For theater director Rebecca Frecknall it is not that all the world’s a stage, but that a relatively unadorned stage can and should contain worlds, or the imprints of them; that we—as an audience—should be able to see and feel rooms, houses, streets, bars, daytime and night, right in front of us with minimal décor. And so, with a stupendous Almeida Theatre revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (BAM Harvey, to April 6), recently transferred from London’s West End to BAM, we gaze upon an open arena of drama, upon which Frecknall and her cast have crafted a zinging masterpiece.
Frecknall’s distinctive aesthetic (the staging is starkly designed by Madeleine Girling), and the enlivening demands it places on audiences’ imaginations, was visible in the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret (which some critics did not like; I did, very much), where the company danced, writhed, and sung atop a raised stage.
In Streetcar, Normal People, All of Us Strangers, and Gladiator II star Paul Mescal (Stanley Kowalski), Patsy Ferran (Blanche DuBois), and Anjana Vasan (Stella Kowalski) occupy a similar raised platform, larger and more rectangular—upon which Blanche’s mental collapse, Stella’s sense of hopeless entrapment, and Stanley’s abuse of both sisters, and his need to dominate and control, play out as a kind of raw, brutal ballet. In London, the production won rave reviews and featured frenzied scenes at the stage door as some of Mescal’s fans sought (inappropriate-touch) proximity to their idol.
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This is a piece of theater that stylishly and intelligently tells on itself—it does not just dramatize Williams’ play, which premiered on Broadway in 1947, it illustrates it, and colors in its margins. The rest of the cast prowl and surround the stage, observing the New Orleans-set action as if a sly Greek chorus, inserting objects like chairs, bottles, a handsome birthday cake, and articles of clothing as subtle markers and accessories. Frecknall sees text, cast, director, and audience in a tango of collective conjuring. Everyone in the theater is expected to work.
Tom Penn, as a drummer above the action (trend alert: drumming is also center stage at Sumo at the Public Theater), sketches sounds as moods in themselves—sometimes ratcheting up the tension of scenes, sometimes sounding like wry payoffs to a punchline, or a clown’s entertainment at a circus. Constanza Ruff adds skeins of mournful singing to the sonic tapestry. There are cleverly constructed pods of sound (Peter Rice), movement and lighting (Lee Curran). This isn’t so much an adaptation of Tennessee Williams as an experience of him.
And yes, as well as all that, this production has the audience-pulling appeal of a movie star: Mescal as Stanley gives a towering performance—quite literally, looked down from above, he is a sometimes-stripped, always hulking, and an intimidating mixture of bully and bombastic, vile truth-teller when it comes to Blanche’s emotional manipulations, intended or not.
Mescal’s is also a generously judged star performance, leaving much space for his co-stars Ferran and Vasan to carve their own imprints into the canvas. Vasan and Mescal both won Olivier Awards for their performances in London, and she and Frecknall make Stella far more than a victim and third wheel to the central Stanley and Blanche grudge match that Streetcar can often be reduced to. Vasan’s Stella knows both husband and sister all too well—she is enmeshed in the strange dialectics of love and destruction both weave around her. Her poise and steel are evident, even if both are fatally corroded.
Streetcar has the additional depth and richness of Williams at his best; one of the standout aspects of this production—thanks again to the actors’ and Frecknall’s care—is the breadth of Williams’ language; its vibrancy and perfectly aimed poison darts of lyricism hit mark after mark. Even when what is being said is terrible or heartbreaking or both, you marvel at Williams’ soaring dramatic poetry, his relentless drilling into psyches, his perverse sense of play and mischief (especially around madness and pain), and his committed interrogations of both untethered, delusional romance and brutish, transactional reality.
In one confrontation, Frecknall arranges Stanley, Blanche, and Stella in a perfect diagonal, each standing the same distance from the other, as if they were atoms about to do a dance-off. The show’s choreography is sometimes literal (dance peppers the action, literally springing up out of nowhere), and sometimes visual as the show becomes its own visual game of human chess.
In another sequence, Stanley is imagined as a prowling, balletic nightmare king of the jungle; a missing link to something more primate than human. To emphasize his primacy, Frecknall has the group coalesce behind him, following the leader of this hideous pack, all bathed in a lurid red light.
Mescal’s voice, at its most violent, is an insistent battering ram. We see the sisters hold each other, curled up as if trying to batten down the hatches in the face of a relentless, terrible storm during one outburst. (Or willing a nightmare to just go away and evaporate.) Ferran’s Blanche is no victim, but like a nervous bird always fluttering, always kicking up dust, always ready for a fight, or tell a joke, or be b---hy. Blanche is funny (and then very not funny).
Stanley hates her for cheating them out of money he believes is rightfully Stella’s; she hates Stanley for abusing her sister. They are both attracted to and repulsed by one another. She finds real solace, indeed reveals most about herself to an ill-fated potential suitor Mitch (an excellent Dwane Walcott). When Stanley rapes her, the entire stage becomes a suspended ballet, a kind of frozen tableau whose horror is only revealed when Blanche is shown in catatonic shock in the harsh light of the next day.
Blanche may end the play being carted off to hospital, with her much-quoted self-observation that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Stanley’s poker game continues (the social order his patriarchal brutishness represents triumphant) as she is led away. But in Frecknall’s interpretation, the final note is rightly one of female desolation—Stella’s. As her upset freezes in time, this astonishing, beautifully mounted revival finally falls into climactic darkness. The deserved, resounding applause and cheers begin a split second later.
