Word: kowalski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tennessee Williams' heartfelt (if politically incorrect) telegram to Marlon Brando, on the opening night of A Streetcar Named Desire 51 years ago, got it right and got it wrong. The young actor, in his first starring role, sent it solid all right--sent it immortally. His performance as Stanley Kowalski, later repeated on film, provided one of our age's emblematic images, the defining portrait of mass man--shrewd, vulgar, ignorant, a rapacious threat to all that is gentle and civilized in our culture. He gave us something else too, this virtually unknown 23-year-old actor. For when...
...Stanley Kowalski, for example, may be a brute. But he's also a funny brute, slyly, sexily testing the gentility and hypocrisies by which his sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, lives as they contend for the soul of Stella, his wife and her sister. Streetcar's director, Elia Kazan, loved this performance because of the way Brando "challenges the whole system of politeness and good nature and good ethics and everything else." It was, of course, this rebelliousness that made Brando a hero to kids growing up in the '50s--and made him a star...
...then, everything had changed, collapsed, coalesced. An early fissure appears in 1951, when Brando brought Stanley Kowalski to the screen; the great beast was unleashed. With the mid-'50s eruptions of lurid B movies, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book and the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, the revolution was born. Now teenagers were the social arbiters, and their pleasure was to love stuff their parents hated. They renounced grownup culture (which was turning pappy and repetitive) for a language of their...
Buddha taught the use of compassion to relieve suffering. Ritual, dogma and temples are irrelevant, red herrings on the path to insight. Karma and reincarnation are merely clever carrot-and-stick tools for people who need them. Most of us can do without them. TOM KOWALSKI Atlanta...
...drowning out the dialogue every few minutes (a Streetcar Named Deafening). But nearly everything else in the production is delicate and understated, starting with Lange's touching and unfussy portrayal of Blanche. Toby Stephens (the son of actress Maggie Smith), an improbably fine-boned actor to be playing Stanley Kowalski, misses the brutishness (and the humor) that Marlon Brando forever stamped on the role. But who needs another Brando imitation? Stephens' Stanley is a credible alternative: a cocky bantamweight, less Brando than Cagney. And if his climactic sexual conquest of Blanche is more like a grapefruit in the face than...