Paul Mescal will star in a new revival of A Streetcar Named Desire off Broadway, reprising his award-winning performance from London. The production will make its U.S. debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this spring, with exact dates to be announced. He reprises the leading role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire from director Rebecca Frecknall's (Cabaret on Broadway) in London's West End in 2023. The show won three Olivier Awards there, including Best Revival and Best Actor for Mescal. Tennessee Williams's play takes place during a New Orleans summer, when fading Southern belle Blanche comes to visit her sister, Stella, and Stella's husband, Stanley. Reality and illusion collide as Blanche tries to escape her past, which Stanley is determined to unravel.
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.
1947 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
1950 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1973 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1973 | Broadway |
Return Engagement [Broadway] Broadway |
1988 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1992 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1999 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
2005 | Broadway |
Roundabout Revival Broadway |
2009 | West End |
Donmar Warehouse Revival West End |
2012 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2016 | Off-Broadway |
St. Ann's Warehouse Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
2020 | Williamstown, MA (Regional) |
Williamstown Theater Festival Production Williamstown, MA (Regional) |
2023 | West End |
West End |
2025 | Off-Broadway |
BAM Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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