Streetcar, on the Rocks
Even though it just closed, I had some thoughts about the recent production of Streetcar at BAM.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of A Streetcar Named Desire is not Vivien Leigh or Marlon Brando, but The Simpsons. To be more accurate, Marge Simpson.
Long before I ever picked up a copy of the Tennessee Williams’ celebrated 1948 play, I was already overly familiar with the equally iconic 1992 episode “A Streetcar Named Marge.” I say it again: equally iconic. In it, Marge auditions for a community theater production of Streetcar. It goes without saying that it’s a musical. After stumbling in her initial audition, Marge eventually wins the lead role of Blanche DuBois, the southern belle on the way down— who always keeps her guard up— seeking reprieve for the summer in the New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella and her husband, Stanley Kowalski. Like many performers, Marge struggles to find her way into her character. It is only after tapping into her own cache of sense memory that she can find her way into Blanche. Surrogating the laundry list of grievances she has with her husband, Marge fits Homer’s deficits onto the chiseled frame of Ned Flanders’ Stanley. She relishes running again and again “the bottle scene,” much to the regret of her scene partner’s bandaged pap.
Perhaps in her own way, Marge is trying to out-Brando Brando, and in doing so, restore Blanche to the heart of the narrative. No matter how many times Stanley’s famous refrain rings in the ears of the audience, it is Blanche’s world that the audience finds itself living in. Right down to the last line of parodically bouncy finale: “a stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met.”
In a horseshoe-shaped sort of way, Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of Streetcar at the Brooklyn Academy of Music seeks to do the same. Re-centering this archly wilting heroine in her own story actively invites the production to follow Blanche’s own dictum. “I don't want realism,” she proclaims at one point to her suitor, Mitch, “I want magic!” No matter how tightly Williams’ play might be knit in the popular imagination to the rise of Stanislavsky-derived realism in America, his work is charged with a languid, lilting magic that seems to laugh at the material economy of the method.
Yet, for a play whose heated dramaturgy is scaffolded by the very politics of perspiration— of who is sweating how, when, and for what— something about this production runs rather cold. For all the blazing intensity of a tight cast, including the box office-bolstering Paul Mescal, the rhythm of the show never falls into step with Williams’ text. Instead of the warm and wallowing tempo of the blues, Mescal and company strike up a brisk bebop beat that, while yielding solid moments of brilliance, does not call for an encore.
Some of this brilliance rests with Patsy Ferran. Her Blanche is one that feels right at home in the unfurling post-post-truth of our current moment. When lies are gilded into facts as fast as they fly off the lips of people proffering them, speed and immediacy are paramount. Quantity gleams next to the dull durability of quality. And as things slip and slide into precarity, wouldn’t we all like to sparkle one last time? Ferran certainly seems to think so. Arriving on the empty stage standing in for the Kowalskis’ supposedly cluttered apartment, the land lady claims the place is “sort of messed up right now but when it's clean it's real sweet,” to which Blanche retorts, “is it?” In an instant, Blanche makes it a mess. Simply by declaring it so. But all that glitters is not gold. As both Stella and Blanche know full well, it’s often costume jewelry.
Ferran masterfully captures the fatalistic, debutante-kissed marathon dance that drives Blanche throughout the play, powered by a ceaseless succession of cold cokes and hot baths— perhaps with a few slugs of bourbon for good measure. The audience sees Blanche as she spits out great gusts of hot air, rapidly inflating the bouncy-castle fantasy of a faded Belle Reve reality. Eventually, it becomes so over-stuffed that it cannot help but betray its own fragility. It can’t help but pop.
Even with such a strong presence at its core, Frecknall’s production frequently feels out of step with the play itself. She presents her Streetcar with the kind of “can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?” economy that in smaller spaces, with tighter resources, could work wonderfully. When not on stage, the ensemble stands at a relaxed ready that threatens to dissolve in an instant. They swoop in with props right when they are called for and add to the production’s pugilistic mentality. They are watching round after round as the fight between Stanley and Blanche unfurls and escalates. Their faces do not betray which side they are secretly rooting for until the decision comes into cruel clarity.
This structural sportiness, though, ultimately works against the play itself. Streetcar is not built on the crisp flow of a basketball game. Neither is it the boxing match Frecknall sets it up to be. No, this is a play with the dramatic structure of a bowling match. It is built on frame after frame of bench-warming bloviating and interspersed ever-so-often by the explosive crack of furious objects toppling over their targets. And the moment or two of it takes in its wake to pick up and reset the pins. It toes the line between game and sport, as many activities that pair nicely with beer do. Yet somehow, as Stanley reminds us, this dramaturgy still manages to work up a true perspiring passion. At least, it’s supposed to.
Madeline Garing’s wood-paneled platform pointedly supports the comparison with combat sports. But unlike an actual boxing ring, there is no neutral corner for the fighters to retreat to between rounds. It ultimately feels ill-fitted for the cluttered quality at the heart of the piece. The actual and metaphoric mess churned up in the wake of the residents of 632 Elysian Fields provides them— with varying degrees of comfort— the places where they can retreat into their respective reveries. On a bare stage, there is nowhere to hide. Compounding these issues are the costumes. Merle Hensel’s designs radiate a casual contemporary vibe that further strands the production. While there is an interesting academic connection to be made between contemporary style trends and those of the post-war period, Hensel’s garments fail to fully articulate this argument. Instead of mid-century New Orleans, the effect is a lot closer to a demographic sampling of the patrons of Fort Greene Park on the first warm day of spring.
Perhaps these sentiments are best summed by the rain. In a decision that feels more driven by a desire to check a box than fueled by artistic choice, there are multiple moments where it rains on stage. After all, can it be a British transfer if it doesn’t rain on stage? In a production that grounds most other moments in persistent abstraction, the material investment of the effect leans into the worst impulses of these technologies. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake has its place and time. It can, paradoxically, both elevate and deepen a moment on stage. And while Frecknall seems to be exploring the ways these interventions of blunt reality inform the fiction that Blanche is conjuring, the concept struggles to find its intended impact. The force of the idea, rather than a roar, winds up as more of a trickle.
And then there’s Paul.
The strength of Mescal’s performance is literal. In an early moment, Mescal gives Blanche’s trunk a brutal, balletic kick that succeeds in both closing the case and sucking the air out of the scene. It is in these moments of sharp inhalation that the allure of this particular Stanley emerges. It is an appeal couched in a question: “If he could do this to a piece of luggage, what might he do to me?”
This rough, raw attraction reaches an understandable zenith during the most famous moment of Streetcar. After assaulting Stella and flying into an ape-like frenzy, Stanley staggers out and begins to bellow for his wife like the wounded animal he is. And it is through this animal magnetism that Stella (played resolutely by Anjana Vasan) finally comes back to him, trance-like. After falling to his knees, searching for reprieve in the belly of his recently pregnant wife, Mescal climbs off the ground and embraces Stella. Then, in an instant, he thrusts her in the air with the kind of fuck-me efficiency that, if it were captured on film, would create an endlessly memeable moment. For those wondering, his biceps popped with professional clarity all the way up in the balcony.
However, there is a hollowness to Mescal’s Stanley that ultimately works against the play. To crib the comments of the critic Isaac Butler in a recent post on Bluesky, this capacity creates “ample room” for the performances of his fellow actors but lacks something of the swagger that his progenitors have carved into the character. Mescal has built the bulk of his career so far on a sensitive succession of sporty soft boys that seem equally at home in the seminar room as they are on the sports field. Rather than Mammalian gusto, his iteration highlights a disembodying sort of pain. For Paul, it seems to be a pain born out of an understanding of crushing kinds of keeping up endemic to traditional masculinity. Perhaps, save for a few selective bursts, this Stanley directs most of his pummeling inward. In this way, it’s a bit more James Dean than his swaggering contemporary. But while this interiority has served him well in other corners of his career so far, it fails to resonate on stage. In Stanley, we need to sense the same cruel charisma that keeps Stella coming back time and time again. And while spurts of this spirit do come, they do achieve the activation energy to catalyze the shift from realism to magic.
In his production notes for The Glass Menagerie, Williams insists that his plays should not be understood in the context of kitchen-sink realism. He writes that rather than hinging on “genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes,” his plays can be understood as a new kind of “plastic theatre.” This plastic theatre seeks to unseat realism, supplanting it “through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” It is a style constantly shifting to fit its container rather than one defined by it. While the term plastic might conjure up images of lifeless rigidity, Williams alludes to the word’s more malleable definition. Sadly, on the stage at BAM, it feels more of the former than the latter.