Uneven Revivals of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Ghosts”

In early 1947, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote to the producer Irene Selznick because Elia Kazan, who had been tapped to direct the Broadway première of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” was balking. Who else could direct “Streetcar”? Williams rejected the suggestion of Tyrone Guthrie out of hand. “He is English,” he wrote. “This is an American play with a peculiarly local or provincial color.”

Nearly eighty years later, the English director Rebecca Frecknall’s highly physical, modern-dress “Streetcar,” which has arrived at BAM from the West End, is not the British production that would put Williams’s mind at ease. Ease is in itself a particularly Southern quality, but it’s nowhere to be found in the show’s stripped-down set, nor in the director’s expressionist interventions. As Frecknall did in last year’s “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” she externalizes subtext and mental states. In this “Streetcar,” which nominally takes place in New Orleans, an onstage drummer (Tom Penn) plays an ear-shattering score by Angus MacRae, making the audience as jumpy as poor, neurasthenic Blanche (Patsy Ferran), a spinster who moves in with her sister, Stella (Anjana Vasan), and her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley (Paul Mescal). Blanche is the play’s frail liar, its soiled dove, but the tidal boundary between her dreams and her delusions can be hard to—BANG BANGITY BANG CRASH!

Dramatically, the piece pits dependent fragility against rude strength, so the set designer, Madeleine Girling, has built an elevated boxing-ring-shaped stage, an abstract, empty space for psychodrama. In this corner is Paul Mescal (the reason the show is selling out); in that corner, you sense, is the original Stanley, Marlon Brando. Mescal’s shadow opponent may explain the Irish actor’s bizarrely inflected American accent and doggedly repetitive phrasing. The show certainly emphasizes his beauty and youth: in a tomato-red muscle shirt and rolled-up pants, designed by Merle Hensel, he looks like one of the rumbustious teens in “The Outsiders.” Mescal’s finest screen roles—“All of Us Strangers,” “Normal People”—have honed his gift for shy longing, and despite his intensity he’s only intermittently forceful here. In the scene in which Stanley attacks Blanche, Frecknall needs to send the ensemble in to help him via a dream-dance slo-mo scrum. (There is a great part in “Streetcar” for Mescal, but it’s Stanley’s hapless poker buddy, Mitch.)

The weight of the play’s tragedy falls therefore to Blanche. The gamine Ferran has an extraordinary feral, changeling quality. Her voice drifts in and out of a Southern accent, but she understands Williams’s cadences, and she excels at demonstrating quickness of thought, though this skill does her intelligent, anxious character no appreciable good. I wish that the production had allowed her bewitching performance more dignity, rather than relying on corny dance-fights, or letting Vasan’s showily emotive Stella cry racking sobs over Blanche, in a moment when silence might have been more devastating. But my sense of the tragic and Frecknall’s are clearly far apart.

Williams showed such compassion for lovely, weak, wounded creatures—Blanche, Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”—that many of us have built protective barricades around even the idea of them. (When an interpretive dancer personifying Blanche’s madness came in, throwing her long hair around, I practically hissed.) I admit, I cannot understand why Frecknall treats this most lyrical and atmospheric of playwrights like an obscurantist whose feelings must be exposed through mood ballets. Williams’s œuvre is a hothouse; strange flowers often bloom there. The last “Streetcar” to make the transatlantic journey was the similarly heavy-handed Benedict Andrews version with Gillian Anderson, which also used adrenalizing rock-music cues. But there are a few things to be thrilled by in this “Streetcar”—Ferran’s elfin Blanche, for one, and a superabundant vitality for another, a sense that the company is flinging itself headlong into the play, like Stanley throwing down a poker hand without bothering to look at his cards.

All this ruminating on national tastes made me wonder what a Norwegian would think of the Lincoln Center production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” from 1881, in a translation by Mark O’Rowe, directed by Jack O’Brien. I thought it was pretty bad, but then I wouldn’t know a deep inlet from a fjord.

“Ghosts” was a scandal from its inception. When it was performed in London, in the eighteen-nineties, the censor intervened, sure that “so loathsome an enterprise,” as one critic wrote, would corrupt everyone who saw it. The issue? Ibsen was exploding bourgeois hypocrisy by cramming his plot with taboos, then asserting that the greatest sin was the propriety that kept people from speaking frankly and living freely.

A widow, Mrs. Alving (Lily Rabe), running her late husband’s estate and setting up an orphanage in his name, has long hidden his moral debasement to preserve her family’s reputation. Secrets, though, will out: her young maid, Regina (Ella Beatty), is, unknowingly, the dead man’s illegitimate child, and her adult son, the frail Oswald (Levon Hawke), has been told by a doctor that he’s “vermoulu” (“worm-eaten”)—a squirming allusion to inherited syphilis. (Billy Crudup plays a moralizing pastor, who exists mostly to be appalled.) Lest we misunderstand, the set designer, John Lee Beatty, places an ostentatious bowl of apples on Mrs. Alving’s table to remind us of Oswald’s increasingly spirochete-ridden brain, and of the house’s mirror-identity as an awful Eden, where the only available Adam and Eve are siblings.

O’Brien’s production begins as a “rehearsal.” We see an exchange between the local reprobate Engstrand (Hamish Linklater) and Regina repeated several times: first, they mumble over their scripts and wear street clothes; then, restarting the dialogue, they shift toward period realism. As Engstrand continues to badger Regina, Linklater tosses his modern messenger bag offstage, and Beatty starts to emote—and shazam, we are in Norway, in a quasi-nineteenth century, in which one woman might wear a leg-of-mutton sleeve, and another a short skirt. (The rehearsal conceit doesn’t return until the curtain call, when all the actors appear with their scripts, only to fling them angrily into a pile. Nuts to you, Ibsen!)

What the critic James Huneker thought might be “the strongest play of the nineteenth century” fights on different ground in the twenty-first. Despite its lugubrious atmosphere, the characters’ problems could now be cleared up with some penicillin and, say, a book club. Keeping the play in the realm of crawling horror—and not having it tip into comedy—requires a touch for the gothic. (Richard Eyre achieved the requisite ambience in 2015, at BAM, with Lesley Manville as Mrs. Alving.) Here, only Rabe manages to establish any eeriness: her burred, throaty voice rasps intriguingly in contrast with her cool, untroubled expression.

The elephant in O’Brien’s rehearsal room is the presence of Beatty and Hawke, two young actors with storied names and few credits. Beatty, the Juilliard-trained daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, displays flashes of spirit and mischief, if also a tendency to screw up her face to indicate effort, but Hawke, the son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, seems completely out of his depth—his program bio lists no other theatre experience—in an exposed, central role. Acting can come down through generations; Rabe’s mother, for instance, was the actress Jill Clayburgh, a lineage you can glimpse sometimes in the way that Rabe sets her chin. But finding faint genetic shadows in younger actors doesn’t make the time fly.

Speaking of inheritance, Ibsen established the standard form of contemporary drama: you present a juicy, melodramatic family breakdown and use it to deliver a stern polemic on the rights of the individual. That is the armature girding “Streetcar,” too, though Williams came to a different conclusion. Ibsen saw an individual’s self-determination as a remedy for bourgeois hypocrisy, the first salvo of liberation. Williams knew the self was something else—the basic, lonesome unit of tragedy. ♦