Theater : Williams, Not Brando, Laid Tracks for ‘Streetcar’

Marlon Brando’s autobiography, due next week from Random House, ought to have some deep thoughts about Stanley Kowalski and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the role and the play that made the actor famous nearly half a century ago.

But if “Songs My Mother Taught Me” turns out, like most celebrity memoirs, to offer more titillation than revelation, South Coast Repertory playgoers still have Jerry Patch to fall back on.

Patch, the troupe’s longtime dramaturge, has written some brief but intriguing newsletter notes for SCR’s season-opening revival of “Streetcar,” which begins previews tonight on the Mainstage in Costa Mesa.

“I think this play is arguably the most perfect play we have in the American theater, which is not to say it’s easy to do,” Patch said in an interview earlier this week. “Many ‘Streetcar’ revivals have not been successful.”

The most recent proof was a disappointing 1992 Broadway revival that defied the Hollywood star power of both Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin, according to various reviewers who found them a dull pair and the production a museum piece.

Back in 1973, Tennessee Williams could be heard guffawing at the “Streetcar” revival mounted in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre with Faye Dunaway and Jon Voight. The playwright apparently didn’t like Dunaway’s interpretation of Blanche Dubois, Stanley’s nemesis.

As for Voight’s interpretation of Stanley, then-Times theater critic Dan Sullivan wrote that it was “a parody of Marlon Brando’s original performance . . . complete with dese-dem-and-dose accent, but lacking Brando’s intensity.”

One of the key challenges in staging “Streetcar,” Patch said, “particularly for the actor doing Stanley, is to forget Brando ever did it.

“Williams wrote a character that had never been on the American stage before. He created an archetype--this really elemental, masculine man. Everybody credits Brando for the character. He had an animal presence on the stage. But what he did was essentially what Williams wrote. Brando became the archetype, when it’s Stanley who is the archetype.”

Brutish and bullying, Stanley Kowalski is more than just a sullen, flag-waving, hairy-chested lout who resents Blanche calling him a “Polack.” He is a primitive, menacing force of nature--crude and powerful and magnetic.

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If, as the critic Harold Clurman once said, “his mentality provides the soil for fascism, viewed not as a political movement but as a state of being,” he is nonetheless a naive victim of his own worst impulses.

“The audience loves Stanley for an act and a half,” Patch said. “And then it begins to realize he’s a rather dangerous man.”

For all his sexual swaggering, Stanley is as emotionally needy as Blanche, his high-strung, temperamental opposite. She, too, is an archetype--the neurasthenic embodiment of disenfranchised Southern aristocracy. Her gentility and sensitivity are real, if ridiculous.

As Clurman also noted, if the audience is too well entertained by Stanley’s “low jeering” and believes with him that Blanche is nothing more than a hysterical phony, the whole point of the play is lost.

Yet while Williams identifies with Blanche’s desperate loneliness--her longing for love and fulfillment are his as much as hers--he never fails to plumb the depth of Stanley’s feelings or frustrations.

“Williams was even-handed,” Patch said. “He showed both sides.”

This SCR revival, starring Kandis Chappell as Blanche and Jeff Meek as Stanley, will not be the company’s first production of the play. The troupe did it in the spring of 1968, during its fifth season.

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In that revival--staged by SCR artistic director Martin Benson, who is also staging this one--SCR founding artist Hal Landon Jr. played Stanley; Patch’s former wife, Cherie, played Blanche.

Anyone familiar with Landon’s SCR career in recent years would be hard-pressed to imagine him as Stanley. Apart from Scrooge, his perennial star turn in “A Christmas Carol,” the slightly built, soft-spoken actor has made a specialty (comic and otherwise) of lost souls, milquetoasts, dimwits and clergymen.

“He was a different sort of actor in 1968,” Patch recalled. “He went through a philosophical change over the years. We all have. At that time Hal caroused a lot. He was a big jock. Then he got to reading Eastern philosophy.”

SCR founding artist Don Took played Mitch, Stanley’s pal, in the troupe’s first “Streetcar.” Benson had to take over the role for one performance, though, when Took’s presence was required at an Army Reserve meeting. This time Took is playing the Doctor, and he’s no longer in the reserves.

If you plan to compare the 1951 movie of “Streetcar” with the play, remember that the recently restored version is still compromised by changes made in the script before shooting began to satisfy Hollywood’s Production Code censors.

“Even with the rape scene put back in,” Patch said, “you’re really getting a bowdlerized version of the play.”

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Elia Kazan, who directed the original Broadway production, also directed the movie. Brando reprised his role. So did Karl Malden (Mitch) and Kim Hunter (Blanche’s sister Stella, who is married to Stanley).

But Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche on Broadway, was passed over in favor of Vivien Leigh, who had played Blanche in London under her husband Laurence Olivier’s direction. Leigh, besides being a fine actress, was a screen star. Tandy was not, and neither were the others. The producers felt they needed at least one recognizable name on the marquee.

Hunter, Malden and Leigh all won Oscars--deservedly. But Brando, whose smoldering performance ignites the ensemble, did not. He was aced out by Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.”

* “A Streetcar Named Desire” begins previews today at 8 p.m. at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $16 to $26 The regular run opens Sept. 9. Performances are Tuesday to Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 9. $26 to $36; a pay-what-you-can performance will be Sept. 10 at 2:30 p.m., $5 minimum. (714) 957-4033.