When we meet Patsy Ferran’s virtuosic Blanche duBois in the opening scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, she is the physical embodiment of jangled nerves, her voice a staccato loop-da-loop. She stands at the doorstep of her younger sister Stella’s (Anjana Vasan) apartment in New Orleans’s French Quarter with all her earthly possessions—mostly frilly dresses; mink stoles, gifts from former beaus; and a rhinestone tiara—packed into a trunk. We’ll soon learn that she’s lost the family estate back in Mississippi and her livelihood as an English teacher, haunted by personal tragedy. She is a woman at the end of her rope.
In Rebecca Frecknall’s Olivier Award-winning Almeida Theatre production, now playing at BAM (through April 6), we’re graced with a Streetcar by a director in complete command of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play. This is a Streetcar that leans into his conception of “plastic theater,” a poetic, expressionistic approach meant to cut closer to the truth for heightened transcendence rather than the “exhausted theatre of realistic conventions.” The action is set on a spare, yet stylized set, actors remain on stage when they’re not in a scene and the blocking is so limber and precise it feels more like choreography.
Frecknall also understands the power of music in Williams’s play, explicitly outlined in his stage directions to represent Blanche’s inner life, she takes it a step further with a full drum kit looming above the set on a balcony at center stage, introducing a blow of violence from the start and setting a charging, cat-and-mouse-like tempo to the action. It comes to feel like your own ragged, panicked pulse as the drama unfolds.
This was the first time I’d seen Streetcar staged, although I had recently reread the play and watched the 1951 movie. In this production, I was struck by the universality of Blanche as a character, the distilled essence and tragedy of what it means to be a woman alone in the world, in the same way that Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman strikes me as the essence and tragedy of what it means to be a man, a husband and a father—that an inevitable desperate end is coming for us all.
And while it could be said that Blanche is preening, deluded, a faded Southern belle of questionable moral fiber, I see her as a tragic heroine, the victim of her times and circumstances and, ultimately, of her sister’s husband Stanley Kowalski, a role that Marlon Brando immortalized, crying “STELL-LAHHHHH!” (with “heaven-splitting violence,” as Williams’s stage directions guide). In Stanley, Williams created the archetypal sexy monster, equal parts animal magnetism and brutality. Here, Paul Mescal steps into the role, borrowing a bit of Brando’s patter to make it his own.
Blanche’s last chance for survival, to finally find a place to rest, comes in a fledgling romance with Mitch (Dwane Walcott), Stanley’s poker buddy, a gentle, kind-hearted bachelor with a dying mother who doesn’t want him to be alone. “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too,” he tells her. “Could it be—you and me, Blanche?” There are two things Blanche feels she must hide from Mitch in order to make him want her: the fact that she’s over thirty and her wayward past with men. When Stanley exposes her secrets, it precipitates her end.
Upon rereading Streetcar as a single woman over forty, I couldn’t help but feel like I was Blanche duBois. The only reason I’m not a tragic figure is because, some eighty years after the character was born, it’s more feasible for a woman to make her way financially in the world. I don’t have to depend on the “kindness of strangers.” But that does not mean the sociological and psychological anxiety of female autonomy has dissipated. Blanche, and also Stella, represent the risky calculations women make in order to survive.
On a recent visit to Key West, an island where Tennessee and I both lived for a time, I found myself in a peculiar situation with a handsome younger man I’d met through mutual social circles who was back on the island to help his mother with the family business. I ran into him one morning on my way to the beach. Covered in sunscreen with no makeup on, I felt as exposed as Blanche under a naked lightbulb. But he hugged me and assured me I looked great and asked for my number.
When I lived in Key West I worked on the water with a bunch of men whose looks could easily cast them as Stanley Kowalski if they had any acting chops. And this young man wanted to know what that was like and also inform me that girls who work for that boating company today have a certain reputation on the island. “Oh,” I asked, “What kind?” Floozies, he said in so many words. (A woman today need commit far fewer sins than Blanche duBois to be branded a whore.) All I could do was brush it off with a surprised, coquettish laugh and say, “Well, I worked there a long time ago”—but not how long ago, lest I expose my age.
When I stopped for lunch on the patio at my favorite little French crêperie, not far from my first cottage on the island, I sat gazing languidly at Blue Heaven’s baby blue clapboard siding and pink neon signage across the street and suddenly remembered that it was once a brothel. I said aloud to myself: “Maybe I am Blanche duBois.”
In Frecknall’s production, there’s a line Blanche delivers defending herself to Mitch that cuts through to the truth of her character more than any other: “I don’t want realism… I want. Magic!” I couldn’t help but think back to a recent New Year’s in Rio de Janeiro when I said something to that effect to two of my best girlfriends, dreaming up the year ahead. Perhaps it’s Blanche’s fatal flaw, but it’s also Williams’s crie de coeur, and what’s made her one of American drama’s most enduring and complex characters of all time.
