So announces the New York Times headline. Meanwhile, Vulture reports that the “Irish sad-boy hunk of Normal People and Gladiator II … is bringing the production to Brooklyn.”
It is true that Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire is transferring from London (where I saw it two years ago at the Almeida Theatre) and will open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February. And it is true that Mescal will reprise his award-winning performance as Stanley.
What bothers me about the breathless Paul Mescal coverage, though, is that he forms just a third of a remarkable ensemble of award-winning actors that includes Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Anjana Vasan as Stella.
And good as Mescal is, this revelatory production foregrounds the relationship between Stella and Blanche, suggesting that the heart of the play lies not in the gladiatorial combat between Stanley and Blanche—exciting as that is!—but in the relationship between the two sisters.
Frecknall’s production underlines the tragedy of Stella, a deeply affecting Anjana Vasan. Stella is clearly devoted to her sister even as she feels overwhelmed by Blanche’s all-consuming need for love and attention, a need that is destroying her marriage to Stanley. When Blanche is taken away in the final moments of the play, we feel unbearable sadness not just for the broken Blanche but also for Stella, who has tried and failed to salvage both her marriage and her relationship with her sister.
Patsy Ferran was a last-minute substitution for an injured Lydia Wilson in the original production. Not an obvious choice for Blanche (her youth makes her a more obvious fit for someone like Laura in The Glass Menagerie), she nevertheless brings great detail to her characterization: her Blanche is refined and vulnerable, but also highly intelligent and surprisingly funny.
She is also a woman who can be steely in her need for control as we see in her astonishing scene with the newspaper boy. When she tells the boy, “Come here,” there is nothing coquettish in her face or voice. It is an order—not a request, not a seduction—but an assertion of authority.
Of course, trying to assert that authority with the more powerful Stanley is another matter entirely. And the transfer from the thrust stage of the 300-seat Almeida Theatre to a large proscenium stage certainly poses problems in communicating the intensity of that struggle between Stanley and Blanche.
Frecknall’s stage design at the Almeida placed the audience on three sides of a bare set, putting us in intimate, claustrophobic contact with the actors, a claustrophobia intensified by the soundscape.
Judging that 1940s New Orleans jazz has become too romanticized to reflect Blanche’s fragile mental state, Frecknall worked with the composer Angus McRae to create a score almost entirely carried by a live drumset above the stage. McRae has noted that his music takes inspiration from the jazz of the time, but “warped and distorted through Blanche’s lens.” Indeed, the unpredictable bursts of sound from just above our heads in the intimate space of the Almeida became at times an aural assault as distressing as Stanley’s on-stage violence.
And what about Mescal’s Stanley? He’s very good. Like Ferran’s Blanche and Vasan’s Stella, Mescal’s characterization of Stanley is intelligently conceived and wonderfully specific: charming and sexy, but also insecure when reminded of his wife’s more privileged background. Wounded by Blanche’s insults as well as by being excluded from their sisterly bond, he becomes increasingly anguished. He begins the play radiant with sexual magnetism, but by the end he has become radiant with rage.
A caged tiger, he prowls the perimeter of the stage, as he tries to control the women within his circle. Frecknall surely came up with this stage direction from the words of the text: in the inevitable confrontation with Blanche, Stanley crawls menacingly toward her, murmuring “Tiger—tiger…” In this terrifying confrontation, Stanley embodies the prowling menace we have seen throughout, while Blanche tries to protect herself with a broken bottle. (I jumped when she shattered it just 15 feet from me.)
None of this can feel quite as enveloping, quite as disturbingly claustrophobic on a larger stage. But still, go if you can. And don’t go just for Paul. Go for the women. This production is a devastating portrayal of love and violence and the fragility of life—about violent men, the women caught in their orbit, and the fate of those who can never quite find their place in the world.
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