\n<\/p>\n
\u201cJohn Garfield should be doing this part, not me.\u201d<\/p>\n
This declaration of self-doubt was muttered by a scruffy, largely untried 23-year-old actor at the first table read for a new work by a fast-rising young American playwright. The year was 1947; the setting, a rooftop rehearsal space on West 42nd Street; and the play, after some vacillation on what the title should be, \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire.\u201d Its author: Tennessee Williams.<\/p>\n
As for that seemingly unsure young actor, who had heard that his role had already been refused by the go-to working-class film favorite John Garfield? His name was Marlon Brando. His raw, eloquently inarticulate subsequent portrayal of a sexually magnetic blue-collar lout named Stanley Kowalski \u2014 the role he was reading that day \u2014 would not only make him a star but also help to change the very nature of American acting.<\/p>\n
Brando may have once felt he was trapped in the brooding shadow of Garfield. But that was nothing compared to the shadow Brando\u2019s performance \u2014 captured for eternity in the 1951 film adaptation of \u201cStreetcar,\u201d which, like the play, was directed by Elia Kazan \u2014 would cast over every actor who dared to portray Stanley Kowalski in the years to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The latest of this courageous breed is Paul Mescal, who has donned Stanley\u2019s historic T-shirt for the director Rebecca Frecknall\u2019s London-born production of \u201cStreetcar,\u201d which runs through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Initially, some doubts were expressed among star watchers about the casting of Mescal, who had become an international heartthrob after he appeared in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney\u2019s \u201cNormal People.\u201d Wasn\u2019t he too sensitive, too slender, too young to play Stanley? (Never mind that he was in fact a bit older than Brando had been on Broadway.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But when this latest \u201cStreetcar\u201d opened in London, critics heaved a gratified sigh of relief. The interpretation by Frecknall, known for her high-concept approaches to classics (including the \u201cCabaret\u201d now on Broadway), was unorthodox but persuasive, they said. So was the casting of Patsy Ferran, a last-minute substitute for an injured actress, as the play\u2019s heroine, Blanche DuBois, whose fragile illusions are crushed by Stanley, her brutish brother-in-law. The general reaction to Mescal was summed up by Andrzej Lukowski\u2019s review<\/a> in London\u2019s Time Out: \u201cHe\u2019s good! Actually very good. (Also: stacked.)\u201d (While admiring the play\u2019s stars, Jesse Green in his New York Times review, was less enthused about the production in Brooklyn.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Surely, no American drama is as haunted by ghosts of actors past as \u201cStreetcar.\u201d By that I mean not only Brando, but also Vivien Leigh in the film as Blanche (a part originated onstage by Jessica Tandy). Leigh\u2019s interpretation was described by Pauline Kael as \u201cone of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke pity and terror.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the way, the image of Brando, in his torn T-shirt, caterwauling \u201cStellllla!\u201d (the name of Stanley\u2019s wife), may have become a meme before there were memes. But it\u2019s the Blanches who have generally received the bulk of praise and analysis from critics. In Brooks Atkinson\u2019s 1947 review<\/a> in The Times, it was Tandy to whom he devoted a long paragraph of lyric description. (Brando was cited as one of three cast members who \u201cact not only with color and style but with insight.\u201d)<\/p>\n It was Tandy who won a Tony Award the next year, while Brando wasn\u2019t even nominated. Leigh, but not Brando, won an Oscar for the movie.<\/p>\n Though \u201cStreetcar\u201d is regarded by many (including me) as the greatest of all American dramas, revivals of it were scant for several decades, perhaps because of the film\u2019s continuing hold on the public imagination. (There were two very brief engagements at New York City Center in the 1950s.) Then in 1973, \u201cStreetcar\u201d received a Broadway revival, starring Rosemary Harris and James Farentino, that reminded New York audiences of its uncommon craft and power. After that, new productions arrived quickly, with a shining assortment of stars enacting the war between Blanche, the fluttering fantasist, and Stanley, the harsh pragmatist, in a shabby New Orleans apartment with their ever-shifting balances of power, between both the characters and the performers.<\/p>\n What follows is an annotated list of some of the Blanches and Stanleys who gave life to what Williams, in a letter to his agent before the play opened, described as \u201ca tragedy of misunderstandings.\u201d<\/p>\n Los Angeles, 1973<\/p>\n Dunaway was said to be an unusually glamorous Blanche, but also \u201criveting, original\u201d and unexpectedly funny, Stephen Farber wrote in The Times<\/a>. Her co-star got off less easily: \u201cTo imitate Brando would be hopeless, but Voight\u2019s studious attempt to underplay the role is almost as disastrous.\u201d<\/p>\n Broadway, 1988<\/p>\n Though The Times\u2019s Frank Rich felt Danner should have been a natural for Blanche, he wrote<\/a> that she lapsed all too often into a \u201cfey eccentricity\u201d more appropriate to No\u00ebl Coward. He added that Danner and Quinn, \u201cboth erotic figures in other circumstances, shed no sparks here.\u201d<\/p>\n Broadway, 1992<\/p>\n In this case, it was Kowalski triumphant, according to Rich<\/a>, who wrote of Baldwin, \u201cHis Stanley is the first I\u2019ve seen that doesn\u2019t leave one longing for Mr. Brando,\u201d while filling the play with \u201cthe America of big-shouldered urban industrialism.\u201d Of Lange, Rich wrote, \u201cThe real problem with her Blanche is less a matter of deficient stage experience than emotional timidity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the first \u201cStreetcar\u201d I reviewed for The Times, the theatrical demolitionist Ivo van Hove set much of his experimental take on the play in a bathtub. Everyone got naked, everyone got drenched \u2014 presumably with the aim of stripping away poses and pretensions. McKenzie\u2019s \u201cscrawny, charisma-free\u201d Stanley didn\u2019t survive the immersion, I wrote<\/a>. (Though it was kind of a hoot to hear an immortal line delivered as \u201cStella! \u2026 glug, glug, glug \u2026 Stella!\u201d) But even sopping wet, Marvel delivered \u201ca performance of remarkable poise and stamina that also locates the tragic, self-defeating conflict in Blanche.\u201d<\/p>\n London, 2002<\/p>\n Close brought an \u201cuncommon vigor\u201d and \u201cgymnastic strength\u201d to Blanche, I wrote at the time<\/a>, while the lithe-bodied Glen appeared merely \u201cto be impersonating coarseness.\u201d When Stanley wrestled Blanche to the bed in the play\u2019s infamous rape scene, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to understand why she doesn\u2019t just deck him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Washington, D.C., 2004<\/p>\n The beguilingly sophisticated Clarkson brought her trademark wit and wryness to Blanche, who emerged here as a calculating strategist and put-down artist instead of a tragic heroine. Rothenberg was an unexpectedly juvenile Stanley. \u201cWhile you might think that a boyish Stanley would be the perfect match for Ms. Clarkson\u2019s chicken-hawkish Blanche,\u201d I observed<\/a>, \u201cthere is only a weak sexual current between them.\u201d<\/p>\n Broadway, 2005<\/p>\n A profound disappointment. After winning a Tony as the life-bruised, sexually voracious Sally Bowles in \u201cCabaret,\u201d Richardson felt like an exciting choice for Blanche. But for the most part, she seemed aglow with good health and confidence here, and rarely vulnerable. Of Reilly, my review noted<\/a>, \u201cYou sense a real mensch beneath the bluster. Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in \u2018The Honeymooners.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A pinnacle of my theatergoing life<\/a>. Liv Ullmann\u2019s production firmly restored Blanche to the center of \u201cStreetcar,\u201d and Blanchett \u2014 an actress who always seems to contain multitudes \u2014 found every conflicted element of her role\u2019s fractured self, as well as a burning vitality. \u201cWhat Ms. Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal instinct that keeps her on her feet long after she has been buffeted by blows that would level a heavyweight boxer.\u201d This turned her encounter with Edgerton\u2019s Stanley, a figure of fierce and youthful strength, into a mesmerizing prize fight.<\/p>\n London, 2009<\/p>\n I deeply regret having missed Weisz\u2019s Olivier Award-winning Blanche, who was agreed to be a figure of ravishing, melting contradictions. Writing in The Times, Matt Wolf said<\/a>, \u201cShe is unique among the Blanches I have encountered in communicating afresh the full weight of the delusional Mississippian\u2019s need to put on a performance.\u201d Cowan was evidently just fine as Stanley, barring some mush-mouthed difficulties with his Polish\/Southern accent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The first all-Black \u201cStreetcar\u201d to be staged on Broadway, Blanche emerged here for me<\/a> as \u201ca lively, self-assured gal, accustomed to manipulating others with her feminine wiles,\u201d while Underwood\u2019s Stanley \u201ccomes across as your average overworked husband, understandably testy with that sister-in-law of his always hogging the bathroom.\u201d They exuded<\/a> \u201cthe ease you associate with actors in long-running television series, for whom banter has become second nature.\u201d<\/p>\n Brooklyn, 2016<\/p>\n Benedict Andrews\u2019s stark, cold-eyed, modernized production presented the war between the in-laws as a brutal Darwinian struggle, which brought out the proto-feminist elements in Williams\u2019s play. Though the approach largely stripped the play of its poetry, for me, it was highly effective. \u201cMs. Anderson endows Blanche with a self-preserving skepticism that is starting to lose its edge,\u201d I wrote<\/a>, \u201cand a calculatedly feminine, shrilly Southern persona that feels thoroughly of the moment.\u201d As for Foster\u2019s \u201ceffortlessly natural Stanley,\u201d he summoned \u201cthe working-class guy who says he\u2019s voting for Donald Trump because he wants America to be strong and virile again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As I compiled this list, I became newly aware of how carefully weighted the balance between Blanche and Stanley must be if the play is to engage us fully. For a \u201cStreetcar\u201d to have any dramatic suspense, it requires both erotic chemistry between its leads and a feeling that, until the end, its outcome isn\u2019t predetermined \u2014 that its combatants are, for a while at least, evenly matched.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a testament to the mysteries of casting that so many of the stars featured here who didn\u2019t make the grade looked so good on paper. As for Brando himself, in his autobiography he writes that in the Broadway production of \u201cStreetcar,\u201d he felt \u201cJessica and I were miscast, and between us we threw the play out of balance.\u201d And as for the role with which he will forever be identified, he said, \u201cI was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski. I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\nFaye Dunaway and Jon Voight<\/h2>\n
\nBlythe Danner and Aidan Quinn<\/h2>\n
\nJessica Lange and Alec Baldwin<\/h2>\n
\nGlenn Close and Iain Glen<\/h2>\n
\nPatricia Clarkson and Adam Rothenberg<\/h2>\n
\nNatasha Richardson and John C. Reilly<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nRachel Weisz and Elliot Cowan<\/h2>\n
\nGillian Anderson and Ben Foster<\/h2>\n
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