Blanchett rides a clunky 'Streetcar Named Desire'
Photo credit: AP Photo/Lisa Tomasetti | In this theater publicity image released by the BAM Press Office, from left, Cate Blanchett stars as Blanche in a scene from the Sydney Theatre Company's revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater through Dec. 20, 2009, in New York.
Cate Blanchett in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'
Cate Blanchett shimmers like a wraith reflecting the spotlight at the beginning and the end of "A Streetcar Named Desire." This is as it should be. As the extraordinary Australian actress revealed in her riveting, eccentric, madly dangerous "Hedda Gabler" at BAM three years ago, she is every bit as compelling in the translucent flesh as she is up close on a big screen.
This time, she is taking on Blanche Dubois, another complicated, sacred-monster heroine who wears her nervous system excruciatingly close to her skin. Again, it is impossible to take one's eyes off of her. Alas, also again, she is the only justification for another sold-out visit from the middling Sydney Theatre Company, which she now runs with her playwright husband, Andrew Upton.
In theory, the production, which runs more than three hours, promises more than a star vehicle for a self-challenging, unpredictable, occasionally willful star. Liv Ullman, who knows from experience about luminescent acting, is making her American directing debut with Tennessee Williams' 1947 psycho-poetic masterwork.
But the result is some strange, tone-deaf and dislocated Scandinavian-Australian idea of working-class New Orleans. In an apparent effort to rip off the decades of romanticized atmosphere, Ullman ignores the lush mythic power of the Kowalski flat on Elysian Fields in favor of a squalid two-room tenement with filthy walls and beds as erotic as military cots. Instead of a struggle between brute reality and fading civilization, we get heavy-handed realism, interrupted by splatters of Williams' ripe, heavily symbolic language delivered in vaguely heehaw accents.
Blanchett's Blanche deconstructs into a mesmerizing mad scene, crawling under the bed in a harrowing attempt to escape being dragged to the asylum. Earlier in the evening, however, she does seem awfully confident, even sarcastic and playful, for a damaged woman running from a degrading secret past. She comes on to Stanley with more than mere coquetry, an outright betrayal to her sister Stella.
Joel Edgerton is more thug than animal power as a standard-issue, post-Brando Stanley Kowalski, saddled with a superfluous scene in which he displays his naked butt. Robin McLeavy has an earthy competence as Stella. The street life outside the flat is less evocative than an especially mean episode of "The Honeymooners." Significantly, the streetcar sounds more like a freight train than an image carrying desire.WHAT "A Streetcar Named Desire"
WHEN|WHERE BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., through Dec. 20
INFO $30-$120; 718-636-4100; BAM.org
BOTTOM LINE Streetcar as star vehicle.
