Word: kowalski
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Nearly 30 years ago, Marlon Brando exploded on the Broadway stage as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Since then he has become the leading movie actor of his generation. Some of his films have been good; more have been awful. No matter. Audiences could always count on Brando for performances that were surprising, overwhelming in their power, sometimes perversely idiosyncratic-his foppish Mr. Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. At the very least, there was always an unforgettable moment or two, like the garden scene in The Godfather in which he mugs for his grandchild. Brando...
...prevent West Side Story. Tennessee Williams is luckier. When Director Charles Lang of West Berlin's Freie Volksbühne theater decided to stage a revisionist production of Williams' classic Streetcar Named Desire, he cast black actor Günther Kaufmann as the red necked Stanley Kowalski. Lang's other change was even more radical: rather than being raped by Kowalski, Blanche DuBois is seduced by him. Tennessee learned of Lang's plans just before the opening and immediately got an injunction to stop the performance. Ruling the show could go on, a three-judge panel...
...last. In the primary election in Illinois last week, a mass-transit proposal rode to victory while former U.S. Attorney Dakin Williams failed in his second bid for a Senate seat. He once said of an opponent, Roman C. Pucinski: "Poochie? The only thing he could be is Stanley Kowalski in the greatest American play ever written--A Streetcar Named Desire by my brother, Tennessee Williams, the greatest playwright who ever lived...
...play's leading characters, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche du Bois, symbolize the eternal struggle of earthy reality v. the romantic imagination, bestiality v. beauty. Of course, the symbols would possess little dramatic strength if the two characters were not vivid flesh-and-blood people. For the play to achieve its maximum emotional impact, much depends on a balance of forces and an electric tension between Stanley and Blanche. The Lincoln Center Repertory Theater revival is slightly, but naggingly off balance...
Inevitably, any actor who plays Kowalski has to cope with the memory of Marlon Brando in the original production. Brando not only exuded animal magnetism but also conveyed the inarticulate dignity of an animal. In the current production, James Farentino seems like a deliberate lowbrow, a slob who relishes being a slob. He comes across as meanspirited, and the scene in which he ravishes Blanche becomes a sordid rape instead of the elemental encounter implied by "We've had this date with each other from the beginning...