\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not bloody likely.<\/p>\n
Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams\u2019s published script for \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire\u201d may amount to a mission statement and an artist\u2019s credo but, 78 years after the play\u2019s debut, they are no longer marching orders.<\/p>\n
At any rate, no one follows them. The New Orleans neighborhood in which Williams set the action \u2014 called Elysian Fields, no less \u2014 has for decades been radically reimagined: as a shoe box<\/a>, a hangar<\/a>, a manga<\/a>, a loo. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called that last one<\/a>, directed by Ivo van Hove, \u201cA Bathtub Named Desire.\u201d<\/p>\n Now Rebecca Frecknall, whose Broadway production of \u201cCabaret\u201d is no one\u2019s idea of subtle<\/a>, takes up the cudgel. In the revival of \u201cStreetcar\u201d that opened Tuesday<\/a> 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 and of their frail interloper, Blanche DuBois \u2014 look like a boxing ring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is some justice in that: Stanley is, after all, Williams\u2019s 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 \u2014 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 \u201cnoise in the night\u201d and getting \u201cthe colored lights going.\u201d That\u2019s his kind of lyricism. And when Blanche, Stella\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can\u2019t speak for \u201cGladiator II,\u201d but he is superb in \u201cNormal People<\/a>,\u201d \u201cAftersun<\/a>\u201d and \u201cAll of Us Strangers<\/a>.\u201d) 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 \u201csexual terrorist.\u201d I am sorry to report that he can. Conceived in violence, his Stanley has but one decent emotion: fear of abandonment. (\u201cStell-lahhhhh!\u201d) <\/em>Everything else is conquest.<\/p>\n In Blanche he meets his opposite number and ideal victim. His famous line, \u201cWe\u2019ve had this date with each other from the beginning,\u201d is not, in Mescal\u2019s 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 \u201cmoth\u201d (as Williams describes her) but clearly certifiable; sweaty and picky and unable to stop her tongue, she\u2019s as voluble as Stanley. If you think there\u2019s nowhere such a character can go from such a start, you\u2019re wrong. Downhill with no brakes is a very scary ride.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s excellent performance, we sense that love, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.) But as Blanche\u2019s options foreclose on her \u2014 Stanley foils her chance to snag his one halfway-decent poker buddy as a husband \u2014 even Stella grows fearful, and the balance tips disastrously.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The director obviously deserves credit for shaping and supporting the actors\u2019 fine work, including Dwane Walcott\u2019s as the poker buddy. (The ensemble, too, is rich and detailed.) And though I\u2019m no fan of Frecknall\u2019s overblown \u201cCabaret,\u201d I very much admire her small-scale work. As in her minimal, breakneck staging of Martyna Majok\u2019s \u201cSanctuary City\u201d<\/a> in 2021, she gets Blanche\u2019s more intimate scenes just right, especially the classic one in which she tries to seduce a baffled newspaper boy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet the directorial interventions everywhere else overwhelm that delicacy; this is a \u201cStreetcar\u201d as if staged by Stanley. I don\u2019t just mean that they are violent, but that they are glaring and obvious. Too many of Frecknall\u2019s ideas seem to come from random spins of a Rolodex of contemporary staging clich\u00e9s: the cast arriving as if for rehearsal, the soaking rainstorm, the dancer miming the ghost of dead love, the onstage drummer underlining what doesn\u2019t need underlining.<\/p>\n And even if you can write them off as maker\u2019s marks, the characteristic indications of an artist\u2019s work, what of the marks of the original maker? Miller, no softy, wrote that the impression left by \u201cStreetcar\u201d was \u201cof language flowing from the soul\u201d \u2014 Williams\u2019s soul. And so it was: Blanche is yet another translation, like Laura Wingfield in \u201cThe Glass Menagerie,\u201d of Williams\u2019s beloved but emotionally troubled sister, Rose,<\/a> who eventually, like Blanche, was sent to a mental hospital. The play, Miller wrote, \u201cmade it seem possible for the stage to express any and all things and to do so beautifully.\u201d<\/p>\n Beauty, in Miller\u2019s sense, is not on Frecknall\u2019s menu. Blanche\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Indeed, it\u2019s hard to hear Williams\u2019s voice at all. The famous lines are often thrown away as if they were grandma\u2019s embarrassing tchotchkes. The playwright\u2019s 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\u2019s animal glee.<\/p>\n This is certainly a way to see \u201cStreetcar\u201d; the world is, if possible, even meaner than Williams imagined. Decay has swallowed lyricism. And Stanley, we now know, has won.<\/p>\n A Streetcar Named Desire<\/strong>
Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org<\/a>. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n