The theatrical landscape is a fickle mistress, capable of both breathtaking beauty and crushing disappointment. Two recent revivals – Rebecca Frecknall’s incandescently volatile A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM, and Jack O’Brien’s more glacial interpretation of Ibsen’s Ghosts at Lincoln Center – serve as potent reminders of this unpredictable nature. One production burns with a fierce, almost unbearable intensity, a wildfire consuming the stage; the other, a slow, creeping chill, leaving the audience shivering in its wake.
Frecknall’s Streetcar, starring the magnetic Paul Mescal as Stanley Kowalski and the hauntingly vulnerable Patsy Ferran as Blanche DuBois, is a masterclass in controlled chaos. Mescal, a force of nature barely contained within the confines of the set, embodies Stanley’s primal energy with a visceral intensity that leaves you breathless. He’s not just acting; he’s channeling the raw, animalistic power of desire, a raging river threatening to breach its banks. Ferran, meanwhile, gives a Blanche that’s both fragile and fiercely resilient, a moth drawn relentlessly to the flame of self-destruction. Her descent into madness is not a gradual decline, but a catastrophic implosion, a shattered mirror reflecting the fractured state of her soul.
This production doesn’t shy away from the play’s darker themes; it embraces them with a ferocity that’s both unsettling and exhilarating. The violence, both physical and psychological, is palpable, a constant undercurrent that threatens to engulf the characters, and indeed, the audience, in its turbulent wake. The set design, stripped bare to its essentials, amplifies the claustrophobia and desperation at the heart of Williams’ masterpiece, a stark canvas upon which the tragedy unfolds with brutal honesty.
In stark contrast, O’Brien’s Ghosts feels oddly muted, a whisper where one expects a scream. While Ibsen’s exploration of repressed desires and societal hypocrisy remains profoundly relevant, this production lacks the necessary spark to ignite the powder keg of the text. The performances, though competent, lack the fiery passion that Frecknall manages to extract from her cast. The staging feels static, the pacing deliberate to the point of inertia, like watching a glacier slowly grinding its way through a mountain. The play’s inherent tension is defused, replaced by a sense of detached observation.
The contrasting approaches highlight the inherent challenges in reviving classic texts. Frecknall demonstrates the power of bold reinterpretations, breathing new life into a familiar story, while O’Brien’s production feels like a respectful but ultimately timid homage, a missed opportunity to truly grapple with the play’s enduring power. One production embraces the raw, visceral energy of the text, the other remains trapped in its icy grip.
The story of the original Streetcar production’s troubled pre-Broadway run, with Elia Kazan initially struggling with the material, underscores the inherent risks in bringing such potent works to life. Williams’ letter to Irene Selznick, cited in the original news piece, reveals a creative tension, a wrestling match between directorial vision and the playwright’s intentions. This tension, this struggle for control, is ironically mirrored by the wildly divergent approaches of Frecknall and O’Brien, demonstrating that the challenge of staging a classic is not merely about faithful reproduction but about daring to reinterpret and to reimagine, risking both triumph and failure in the pursuit of theatrical alchemy.
Ultimately, these two productions offer a compelling study in contrasts, a reminder that even the most iconic plays are capable of yielding vastly different, and equally compelling, interpretations. While Frecknall’s Streetcar leaves you scorched but exhilarated, O’Brien’s Ghosts leaves a lingering sense of unfulfilled potential. Both, however, are crucial contributions to the ongoing conversation surrounding these timeless masterpieces.
