INHERIT THE PLAY

The return of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Ghosts.”

- BY HELEN SHAW

Anjana Vasan, Paul Mescal, and Patsy Ferran star in a modern-dress "Streetcar."

In early 1947, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote to the producer Irene Selznick because Elia Kazan, who had been tapped to direct the Broadway première of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” was balking. Who else could direct “Streetcar”? Williams rejected the suggestion of Tyrone Guthrie out of hand. “He is English,” he wrote. “This is an American play with a peculiarly local or provincial color.”

Nearly eighty years later, the English director Rebecca Frecknall’s highly physical, modern-dress “Streetcar,” which has arrived at BAM from the West End, is not the British production that would put Williams’s mind at ease. Ease is in itself a particularly Southern quality, but it’s nowhere to be found in the show’s stripped-down set, nor in the director’s expressionist interventions. As Frecknall did in last year’s “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” she externalizes subtext and mental states. In this “Streetcar,” which nominally takes place in New Orleans, an onstage drummer (Tom Penn) plays an ear-shattering score by Angus MacRae, making the audience as jumpy as poor, neurasthenic Blanche (Patsy Ferran), a spinster who moves in with her sister, Stella (Anjana Vasan), and her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley (Paul Mescal). Blanche is the play’s frail liar, its soiled dove, but the tidal boundary between her dreams and her delusions can be hard to—BANG BANGITY BANG CRASH!