If you already have tickets to Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal, the screen hunk of Gladiator II, good for you. You can either see the show—a perfectly enjoyable London import playing at BAM until April 6—or you can scalp your seats on StubHub for, say, $4,726.00 each!
A few friends of mine have cashed out in this way, and I have no reproaches for them. I liked the show, with a few reservations, but afterward all I could think of was what Tennessee Williams, author of the immortal essay “The Catastrophe of Success,” might think about seeing his lyrical drama about the wanton destruction of a sensitive misfit outshouted by a bonkers celebrity circus. This caliber of transactionalism leaves his art in shadow, serving only power, wealth, and status—an outsider poet depending on the kindness of rich strangers.
Frecknall’s production is spare, sensual, and humbly operatic. Originally staged at the Almeida Theatre in 2023, it transferred to the West End and won numerous British awards.
It makes no realistic attempt to evoke the tatty New Orleans apartment building where the play is set. The action is played on a raised, grey, cinder-block platform resembling an MMA cage with the metal mesh removed (set design by Madeleine Girling). Actors hang out at the sides when not in scenes. A stairway at the edge leads up to a drummer (Tom Penn) who underscores the show with dynamic jazz licks. The central platform is surrounded by a flat shelf where actors sometimes brood, pace, and stalk, and near the end it catches lovely curtains of rain.
There’s a lot of choreography too (Frecknall is a trained dancer). The entire opening dialogue before Blanche’s entrance is delivered as a cacophony of overlapping voices as lithe dancers perform steamy, undulating solos. Two turn out to be important background characters who show up again later: the ominous woman selling flowers for the dead, and Blanche’s young-poet husband who killed himself after she shamed him for gayness. Most productions leave these figures offstage. Here they become a mainstay of the musical texture, accompanied by moving, plaintive songs.
Of course, any production of Streetcar rests on the charisma and sexual chemistry of its leads: Blanche, Stanley, and Stella. It’s a play, after all, about the arrival of a third wheel who disrupts the sexual idyll of a hot couple. Blanche, finding herself “played out” after years of sexual wandering, shows up broke on the doorstep of her sister’s two-room flat and finds herself unwanted and unappreciated. Her haughty airs have no power over her brutish brother-in-law, and he destroys her rather than keep tolerating a house guest after six months.
There's more to the drama than this, obviously. It has a profound mythical dimension and legitimate claims to tragedy, specifically American tragedy, with its place-specific collisions over class, imagination, and freedom. The main strength of this production, however, is its focus on basic practical and sexual facts. On that rudimentary storytelling level, it succeeds.
Paul Mescal’s Stanley is a champion sexual gladiator. He walks on, tears his shirt off, and claims dominance as an apex predator who just happens not to be hunting at the moment. Anjana Vasan’s Stella is instantly all over him like a leotard. Patsy Ferran’s Blanche at first tries to retreat to a corner but there are no hiding places in a fight cage. Mescal gets in her personal space, unfazed by her pretentions, clocking her lie about drinking (“I—rarely touch it”), and staring straight through her. His tone is the bluff, knowing directness of a street cop, and he sticks with that the entire night (except when yelling “Stella!”). This Pole, we understand, knows he’s a star, in his world and ours.
It was Marlon Brando who famously made Stanley the play’s star. As true Williams fans know, though, that wasn’t the original plan. Williams felt the focus should be weird, dissipated, castoff Blanche, the sensitive soul tragically victimized by her desire, not the callous soul savagely wielding his lust like a mace. Interestingly enough, 16 years ago, another production from abroad came to BAM that marvelously corrected this imbalance, starring Cate Blanchette as an unforgettable and very central Blanche. In my 2009 review, I speculated on whether the foreign origin of that production might have helped the artists recognize the benefits of the intended balance.
There is no correcting it on Frecknall’s stage, which leaves Ferran, a fine actor, in an impossible situation. The whole machine is programmed to subordinate her to Mescal. She plays Blanche with a lot of fidgety hand movements, speaking a mile a minute and very intently, as if trying to convince herself as much as others that her refined “Dame Blanche” act is real. Her confidence in the act is so weak that she resorts to brazen flirting with Stanley from the second scene. That doesn’t melt him, of course, so the problem becomes: where to take her performance from there? Her southern accent is so weak and wobbly it’s barely useable as an acting tool. This evidently went unnoticed in London, but in the U.S., where Blanche’s voice taps into a huge, resonant, and contested cultural “imaginary,” it’s a serious limitation. A key source of depth in the role feels unaccessed.
Another quibble is that it doesn’t seem plausible that Ferran and Vasen are sisters. The show’s casting is deliberately diverse—Ferran is Spanish-British, Vasen is Indian-Singaporean, and Mescal is Irish—but I’m not referring to that. The improbability comes from a seeming indifference to character background in their performances. To make this play truly sing, the actors of both Blanche and Stella have to convince us they were once actually posh. Here neither does, and one (Vasen) doesn’t even bother faking it.
In sum, Frecknall’s show is unquestionably steamy, but it feels a little long and repetitious (it’s 2 hours 45 minutes). She’s a bit too enamored of her stylistic conceits, including the pacing, the dances, and the rain episodes.
It’s a spicy use of 3 hours, but is it worth $4,726.00? You’ll have to decide.
Production photos: Julieta Cervantes
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Rebecca Frecknall
BAM Harvey Theater