Rare is the review that ties Tennessee Williams to Mr. T. (Perhaps a drug test should be administered to the reviewer who does.) But, with deep apologies to the late, great playwright who's likely in mid-rollover in his grave ... well, what the hell:
I pity da fool who plays Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Not that Las Vegas Little Theatre's mounting is anything close to A Streetcar Named Disaster. But as with Beantown's Bosox, it may take generations to overcome the specter of a rotund, legendary force—call it the Curse of the Brandino.
It hexed Treat Williams on television in the '80s, vexed Alec Baldwin on Broadway in the '90s and perplexes a game Joshua Reisman on Schiff Drive, because rare also is the role so definitively sculpted by an actor—in Brando's case, one that launched an entire approach to acting—that its ghost haunts all who follow. It's unfair. Also undeniable.
Just choosing the play is as risky as it is gutsy.
You know the story: Neurotic Blanche DuBois, the ultimate virgin-whore, clings to her faded Southern refinement after her banishment from her Mississippi hometown for seducing a 17-year-old. She escapes to visit pregnant sister Stella in the French quarter of New Orleans where, amid the squalor that appalls her, she clashes with Stella's husband, guttural, sexually bold Stanley, who brutally punctures her pretensions.
But Reisman's Stanley is more of a well-spoken lug with ape-like outbursts, rather than the marginally civilized, animalistic-at-his-core Stanley that Williams wrote and Brando immortalized. Reisman's strut, his comportment, feel carefully coached, rather than organic—playing at Brando playing at Stanley. Even in T-shirt, jeans and cigarette tucked behind the ear, Reisman looks like he could walk off-set and into a GQ photo shoot, a dissonance emphasized when he tells Blanche, "I'm afraid I may strike you as the unrefined type." Fact is, this guy's struggling to suppress his innate civility.
Reisman is intimidating (see photo-scream, above) in full-bore roar—say, the infamous clear-the-dinner-place scene in which plates go airborne—but Stanley should be even more frightening in calm, coiled-spring mode, like an animal up on its haunches, about to strike at fragile, vulnerable Blanche. It's a crucial weapon missing from Reisman's stage arsenal.
Reisman's vocal performance is also distracting—a primitive growl that curiously curlicues into a Euro-style affectation (an attempted 'Nawlins drawl?) as if he's late for high tea with Her Heinie the Queen.
And when The Scene arrives—Hey, STEEEELLAAAA!—you can't help but sympathize with Reisman. As he launches into it, low giggles ripple through the audience. Not his fault. So iconic is the moment, so encased in the Museum of Dramatic History, that it stands outside the play, rather than woven into its fabric. It survives now only as a searing Brando memory or Saturday Night Live parody.
But this Streetcar is largely redeemed by a cluster of solid performances under the crisp direction of Waler Niejadlik. Tackling Tennessee once more (she powerfully essayed Maggie the Cat at LVLT a couple of seasons back), Anita Garland weaves a layered, and at times, heartbreaking performance as Blanche, while Deanne Grace's Stella is a grounded yet sexualized realist. Robert Cox invests Mitch, Stanley's best bud and Blanche's awkward—then enraged—suitor, with a shy, likable insecurity. And Kate C. Lowenhar and Scott Ast supply appropriately sassy, trashy support as upstairs neighbors Eunice and Steve.
Ron Lindblom's bi-level set is a thing of squalid beauty, brimming with depth, detail and dimension, and Glen Dunzweiler's sound work is an evocative aural pastiche of rumbling streetcars, mewling cats, roiling thunderstorms, church chimes and jazzy, sensual bass lines.
But the Brandino's overwhelming presence undermines yet another Desire. Though faulting an actor for not being Brando is like condemning the moon for not being the stars, it's also why so many Streetcars run off the rails.