Review: Paul Mescal-led A Streetcar Named Desire Violently Crashes into 2025

Several times I found myself flinching and jumping in my seat during the Almeida Theatre revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which has just landed with a jarring crash at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Under the brutally effective, no-frills direction of Rebecca Frecknall, this modern classic emerges as the timeless tragedy of progress it was always meant to be.

Frecknall wastes no time with period atmospherics, marching the full cast onto a bare platform in the frenetic opening moments, when Blanche DuBois (Patsy Ferran) arrives in New Orleans to visit her sister Stella (Anjana Vasan). The plantation home where they were raised has been lost to generations of financial mismanagement. Stella’s working-class husband Stanley (Paul Mescal) suspects a lot of it went into Blanche’s fancy wardrobe.

Blanche is an exotic bird with no remaining natural habitat, and as the sticky Louisianna summer grinds on, it increasingly looks like Stanley and Stella’s dingy apartment is her new cage. But as Stanley’s rage festers and Stella’s belly swells with their first child, Blanche’s need to fly away becomes ever more desperate.

We feel Blanche’s mounting anxiety with every cymbal crash in Angus MacRae’s percussion compositions, which jangle our nerves and draw out the poetic rhythms in Williams’s script. Drummer Tom Penn presides high above the stage like a Greek deity dispensing fate, underscoring Blanche’s inevitable journey toward destruction.

Ferran is a revelation, delivering a Blanche for the 21^st century. Far from portraying the Southern belle trapped in amber (Vivien Leigh as Blanche in the 1951 film is one of the great casting triumphs of all time), Ferran delivers a thoroughly recognizable figure from our own time: a downwardly mobile superfluous elite who could easily walk among us in the streets of Brooklyn.

Mousy, tightly wound, and seemingly suffering from allergies that have blocked her nasal passages, this is a Blanche we can envision losing her shit over the perceived whiff of gluten in her gluten-free pasta. Her Sorkinesque soap box speeches about magic and courtly manners are operatic, but ultimately come to naught. While such histrionics might have elicited sympathy in a more civilized age, absolutely no one is rushing to retrieve the smelling salts—not even her own sister.

Vasan’s Stella is clear-eyed about the rough world she inhabits, having mentally left the plantation long ago. When Blanche asks her why she doesn’t leave Stanley, Stella replies, “I’m not in anything I want to get out of,” a poisonous blend of pity and resentment in her voice. Better to be with one abusive brute (a man with “drive”) than be brutalized by the world, as Blanche surely will be.

In this house of cruelty, it’s no wonder that Blanche is drawn to Mitch, Stanley’s co-worker and old army buddy, who is the only character to offer her the slightest indulgence. He is her last opportunity to escape. Dwane Walcott’s even-keeled speech and sturdy demeanor certainly passes for chivalry in this harsh environment, especially considering the man of the house.

While Marlon Brando endowed the role with a hint of boyish sensitivity, Mescal’s Stanley is all hardness and desire. His grin is that of an apex predator right before he devours you. His softly spoken lines are far more terrifying than the ones he shouts, crushing our spirits with the awful weight of anticipation.

Frecknall’s essential production magnifies these performances on Madeleine Girling’s pristinely uncluttered set, which still manages to deliver some elemental surprises. Merle Hensel’s costumes illuminate character without tying the production to a specific historical context (Blanche’s dainty sheer sleeves and Stanley’s tunic-like muscle shirt prove perfect choices). Sound designer Peter Rice further takes us into Blache’s fragile psyche as certain lines echo and reverberate. And Lee Curran’s unforgiving lighting serves as another one of Blanche’s many antagonists, breaking the delicate spells she works so hard to cast.

Blache’s magic is, of course, mostly perception—smoke and mirrors that can elicit oohs and ahhs until the children stop believing. Pulling back the curtain on a vaunted classic, Frecknall succeeds in exposing the true brutality of Streetcar, a story that those of us living in 2025 feel in our bones. Progress is not the arc of history bending toward justice, but the obliteration of decorum as the law of the jungle reestablishes itself—if it ever really went away.

For what are Blanche’s refined manners but a velvet glove on the iron fist of the plantation-owning class? Dress it up or strip it down—as Frecknall have breathtakingly done in this vital production of Streetcar—we still arrive at the same place: Stanley triumphant, and Blanche dependent on the kindness of strangers.