Scott Klavan: A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire

By Tennessee Williams

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Reviewed by Scott Klavan, March 25, 2025

By now, it’s well-known theater history that after Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire premiered on Broadway in late 1947, the supporting role of Stanley Kowalski, the brutish husband of Stella, gradually overshadowed both the play and the leading part of Blanche DuBois, Stanley’s damaged sister-in-law, whose visit to the Kowalski New Orleans home is a catalyst to tragedy. This was due, of course, to the performance of a young Marlon Brando as Stanley, whose mix of sexuality and sensitivity expressed a new form of cultural masculinity. The 1951 film, one of the best ever made in Hollywood—both play and movie directed by Elia Kazan—corrected this imbalance somewhat, with Brando matched with Vivien Leigh as Blanche rather than the stage’s Jessica Tandy. But still, it’s Stanley/Brando who emerged over time as the main symbol of the work. The current British revival of Streetcar, playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), after a popular run in London, puts Blanche back as the central focus. But given the new interpretation of the role, this seems unfortunate.  

The production originated in 2022 at London’s influential Almeida Theatre, which has transferred several recent productions to Broadway, including Ink and Patriots, and the ill-fated musical Tammy Faye, which won awards in England, but quickly folded in NYC. Directed by Almeida’s Associate Director Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar won Olivier Awards for Best Revival and Director, and received publicity for the casting of Irish actor Paul Mescal as Stanley, following his starring in high-profile movies including AfterSun and Gladiator II. The five week limited run at BAM’s Harvey Theatre ends April 6.      

Patsy Ferran plays Blanche here. A veteran of Almeida shows Three Sisters and Williams’ Summer & Smoke, Ferran also did Eliza in a 2023 Old Vic production of Pygmalion. The actress has a terrific spontaneity, moment-to-moment playing that is lively and surprising. But her affect and character choices as Blanche work against the text, and while that’s not a crime, and could possibly have been used to innovative advantage, they leave an unsatisfying and repetitive question mark at the heart of the piece.

It’s really the heartbreak that is missing. Ferran’s Blanche is a jittery but spunky and down-to-earth dynamo, perturbed by her romantic misfortunes, but basically resilient and unbowed; Ado Annie come to New Orleans. The burning need and crippling fragility of the written character—described often in the play by her sister Stella and Blanche herself—are skipped over. Ferran only goes one way, straightforward, and it’s the actor, not the character, who runs out of options. While modern theater flees from portraying characters, particularly female ones, as victims, fearing alienating an audience continually seeking “empowerment,” Blanche really is a traumatized victim and, without that element, the play’s interaction makes no sense. We are all victimized, after all, many of us by our difficulties in Life, and all of us finally by Life; Reality Bites everybody in the end. If Blanche can deal, as it were, then life’s cruelties as represented by Stanley’s corruption and aggression, have no teeth, no reason for being. If Blanche’s heart can’t be broken, if she has no innocence for Stanley to destroy, where’s the conflict/drama, and what’s the play about? 

In more specific acting terms, Ferran rejects the traditional female mannerisms that Blanche uses throughout her life for both her benefit and disaster. The soft southern flirtations, protestations of modesty, and whispery vulnerabilities that Blanche employs to charm suitors, reputable and disreputable, lift her up but eventually accompany her fall down to degradation and final madness. This behavior is a remnant of another time—in Blanche’s fantasizing mind, a better time, really a myth at any time and place. It is an anachronism even in the world of 1940s America, particularly then, as genteel 19^th-century mores clash with the aftermath of a grossly animalistic worldwide war. If Blanche remains “one of the guys,” as she does here, then there’s no real contrast with Stanley and his vulgar poker buddies, no tantalizing female “magic” to extinguish. The greatness of Williams’s creation of Blanche, one of the most profound characters in any fiction, book, play, film, opera, is that beneath her performative female vulnerability is something less defined but even more defenseless and dependent, beautiful, and ultimately, alone. She’s a metaphor for all of our human contradictions and helplessness. Ferran, an obviously gifted and inventive performer, eschews those classic female characteristics in her portrayal of Blanche, and in a crucial way, she keeps it superficial, plays it safe. No risk, no reward; the lack of a true Blanche makes the production seem perplexing at best, empty at worst.  

(The reason for Patsy Ferran’s unusual casting as Blanche, by the way, is both interesting and reminiscent of an old show biz tale like 42^nd St. Another actress was initially playing the role but was injured, and Ferran took the part close to opening with little preparation and rehearsal, presumably saving the show. Despite her interview quotes as doubting being “right” for the part, she since has played Blanche competently for months in Europe and now, in the US. In that way, she’s a theatrical heroine.)   

Frecknall’s direction employs several striking additions to typical Streetcar presentations, including a drummer playing on a level above the stage, emphasizing major moments with pedal, snare, and high-hat. There is no formal set to speak of, just suggestions of New Orleans, and designer Madeleine Girling puts out an empty elevated wooden box-like platform with a walkway round it; at times, rain pounds on and alongside the actors. Similar to the work of another prolific contemporary British director, Jamie Lloyd, whose revivals of Betrayal and A Doll’s House were hits on Broadway, offstage actors sit on chairs on stage near the scene, and sometimes hand props to each other. The stark minimalism has sporadic electricity but can’t cover the show’s liabilities. Also, we lose the literal setting of New Orleans, its heat and sweaty struggle, and, more important, the close quarters of the Kowalski apartment, which causes so much anguish and embarrassment for Blanche, and provides sadistic opportunities to Stanley.

Throughout, Frecknall has the actors talk and interact at break-neck pace, not allowing the characters to fully experience and express the discomfort and yearning that lurks in the silences of the text. This particularly hurts the tormentedly romantic scenes with Blanche and Stanley’s friend Mitch (Dwane Walcott), which, rushed, make a too-small impression. All of the players eventually resort to yelling as a default position. This is particularly true of the loud and blatant staging of the ending, which overdoes the pathos, eliminating it.  

Paul Mescal does a fine job as Stanley, providing dynamism, humor, meanness, and sexuality. For all of the attention surrounding his casting, there’s nothing revelatory about his performance, but no actor who ever played the part has approached Brando;  so: what’re you gonna do? The role of Stella can seem bland on the page, but Anjana Vasan has sensuousness in her love/fights with her husband and injects some weary resentment towards sister Blanche in their scenes together, hardening the shell of the character in refreshing ways.

At intermission, this reviewer looked around the theatergoers at the Harvey Theatre, named for late, longtime BAM president Lichenstein, not Weinstein, opened in 1904 and restored in ’87, and recently, again, seating 837, purposely leaving its walls distressed as if still under construction. I wondered what a young person, particularly a young woman, perhaps having little if any connection with the original play and movie of Streetcar, would make of this new revival. Today’s culture is overrun with feminist ideology, constant exhortations for young girls and women to reject soft traditional vulnerability, even maternal feeling, and basically imitate men. They seem to have submitted to this coercion: as if unable to beat aggressive males at their own game, they’ve decided to join them. At the same time, we also hear the ever-present criticism of dominant manhood as destructive and even ill, supposedly enabling women to bring men down several notches to meet them on a more even androgynous plane. Without much real-world exposure to the kind of woman Williams wrote in Blanche, and not seeing her on BAM’s stage, it seems unlikely if not impossible for these young women to get the point, or feel the pain, of this masterpiece play. With attacks on manhood perhaps playing themselves out, in society and culture, maybe it is womanhood and femininity that will soon be ripe for honest scrutiny, forthright depiction, and renewal. This production of A Streetcar Named Desire had the chance to start it off, explore something old, and new; it skirts the opportunity.

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, in regional theater, and in numerous shows Off Broadway, including two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. For twenty years, Scott was Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, and Viacom. In 2015, he was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. In 2019, he directed a 60-minute version of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in The New York Times. He helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. He is a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area, was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works in 2019. During the pandemic, Scott figured out how to direct on Zoom! Scott teaches at the JCCManhattan and other arts organizations.