The production of A Streetcar Named Desire that opened last week at the Ethel Barrymore is a big disappointment. It has a cuddly, avuncular Stanley (Alec Baldwin), a Stella (Amy Madigan) out of a Carol Burnett skit, and a set (by Ben Edwards) that seems to locate Tennessee Williams’ French Quarter firmly in the world of Charles Addams. It also has a lot of embarrassing staging, and a number of performances that seem to have nothing to do with each other or with the play. In fact, just about the only things the revival has going for it are the courage and the intelligence of Jessica Lange, whose dignity in the role of Blanche DuBois is all the more remarkable in view of how little experience she’s had performing onstage.
The prospect of a dignified Blanche DuBois—one with no temperament, no penchant for histrionics, who isn’t contemptible, hypocritical, or a disguised homosexual—was always interesting. And who better to reinterpret Williams’ shopworn heroine than Miss Lange, who has spent so much of her career projecting images of womanhood and reinterpreting American icons—Faye Wray, Lana Turner, Ma Joad, Patsy Cline (the list goes on)—not through any conscious choice, one senses, but because her gift is for commenting without making a statement. Unfortunately, in the current production all her acting is “for the camera.” Her speeches are unbearably, killingly slow—and they get slower as the evening wears on. (The show came down at ten past eleven the night I attended.) No one seems to have explained to her that stage time and screen time are two different things, that in a theater there’s no lens to focus the audience’s attention, no editing to control the pace. From the moment she walks onstage, you feel that you know what Miss Lange is about—trying to rescue the role from decades’ worth of assumptions, trying to play the character from her own point of view rather than from the outside. You only wish that the director, Gregory Mosher, had been able to help her work out what this means in specific terms.
Actually, though, her greatest problems have to do with what’s going on around her—particularly with Mr. Baldwin, who is playing some sort of cross between Nicely-Nicely Johnson and the husband on “Married with Children.” He’s a boob, this Stanley—comical, harmless, and a little pathetic. There’s no meanness in him, no contempt for Blanche, no wounded masculinity, no sense of stalking a trapped animal. There’s no menace in Baldwin’s performance at all—he often seems to be on the verge of tears—and above all no irony.
But Stanley’s irony is precisely what makes him so threatening to Blanche. Her tragedy consists almost entirely in the fact that Stanley thinks he’s so smart. Mr. Baldwin’s Stanley doesn’t think he’s smart. He just wants to get into the bathroom. Still, the inefficacy of Mr. Baldwin’s Stanley is nothing compared to the almost transcendent awfulness of Amy Madigan. She is like a dry stick of wood. What with her shrill, brassy, unmodulated voice and her phony trailer-trash accent—“see-is” for “serious,” “tehbul” for “terrible,” “ma-ehd” for “married,” and “Ah suttently we-il”—you don’t know where to look. Even Kevin Rigdon’s lighting, hurrying us out of scene after scene, seems embarrassed.
It’s too bad about the casting and the direction, because you get a sense of how good Lange could be from the scenes with Mitch (Timothy Carhart) and the paper boy (Matt McGrath)—scenes in which she has someone to play to. Mr. Carhart is terrific, but, like Mr. McGrath (who’s charmingly unaffected, though you never really understand what Blanche wants with the paperboy), he doesn’t appear to be on quite the same wavelength as Miss Lange. Still, the acting is so honest and on-the-ball that it seems on the verge of some lovely truth. You want to stop the performers and ask if there’s a director in the house.
There’s nothing honest about the performances that Lloyd Richard has elicited from the actors in August Wilson’s new play, “Two Trains Running,” which opened last week at the Walker Kerr. The fifth in Wilson’s steadily emerging cycle of dramas about black life in twentieth-century industrial America (he sets each on in a different decade), this installment takes place in 1969 and is remarkable for containing nothing in the way of verbiage, action, or event that is not freighted with Meaning.
The setting is a luncheonette where characters seem to congregate chiefly for the purpose of making speeches and even the condiments have symbolic content. Memphis (Al White), who owns the luncheonette and the building it’s in and is trying to figure out how to keep the white man from cheating him, represents the Old South, while Sterling (Larry Fishburne), just out of prison and having a hard time making a go of things, represents the new generation of urban youth. Wolf (Anthony Chisolm), a numbers runner who shares with Sterling an interest in Risa (Cynthia Martells), the young woman who works the lunch counter, represents the black man’s unwitting complicity in cheating his brothers. Risa herself, whose legs are covered with razor scars—self-inflicted, to make sure that men appreciate her for something other than beauty or sex—represents the problem of self-esteem that black women are faced with. There’s also Holloway (Roscoe Lee Brown), the retired housepainter who seems to spend most of his time at Memphis’s restaurant, and the undertaker, West (Chuck Paterson), whose funeral parlor is just across the way. I guess they represent life and death, respectively—according to a press release, these are the “two trains” of Wilson’s title—while Hambone (Sullivan Walker), one of those mentally handicapped prophets that Wilson has a weakness for, represents an unwillingness to accept whatever gets thrown one’s way.
Nine and a half years ago, Hambone painted a white man’s fence on the understanding that he would get a ham in return. He was given a chicken, and he’s never forgotten it. Some people think Hambone’s crazy, but Risa thinks he’s probably got “more sense than any of us,” even though, until he learns from Sterling how to say “Black is beautiful!” before expiring of terminal symbolism, the only two phrases he ever utters are “He gonna give me my ham” and “I want my ham.”
There’s something awe-inspiring about a play in which absolutely nothing happens that doesn’t have to do with race relations or underline some aspect of the black character. All the same, I like my August Wilson a little subtler, with action as well as symbolism—as in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the only one of Wilson’s plays I haven’t found it a chore to sit through. This sort of in-your-face allegory is exhausting, as is the attention-getting kind of performance it fosters. In the current play, the worst offenders are Miss Martells, who makes a running gag of moving very slowly—like a camel through water—and wears a perpetual expression of pained bafflement, to show how much and how unjustly she has suffered, and Mr. Walker, who plays Hambone like a down-home Smike. For the most part, the play is a chance to watch characters rant and speechify themselves out of existence, while Roscoe Lee Brown looks on, smiling indulgently, and trying to seem attentive.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 27, 1992