A Classic Reborn: A Streetcar Named Desire's Electrifying Revival

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, a buzzing crowd lingers in the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). They are waiting to take their seats for the third to last performance of the much traveled, much beloved revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams play that won him his first Pulitzer Prize.

Set in the 1940s, the play follows the fading Blanche Dubois (Patsy Ferran), who moves in with her sister Stella (Anjana Vasan) and her animalistic husband Stanley Kowalski (Paul Mescal). This revival was on its victory tour, with a sold out run on London’s West End, and 3 Olivier Awards under its belt: Best Revival, Best Actor (Mescal), Best Supporting Actress (Vasan).

Director Rebecca Frecknall’s production stands out amongst the hundreds of others. She adds her own twists, stripping down the set and lighting, making for a sometimes harsh, but always beautiful stage. The small square platform, a simplified version of Stella and Stanley’s apartment, is bare except for a rotation of chairs, a stool, Blanche’s trunk, and various glass bottles. As a viewer, you feel more like a voyeur, peeking into the lives of troubled, young, and hungry.

The play is a whopping three hours. The first six scenes build the world. Vasan’s Stella has a sort of hesitancy in every move and word, always careful. Mescal’s Stanley booms across the stage, but never at full capacity. He, very smartly, holds back and builds for the second half. But Ferran’s Blanche takes it. She brings a biting, casual humor to a character that is often portrayed as skittish, inconsiderate, delicate to a fault. She is, of course, all of these things, but Ferran plays her more sympathetically, letting her have a sort of freedom before the second half, when it all comes crashing down.

The final five scenes fly by. The actors are unrecognizable. Ferran cleanly and subtly phases out Blanche’s humor and levity as her mental state continues to deteriorate. Mescal seems to lean more and more into the “primitive” nature of Stanley. He plays up the character’s raw physicality, even bear crawling at one point during scene ten. He is completely transformed from the softness of Connell in ‘Normal People' or the emotional Calum in ‘Aftersun.’ Vasan gives the most passive of the performances, although it is what the character calls for, so she is successful on that front. She is occasionally absent towards the end of the play, and, as she eventually disappears to give birth, Stanley and Blanche’s confrontations become more heated.

The technical parts of the show follow suit. The lighting, once a soft white from overhead, is now harsh shades of red and blue coming at you on all sides. Their shadows clash across the stage in jagged lines, angles, making for unsetting figures. The choreographed characters of ‘The Mexican Woman’ and Allan Grey, Blanche’s husband from her teenage years who committed suicide. Allan is, in Williams’ original play, only ever referred to. However, Frecknall introduces him as metaphysical. He slowly trails around the stage as the ghost of Blanche’s past, a constant reminder of her suffering.

The audience, at times, felt like one complete body. As one, we laughed, we hung onto every word, we held our breath. Frecknall commands the crowd in her revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Other classical plays staged in similarly contemporary ways fail in this regard. She is in some sense less like a director and more like a composer.

This particular production was Williams, and Streetcar, at its best: manic, wrenching, raw, magnetic, bursting with life. It calls out to you, time seems to stretch as the play pulls you in. The play is, just as Blanche says, “a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands.”