“The sky that appears around the dimly lit white building is a distinctive soft blue, almost turquoise, investing the scene in lyrical form and gracefully reduces the atmosphere of disintegration.”
It's not bloody.
These stage instructions from the published script for “The Tram Named Desire” in Williams, Tennessee could represent mission statements and artist Credo, but 78 years after the play's debut, they are no longer marching orders.
No one follows them anyway. The New Orleans neighbourhood (called Elysian Fields) where Williams set the action has been fundamentally rethinked for decades. As shoe boxes, hangars, cartoons, and lou. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called the last one directed by Ibo Van Hove, “a bathtub named Desire.”
Nowadays, Rebecca Flecknall, who is not a single thought, is a bit nuanced about the production of Broadway's “cabaret” and is hugging her. The London move starring the ferocious Paul Mezcal in the revival of Street Cars, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday, is literally making the idea of a brutal relocation. No white buildings can be found in the square wooden board set of Madeleine Girl Ring, let alone a soft blue sky and lyricism. In the rough darkness of Harvey Theatre, raised by a block of concrete, she creates the world of Stanley and Stella Kowalski, and their frail intruder, Blanche Dubois, looks like a boxing ring.
There are some justices in it. After all, Stanley is a brute icon immersed in half and half of Williams. He goes into the first scene where he has a bloody meat package and throws it to Stella to cook it. More than her husband, she makes what he calls “noise at night” and looks forward to “the coloured light going.” That's his kind of lyricism. And when Stella's poor sister Blanche arrives desperately for an indefinite stay, we look the other side of it as he is trying to destroy her because he can.
Mezcal is best known and obviously for his insufferingly sensitive portrayal of hurting Hank, who can barely recognize pain. (I can't talk about “Gladiator II,” but he's good at “normal people,” “After Sun,” and “All Strangers.”) So it wasn't immediately clear that Arthur Miller could do justice to the character Marlon Brando, who is called “sexual terrorist.” Sorry to report he can do it. Imagine with violence, his Stanley only has one decent emotion. It's the fear of abandonment. (“Stel-Lahhhhhh!”) Everything else is conquered.
In Blanche he meets the opposite number and ideal victim. His famous line, “We had this date for each other from the beginning,” is not exactly sex in Mezcal's reading. And, as Patsy Ferran plays, faded bells are more attractive than usual targets. She arrives in the Elysian field, which can be clearly proven, rather than just a tense “moth” (as Williams describes her). Sweaty and noisy, and can't stop her tongue, she's as aggressive as Stanley. If you think that such a character can't go from such a start, you're wrong. The downhill without brakes is a very scary ride.
All of this is persuasive. The play is very beautifully thought out and plotted. Blanche mercilessly turns her into a needle, exposing her claims while working Stanley's final nerves in her air and long bath. (She is not a virgin except for her early marriage to the fateful gay.) Trying to protect peace is Stella, despite everything she loves her sister. (In Anjana Vasan's excellent performance, we feel that love, even more than the usual weak tee tolerance.) But Blanche's choice seizes her – Stanley blocks her from a chance to flip his one middle poker mate as husband.
The director is clearly credited in shaping and supporting the great work of actors, including Dwayne Walcott as a poker buddy. (The ensemble is rich and detailed too.) And while I'm not a fan of Flecknard's exaggerated “cabaret”, I highly admire her small work. Like the minimal, ferocious staging of Martinamajok's “Sanctuary City” in 2021, she gets a more intimate scene in Blanche, especially the classic scene that tries to seduce a confused newspaper boy.
But the supervisor's intervention everywhere else overwhelms its sensitivity. This is a “tram” as Stanley performed. I don't mean they're violent, I mean they're prominent and obvious. Much of Frecknall's ideas seem to come from the random spins of the modern staging cliche Rorodex. The cast arrives for rehearsals, mimicking the soaking storm, the ghosts of love where the dancers die, and mimic the drummers on stage.
And even if you could write them down as maker marks, what about the distinctive signs of the artist's work, the original maker's mark? Miller writes that the impression left behind by the unsoftly “street car” is the soul of Williams, the “language flowing from the soul.” Blanche is eventually sent to a mental hospital like Blanche, like Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” by Williams' beloved sister Rose. The play wrote, “It seemed that the stage could express everything and make it beautiful.”
In the sense of mirrors, beauty is not on the menu at Flecknall. Blanche's outfit (by Mehl Hensel) doesn't pretend to be pretty, so that staging doesn't leave her dignity. The lighting (by Lee Curran) is harsh and the sound (by Peter Rice). The drums obscure some of the dialogue.
Certainly, it's difficult to hear Williams. Famous lines are often thrown away as if they were grandma's embarrassing chotchke. The identity with Blanche, reflected in the playwright's words with Blanche, is almost own dead. We are not invited to her hopes or fear, but rather to the joys of our stepbrother's animal.
This is certainly a way to watch the “tram”. If possible, the world is more despicable than Williams imagined. Corruption engulfed lyricism. And Stanley now knows we know, we won.
A streetcar named Desire
It will be held at the Harvey Theatre at Brooklyn Academy of Music until April 6th. Bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.