It takes me a second to remember when I see Paul Mescal taking his shirt off that it’s Paul Mescal taking his shirt off. This white slab of torso flashing before my eyes is famous-guy torso, Sally Rooney hive wet-dream torso, now masquerading as boorish commoner torso in A Streetcar Named Desire. The 29-year-old Irish actor stars as Stanley Kowalski in Rebecca Frecknall’s smash revival of the Tennessee Williams play. It sold out two runs on London’s West End before moving to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it sold out again. Mescal fans have hauled ass to see him, enduring multi-hour online queues, steep ticket prices, and other fans jostling them for space around the stage door for a glimpse. One of them, blatantly violating BAM’s no-phones policy, posted a TikTok of him bowing in his muscle tank and captioned it “The view from the play I shaved my whole body for.”
Loitering in BAM’s Harvey Theater three hours before the show, I saw Mescal eating Mediterranean food from a paper plate, looking like a normal guy in Brooklyn. And to Streetcar’s opening-night attendees, he kind of was. The average age of the crowd was about 40, and most of the people I talked to were motivated by pure devotion to the theatrical arts. I asked Judy Fishman, board chair of Mark Morris Dance Company and wife of former BAM chairman Alan Fishman, whether she followed Mescal. “Not really,” she replied. What about others in her circle? “No, sorry.” A fabulous septuagenarian who sees up to four plays a week told me she’d only watched him on Saturday Night Live. There were barely any celebrities, though the guy at the front of the standby line told me that he’d heard Bong Joon Ho and Charlie Kaufman had been in the audience earlier this week. He was also Mescal agnostic.
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Well, I was there for Mescal—though during the show when he took off his pants too, I thought, That’s enough. The last time Streetcar was staged at BAM, it was 2009, with Cate Blanchett as Blanche and Joel Edgerton as Stanley — 58 years after Vivien Leigh’s Oscar-winning performance in Elia Kazan’s film adaptation of the play. Streetcar follows a Southern belle named Blanche DuBois who flees to New Orleans to live with her sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley, after a mysterious fall from grace. The play feeds off the antagonism between Blanche and Stanley — one an uppity coquette with a trunkful of furs and the other a blue-collar brute — as they battle for dominance in the Kowalskis’ cramped apartment. Blanche is a brittle beauty, but she emasculates Stanley, reducing the king of the house to a “Polack” and “pig.” He bullies her, aware that she has nowhere else to run.
I came to BAM curious whether Mescal, who is famous for his wounded sensitivity, could really play a chauvinist. And he can. Though his Southern accent feels all over the place — generally the actors seem to forget their drawls when they yell — he gives a genuinely terrifying performance. Madeleine Girling’s bare-bones set, little more than a wood-plank platform, functions as a holding pen around which he prowls, leery then suddenly violent. He licks his fingers, crawls on all fours, smashes chairs. To Blanche, Stanley is not just an unworthy husband but an ominous symbol of cultural decline: “In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching … Don’t hang back with the brutes!” she warns Stella. The concept of humiliated men dragging civilization back into ignorance, wielding force to compensate for a sense of powerlessness, undoubtedly calls the present to mind. The audience certainly seemed to be thinking of Donald Trump. When Stanley references “the president of the United States,” they laughed uncomfortably.
But Stanley is actually referring to Blanche and her promiscuous hometown reputation: “She is as famous in Laurel as if she was the president of the United States, only she is not respected by any party!” Witnessing Streetcar in full form — I’ve only seen the film, which abridges the story — I became more attuned to Blanche’s bigotry and predatory past. “I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children,” she says. Simultaneously, I felt frustrated by the play’s loss of subtlety in Frecknall’s hands. The characters shout frequently, arguably too much. Subtext becomes text. When Blanche monologues about the pressure of having to “put out” at 30, it registers as an attempt to address the current moment — in part because she speaks so frankly. Patsy Ferran sheds Blanche’s tense glamour and polite euphemisms, which makes her not seem like Blanche at all. And so the play feels confused, suspended somewhere between the 1940s and now, minimalist Gap-style outfits paired with old-fashioned accents. At various points, rain floods the stage, actors break out in dance, and a woman sings in Spanish during a kind of Lynchian interlude. I wondered what anyone who wasn’t already familiar with Streetcar would have made of it all. After the play ended, I walked over to the after-party at BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building, ruminating on it. Mescal was there, and I nearly missed him — a normal guy after all.
