Paul Mescal in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

The woman behind me gasped when Paul Mescal’s shirt came off. Meanwhile, I was getting a little breathless over Tennessee Williams. There are certain plays that, no matter the production, leap straight through your ears to your soul every time. Like listening to a Mozart aria, the experience is astonishing even if the performer isn’t quite a match for the material. But how much more thrilling it is when the whole orchestra is tuned up and ready for the downbeat, poised to pump life into a deathless score. That’s the case with Rebecca Frecknall’s swift, muscular revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, now visiting BAM after an Olivier-showered London run. Mescal, the bedroom-eyed star of Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, and the latest Gladiator, might be a big part of the draw — and his Stanley Kowalski is certainly a performance to raise pulses — but what’s really exciting is that he’s far from throwing off the balance of the show. Neither he nor the production’s Blanche DuBois, played by the elfin powder keg Patsy Ferran, is a preening soloist, subordinating their fellow actors. Instead, Frecknall revivifies Streetcar as a true ensemble piece — a haunting jazz symphony with a devastating trio at its center.

The musical metaphors are going to keep coming because a large part of what Frecknall has done with Williams’s 1948 Pulitzer winner is to strip it back to its essential rhythms — the ecstatic, intertwining poetry of its characters — and then to push the tempo. There’s no Spanish moss or quaintly ornamented gables to be seen on her stage, no meticulously rendered New Orleans architecture, no sounds of tinny piano or rumbling streetcars in the distance. Instead, scenic designer Madeleine Girling has provided the ten actors with a raised wooden platform and a simple wraparound balcony on the back wall (though it’s true that, inside the spacious proscenium of the BAM Harvey, the production team has replicated that curving brick wall from London’s Almeida Theatre, where Frecknall serves as associate artistic director and where this Streetcar premiered). The platform is everything — its outer lip becomes a threshold where characters can hover on the periphery of a scene or balance precariously as they navigate around it. At the same time, its limited size and its spareness convey both the claustrophobia of the home where Stanley lives with his wife, Stella — and where her sister Blanche arrives via the titular streetcar for one hot, catastrophic summer — and the lack of boundaries within it. “But there’s no door between the two rooms …,” frets Blanche to her sister when she arrives, “Will it be decent?” No, poor, soulsick Blanche, it will not. In Frecknall’s hands, it will often be, to steal more words from Williams’s high-strung heroine, “downright — bestial.”

Frecknall doesn’t just treat the play’s whitewater dialogue like a score; she adds a complementary live soundtrack of her own. Atop that balcony, often shrouded in thick, summery haze, sits a drummer (Tom Penn) at a full kit. He drops us smack into the top of the play with a resounding crash, and then we’re off like blazes. (Angus MacRae composed the driving percussion music, which also symbolically supplies any and all sounds the play calls for, from screeching street cats to the racket of an upstairs fight.) The lights sear and the actors caterwaul and jostle around the space, turning the play’s opening lines into a chaotic jazz riff, an evocation of the heat and hustle of summer in New Orleans. Stanley swings Stella (the thoughtful, radiant Anjana Vasan) around by the waist; their upstairs neighbors, Steve (Alexander Eliot) and Eunice Hubbel (Janet Etuk) chase and slap at each other; the men we’ll come to know as Stanley’s poker buddies—Pablo (Eduardo Ackerman) and the lonely, guileless Mitch (Dwane Walcott)—form a kind of vigorous, verging-on-menacing dance corps, sweeping around the space as the drums rattle and clash. Only two bodies remain still: Ferran’s, in one corner of the platform, and that of a young man (Jabez Sykes) diagonally across from her, tall and willowy and pale — two statues that seem moonlit while the rest of the world writhes and sweats around them. “Death,” shivers Blanche late in the play, after we know all about that young man, who he was to her and why his ghost still lingers. “The opposite is desire.” Without wasting an instant, Frecknall captures that inciting dichotomy in her first frenzied beats. The broiling drums will always urge us onwards, and Blanche will always be caught somewhere in the half-light, trapped in a different dance under a paper moon.

Streetcar isn’t a short play, and among this production’s achievements is a tenacious commitment to pace. Frecknall sets her metronome fast — faster than our American ears are used to hearing Wiliams’s filigreed dialogue, and the payoff is extraordinary. She sacrifices none of the play’s sweltering heat, but unlike so many evocations of that crucial atmosphere, hers never becomes lugubrious. No one lolls or drawls in this Streetcar; there’s no Vaseline on the lens. Even Blanche enters the action amped up to a place that, for a moment, I worried might cut Ferran off from continuing to build throughout the character’s long arc. But it didn’t take long, even with her slightly jangly Mississippi accent, for her to hook me. Her birdlike, dark-eyed form practically vibrates with anxiety — and why not? Blanche begins the play with what Williams describes as “faintly hysterical humor” and ends her first scene stammering, “I’m afraid I’m — going to be sick!” Why not strip away some of the plush, performatively genteel veneer the role has acquired and really play the circumstances? Blanche’s tendency to retreat into mood lighting, her assertion that “soft people” have got to “put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and glow,” has stuck in our communal consciousness — but what of her earlier declaration to Stanley, which I heard anew out of Ferran’s mouth: “I like an artist who paints in strong, bold colors, primary colors. I don’t like pinks and creams and I never cared for wish-washy people.” Thinking back, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Streetcar directed by a woman: What Frecknall’s hand means here is that Blanche’s journey is scarier from the offset, less veiled in sexiness, her complicated but fierce bond with her sister foregrounded, her desperation closer to the surface — and Stanley’s predatory determination to unmask her therefore all the more cruel.

What makes Mescal’s performance so riveting is that, without ever blunting or apologizing for Stanley’s cruelty, he also reveals the soft belly of the role, the vulnerability and hurt that, for a man in his world with his upbringing, can naturally lead to violence. “When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common,” he reminds Stella, who was raised with Blanche as part of the fading Southern aristocracy, at a former plantation called Belle Reve. “How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it… And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till she showed here?” It’s easy to play language like this with a thick nasty streak, a kind of bullish, spiteful triumph, but Mescal chooses a different path. He gives in to the memory; we can hear the desperate nostalgia, the pleading for a return to a time when his marriage felt whole. He and Vasan share real, tender chemistry, the kind that feels a little voyeuristic to watch — so crucial to the play yet so often swapped out for a more aggressive form of attraction. His voice is low, almost soothing when he’s not on a tear, and his movements are guarded, inquisitive, soft-footed.

Most Stanleys are dogs, leading with the chest, barking and biting at the first opportunity. Mescal’s is a big tomcat — watchful and beautiful to watch, sleek and almost loveable until he proves himself very, very dangerous. I’ve never seen an actor make more of the horrible moment when Stanley and Blanche finally encounter each other unleashed, late in the play, and as she tries to fend him off with a broken liquor bottle, he purrs, “Tiger — tiger!” Mescal doesn’t say the word — he becomes it, dropping to all fours and stretching voluptuously, fingers spread, eyes flashing, drawing out the syllables as if he’s playing some terrible game of hide-and-seek. The animal is fully present, merciless and hungry. It’s always lurking in a play like Streetcar, and Frecknall and her company have found a visceral new way to dance with it.

A Streetcar Named Desire is at BAM through April 6.