Paul Mescal is far from common

It starts with a drumbeat. A very, very loud drumbeat. We’re talking literal drums here. The drums don’t just punctuate the action of the latest revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater — they are a warning. Advance notice of the carnage, both emotional and physical, to come.

Williams’ play — first staged in 1947 — is about as stark as they come. A down-on-her luck Blanche DuBois travels to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski. To say Stanley does not appreciate the intrusion would be an understatement of epic proportions. He and Blanche butt heads from the start, with his savagery and her lies about what really happened back in Mississippi on a collision course.

Director Rebecca Frecknall leans into that starkness by stripping everything down to its barest bones. Tom Penn’s empathic drumming and Gabriela García’s occasional ethereal singing provide the soundtrack of French Quarter fear and self-loathing, while Medeleine Girling’s set design consists simply of a wood platform roughly 25 by 25 feet across laying on top of cinderblocks. No furniture. No walls. Nothing else. When not in a scene, cast members either circle or sit on the side of the stage, occasionally delivering pertinent props — a lot of liquor bottles, mostly — when necessary. The most high-tech the production gets is the occasional indoor rainstorm, as if the water can somehow wash away all that violence and shame. (Spoiler alert: It can’t.)

A lot of that violence and shame comes, of course, from the ball of rage that is Stanley, played here by Paul Mescal. To those used to seeing Mescal shine as the quiet and caring boyfriend on Normal People, watching the Irish heartthrob play a wife-beater and rapist stalking his prey with a maniacal grin is certainly a somewhat disturbing (and impressive) transformation. For anyone taking on this role, comparisons to Marlon Brando (who initiated the part on both stage and screen) are all but inevitable — none more so than when crouched on the ground yelling “Stelllla!” at the top of his lungs. But Mescal imbues his Stanley with a furious edge that shows not just a man being put-upon by his new guest, but one constantly put down by both his in-law and a society that sees him as “common.”

Patsy Ferran was initially a replacement for Blanche in the show’s original UK run after actress Lydia Wilson suffered an injury shortly before the opening, but she has more than made the role her own — which truly says something when you consider some of the names that have played this part before her, including Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, and Cate Blanchett, the last of whom played Blanche on this very same BAM stage. Ferran is a force of hysterical nature, painting in the strong, bold colors her character so professes to adore as the elder DuBois sister attempts to tune out reality by literally putting a paper lantern over the light.

Perhaps saddest of all is Anjana Vasan’s Stella, a seemingly practical and level-headed woman stuck between her needy sister and hot-tempered husband and unable — or unwilling — to escape either. Vassan plays Stella’s resignation with something almost bordering on a shoulder-shrug, which serves to make her plight all the more harrowing. While others may depend on the kindness of strangers, there is no kindness extended to Stella throughout the show’s two-hour-and-45-minute runtime.  

The committed cast and Frecknall’s wide-open staging combine to provide a stunningly combative performance in which no one can hide from each other or the ugly truths they care not to confront. “I don’t want realism,” Blanche famously says at one point. “I want magic.” Audiences watching this latest revival will receive plenty of both. Grade: A–