Tuesday, April 26, 2005
^ Back to michaelpaulwhelan's Photos
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Natasha Richardson as a Blanche with a deep sexual hunger but an ambivalence, too, in the Roundabout's "Streetcar Named Desire." THEATER REVIEW | 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE' A Weak Erotic Charge Flickers in the New Orleans Heat By BEN BRANTLEY Somebody has to tell Blanche DuBois, who is having her latest nervous breakdown at the theater at Studio 54, that she really doesn't need to worry so much. You know all that ducking from harsh lighting and fretting about her faded beauty that she's famous for? Well, as incarnated by a truly radiant Natasha Richardson in the production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" that opened last night, Miss DuBois appears as pretty, dewy and healthy as a newly ripened, unbruised peach. Let them bring on those naked light bulbs, Blanche honey. You look marvelous. As to Blanche's anxieties about her brutish, sexually magnetic brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, she can put her mind to rest there, too. John C. Reilly is portraying Stanley in Edward Hall's revival for the Roundabout Theater Company of Tennessee Williams's 1947 masterwork, and Mr. Reilly seems neither threatening nor - how to put this? - erotically overwhelming. True, he can be kind of loud sometimes. But you sense a real mensch beneath the bluster. Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in "The Honeymooners." That's our Stanley, as Mr. Reilly presents him. So now that we've taken care of the problems that were causing such an unnecessary uproar in the squalid Kowalski household in New Orleans, why don't we all go out and have a friendly beer together? Because without credible conflict and crisis, there isn't much of a play. All right, I'm exaggerating, but just a little. Mr. Hall's generally straightforward staging of "Streetcar" isn't the hazy, misguided mess that David Leveaux's current production of Williams's "Glass Menagerie" is. And Ms. Richardson, an actress of shining skills and unexpected insights, is always worth watching. But like Mr. Leveaux's "Menagerie," which features the movie stars Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in roles they were not born to play, this "Streetcar" suffers from fundamental mismatches of parts and performers. The capricious gods of casting have not been kind to Tennessee Williams of late. This "Streetcar" follows last spring's production, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, which was most memorable for the perversely witty wiliness of its Blanche, played by Patricia Clarkson, and the matter-of-fact sensuality of Amy Ryan, who portrayed Stella, Blanche's sensible sister. Happily, Ms. Ryan is on hand for this production, too, and she again lends the show an anchor of authenticity that keeps it from drifting altogether into the clouds of unbelievability. Yet for all her admirable efforts, Ms. Ryan's Stella has problems connecting with her hunk of meat of a husband, Stanley, and her fey sister. (This is not, for the record, Ms. Ryan's fault.) Worse, there's not a flicker of that destructive chemistry that is supposed to flare when the hoity-toity Blanche, who grew up on a grand Mississippi estate, drops in on Stella and Stanley's slovenly digs for an extended stay. Since "Streetcar" is all about what happens when worlds and psyches collide, this lack of emotional contact leaves the audience dry when it should be wet with anxious sweat and tears. Though Ms. Ryan turns in the production's only fully integrated performance, it is nonetheless Ms. Richardson, who has more effectively harnessed her star power for the Roundabout in "Cabaret" and "Anna Christie," who makes this "Streetcar" worth consideration by hard-core Williams devotees. Of all the great lady basket cases of the theater - a roster that includes Ophelia, Strindberg's Miss Julie and Mary Tyrone (of "Long Day's Journey Into Night") - the ethereal but erotic Blanche DuBois may well be the hardest, er, nut to crack. Ms. Richardson definitely has some tantalizing ideas about solving the puzzle. More than any other Blanche I've seen (except for Vivien Leigh's still definitive version in Elia Kazan's 1951 film), Ms. Richardson is not afraid to evoke her character's real and deep sexual hunger as well as her ambivalence about it. A worldly, exhausted knowingness pervades this Blanche's dealings with the opposite sex. When she is testing her charms on Stanley, a handsome newspaper boy (Will Toale) or even Stanley's pal Mitch (Chris Bauer), with whom Blanche pretends to be a lady of virtue, she registers that she is fully aware that the final goal of such game-playing is good old fornication. When she says to Stella that the only thing a man like Stanley is good for is bed, you sense that she is speaking from experience as well as from contempt. And when she drunkenly and lyrically recalls slipping out to meet soldiers at night in earlier years, her robe falls from her shoulders and her face assumes a self-hypnotized glaze that reconciles the carnal and the poetic. The problem - and it is, let's face it, a really big problem - is that this Blanche never seems all that vulnerable. Ms. Richardson has a couple of moments of searing, outraged pain, as when Blanche describes her young husband's suicide. But her means of signaling imminent nervous collapse is to make her voice and hands tremble, and these vibrations often feel artificially switched-on. And Ms. Richardson's uncannily fresh face does not bear the marks of suffering. Mr. Reilly, so brilliant in Sam Shepard's "True West" and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, would have been perfect as the awkward, gentlemanly Mitch, a role he has played elsewhere. But while Stanley does not have to be a beauty like the young Marlon Brando, who created the part, he does need to exude strong sexual promise and menace, neither of which is in Mr. Reilly's goofy portrait of him. The deep-voiced Mr. Bauer, who portrays Mitch here, comes closer to being harshly animalistic, like a redneck out of "Deliverance." This is not the way things should be. Under the busy staging of Mr. Hall, a young British director on the rise and the son of the august Sir Peter, the dramatic timing often goes slack, even in crucial climactic moments like Blanche's rape and the final aborted fight between Mitch and Stanley. Mr. Hall uses Robert Brill's two-tiered set (which bears a resemblance to that of the current "Menagerie" by Tom Pye) and the aisles of the theater to create one of those noisy, street-peopled mise-en-scènes in which a city becomes a main character. But the hubbub fails to distract from our awareness that there is a silence at the center of things, one that should be filled with the painful clang of clashing souls. 'A Streetcar Named Desire' By Tennessee Williams; directed by Edward Hall; sets by Robert Brill; costumes by William Ivey Long; lighting by Donald Holder; original music and sound by John Gromada; hair and wig design by Paul Huntley; production stage manager, Jane Grey; dialect coach, Deborah Hecht; fight direction by Rick Sordelet; associate director, Barbara Rubin; technical supervisor, Steve Beers; general manager, Sydney Beers; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis; director of marketing, David B. Steffen. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Ellen Richard, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director, external affairs. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street; (212) 719-1300. Through July 3. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes. WITH: Natasha Richardson (Blanche DuBois), John C. Reilly (Stanley Kowalski), Amy Ryan (Stella Kowalski), Chris Bauer (Mitch), Wanda L. Houston (A Negro Woman), Kristine Nielsen (Eunice Hubbell), Scott Sowers (Steve Hubbell), Frank Pando (Pablo Gonzales), Will Toale (A Young Collector), Teresa Yenque (A Mexican Woman), John Carter (A Doctor) and Barbara Sims (A Nurse). Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
&
