435)
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