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    ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Is Haunted by Brando and Ghosts of Actors Past

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    With a revival starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran in Brooklyn, a look at the carefully weighted balance that actors playing Blanche and Stanley need to strike.“John Garfield should be doing this part, not me.”This declaration of self-doubt was muttered by a scruffy, largely untried 23-year-old actor at the first table read for a new work by a fast-rising young American playwright. The year was 1947; the setting, a rooftop rehearsal space on West 42nd Street; and the play, after some vacillation on what the title should be, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Its author: Tennessee Williams.As for that seemingly unsure young actor, who had heard that his role had already been refused by the go-to working-class film favorite John Garfield? His name was Marlon Brando. His raw, eloquently inarticulate subsequent portrayal of a sexually magnetic blue-collar lout named Stanley Kowalski — the role he was reading that day — would not only make him a star but also help to change the very nature of American acting.Brando may have once felt he was trapped in the brooding shadow of Garfield. But that was nothing compared to the shadow Brando’s performance — captured for eternity in the 1951 film adaptation of “Streetcar,” which, like the play, was directed by Elia Kazan — would cast over every actor who dared to portray Stanley Kowalski in the years to come.Rebecca Frecknall’s London-born production of the play, starring Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley, is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe latest of this courageous breed is Paul Mescal, who has donned Stanley’s historic T-shirt for the director Rebecca Frecknall’s London-born production of “Streetcar,” which runs through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Initially, some doubts were expressed among star watchers about the casting of Mescal, who had become an international heartthrob after he appeared in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.” Wasn’t he too sensitive, too slender, too young to play Stanley? (Never mind that he was in fact a bit older than Brando had been on Broadway.)But when this latest “Streetcar” opened in London, critics heaved a gratified sigh of relief. The interpretation by Frecknall, known for her high-concept approaches to classics (including the “Cabaret” now on Broadway), was unorthodox but persuasive, they said. So was the casting of Patsy Ferran, a last-minute substitute for an injured actress, as the play’s heroine, Blanche DuBois, whose fragile illusions are crushed by Stanley, her brutish brother-in-law. The general reaction to Mescal was summed up by Andrzej Lukowski’s review in London’s Time Out: “He’s good! Actually very good. (Also: stacked.)” (While admiring the play’s stars, Jesse Green in his New York Times review, was less enthused about the production in Brooklyn.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

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      Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More

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      in Movies

      Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s Turbulent Relationship, Retold With Compassion

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      In “Truly, Madly,” Stephen Galloway writes about one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples, training an eye on Leigh’s mental health struggles.TRULY, MADLYVivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the CenturyBy Stephen Galloway406 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $30.God help anyone who flew the friendly skies with Vivien Leigh, her second husband, Laurence Olivier, or both.1936: A struggling seaplane on which Leigh was a passenger went “thudding like a skimmed stone over the waves” en route to Capri, writes Stephen Galloway in “Truly, Madly,” a new book about the couple’s relationship, causing Leigh, a Catholic, to repeatedly invoke Saint Thérèse.1940: The newlyweds were en route from Lisbon to Bristol. The cockpit of their plane burst into flames, eerily echoing a dream of Olivier’s.World War II: The debonair Olivier, enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy but a pilot “of notorious incompetence,” according to the writer and editor Michael Korda, crashed his own plane twice and was demoted to target-towing, parachute-packing and recruitment demonstrations.1946: On a trans-Atlantic flight from New York, the lovebirds glanced out the window and saw an engine on fire. The Pan Am Clipper turned back and hit the ground with a long, hard bounce in Connecticut.1948: Leigh got breathless at 11,000 feet over the Tasman Sea; the plane had to descend several thousand feet, and the actress was given an oxygen mask. Traveling by air in the ensuing years, she suffered flashbacks that required her to be restrained and sedated.Best remembered for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” (1939), Leigh had bipolar disorder, known in her lifetime as manic depression (she later contracted tuberculosis as well). She was brittle, winsome and sociable: “The only person in the world who could be charming while she was throwing up,” Korda’s uncle, the director and producer Alexander Korda, told him. But then she would toggle rapidly, and at first confoundingly, to fits of temper and nervous breakdowns. The medications and therapies that might have stabilized her weren’t common at the time.And thus her three-decade entanglement with Olivier, considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, was its own sort of doomed flight: It soared sharply into the heavens, then was rocked with turbulence before its inevitable tumble down to earth and straight through to hell.There have been many, many previous biographies of Leigh and several of Olivier (including one by his oldest son, Tarquin, from a first marriage to Jill Esmond); a memoir by Olivier, “Confessions of an Actor”; and a memoir by his third wife, Dame Joan Plowright. There has even been at least one book, “Love Scene” (1978), devoted specifically to the Olivier-Leigh romance.But Galloway, the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, is perhaps the first author to interpolate this oft-told story with commentary from contemporary mental-health experts, like Kay Redfield Jamison, the psychologist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder and wrote “An Unquiet Mind.” He accomplishes this smoothly, in a contribution to the LarViv literature that is — if not strictly essential — coherent, well-rounded and entertaining. To the couple’s tale of passion he adds compassion, along with the requisite lashings of gossip.Stephen Galloway, the author of “Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century.”Austin HargraveSome couples “meet cute.” Olivier espied Leigh playing a prostitute in “The Mask of Virtue” and was left “drunk with desire.” (They went on to get drunk on many other substances as well.) Unfortunately, they had both already married other people.The startlingly beautiful Leigh was born Vivian Hartley, an only child raised first in India and then shipped off to convent school in England. She took her stage surname from the middle name of her first husband, Herbert Holman. They had a daughter, Suzanne, but Leigh found the marriage “just another role in an interminable play,” Galloway writes, and “motherhood a repeat performance without the benefit of good writing.” The youngest of three siblings, Olivier lost his beloved mother when he was 12, and though less attached to his father — a clergyman of some oratorical gifts who “meted out affection in tranches, just like the Sunday roast he would cut into wafer-thin slices” — he was influenced by him to settle down early with Esmond. “That’s a noble idea,” Esmond responded when Olivier proposed for the second time. Trying to spice up their home life, he bought her a lemur from Harrods. The Brits are different.Leigh, Olivier and their spouses all became friends at garden parties, lunches and holidays. Reading how it all went down, quite civilized and drawing-room (Leigh asked Esmond how Larry liked his eggs cooked) but with plenty of jealousy, despair and child neglect, I was reminded of John Updike’s lesser-known infidelity novel, “Marry Me,” and Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal.” (Leigh, who excelled onstage as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” before bringing her to the silver screen, and Olivier, a Shakespearean virtuoso, both preferred the theater to mercenary moviedom.)That the scandal of their relationship had to be initially covered up for the morality clauses of Hollywood just as they were having their big breakthroughs there — Leigh in “Gone With the Wind”; Olivier as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” — surely only added to the excitement.Galloway clearly spent significant time in the archives (though frustratingly, a chunk of Leigh’s side of her correspondence with Olivier remains on the loose). Galloway splices this material seamlessly with old interviews and enough new ones with those Of That Era, such as Korda and Hayley Mills, to inject some pep and freshness. Re-encountering Leigh and Olivier’s highly literate fans, like Noël Coward and J.D. Salinger, and their foils, like the flamboyant critic Kenneth Tynan, is a treat. As are the old-fashioned words — like “martinet,” “popinjay” and “annealed” — that Galloway sprinkles through the text, the way Leigh strewed the beloved posies from her various country estates.This celebrated pair, whose doomed, disease-troubled love lends them a sheen denied to steadier partnerships, won between them half a dozen Oscars. It’s an enjoyable, disorienting sensation — as the Oscars now hemorrhage viewers and relevance — to find a time capsule from when movies and their stars didn’t just stream into our living rooms along with all the other space junk, but seemed the very center of the universe. More