A Streetcar Named Desire Off-Broadway Reviews

This is all compelling; the play is so brilliantly conceived and plotted it can hardly be anything else. While Blanche, with her airs and long baths, works Stanley’s last nerve, he mercilessly needles her and debunks her claims. (She is no virgin, even aside from her early marriage to a doomed gay man.) Trying to keep the peace is Stella, who despite everything still loves her sister. (In Anjana Vasan’s excellent performance, we sense that love, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.) But as Blanche’s options foreclose on her — Stanley foils her chance to snag his one halfway-decent poker buddy as a husband — even Stella grows fearful, and the balance tips disastrously."

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.

Rebecca Frecknall, who directed the recent Broadway revival of “Cabaret” that made a choppy Atlantic crossing, has brought to Brooklyn the best revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” of my lifetime. The production had two touted West End runs, but I didn’t expect to hear Williams’ play as if for the first time."

Stanley and Blanche are gunpowder and match. And while a drummer pounds upstage, sometimes joined by an ethereal singer, explosive Ferran and Mescal go thrillingly head-to-head. I can’t remember Mescal ever being so loud before. The Oscar nominee is typically soft-spoken, bashful almost, in so many films and TV shows. He was even polite in “Gladiator.” But the guy wails “Stellaaaaa!” here with the roar of a provoked grizzly. Ferran, meanwhile, is mesmerizing as she descends further into madness.

The story of “A Streetcar Named Desire” remains timeless in this rendition, aided by the powerful performances. The barebone scenic construction (designed by Madeleine Girling) enables the story to stand alone without the extra frills usually found on more traditional sets. Specialized water effects by Water Sculptures are also beautifully effective, allowing audiences a window into Blanche’s increasingly fractured mind."

The revival has been directed by Rebecca Frecknall, whose production of Cabaret, excuse me, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, was a sensation in London but has proved more than a little divisive on Broadway. Here, she not so much stages Williams’ play but comments on it. It feels less like an actual production than a series of annotations scribbled in her copy of the text.

Williams purists might scoff at a few of Frecknall’s directorial flourishes—one would expect nothing less from the director of the current Cabaret revival. A haunting bit of modern dance, for instance, illustrates Blanche’s inextricable ties to her long-dead husband. Props appear only when needed, almost magically, delivered by actors lingering outside the action.

What makes Mescal’s performance so riveting is that, without ever blunting or apologizing for Stanley’s cruelty, he also reveals the soft belly of the role, the vulnerability and hurt that, for a man in his world with his upbringing, can naturally lead to violence. 'When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common,' he reminds Stella, who was raised with Blanche as part of the fading Southern aristocracy, at a former plantation called Belle Reve. 'How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it… And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till she showed here?

The Irish film and TV star (All of Us Strangers, Normal People) may be the name driving up ticket prices and attendance at BAM, but his performance is carefully integrated into Rebecca Frecknall’s keen, intelligently deconstructed revival. Mescal doesn’t shrink from his role’s indelible association with young Marlon Brando; the actor’s credibly flat accent (urban Midwest dusted with Brooklyn) and unforced physical beauty constitute what you might call a Brando-adjacent reading: not trying to reinvent the wheel but perfectly able to handle the curves.

The Streetcar revival now playing at BAM, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, doesn’t have much truck with magic; it does not invite the audience, even momentarily, to share the nympho- and dipsomaniacal Blanche’s delusions of gentility. But neither does it go for realism: There is barely any set, and nearly all of the action is squeezed onto a central square platform on cinderblocks that suggests a boxing ring minus the ropes; an onstage drummer sometimes bangs loudly on his kit, like a migraine in Blanche’s head, and there are occasional shifts into dancey stylized movement.