[italic]To imitate Brando would be hopeless, but Voight's studious attempt to underplay the role is almost as disastrous. His relatively quiet, halting, ineffectual Stanley makes little sense on any level. He even throws the dishes politely. Voight simply has no menace; we never believe that he has the power to destroy Blanche.
Unlike Voight, Faye Dunaway has had a very uneven film career. Often mannered and uncontrolled in her serious roles, she has shown a flair for comedy—which she uses to build her riveting, original interpretation of Blanche. It must be a rare production when Blanche gets more laughs ihan Stanley, but that happens here. Dunaway's timing is expert; in the scene in which Stanley interrogates her about her loss of the family estate, she teasingly holds her own, and when she summarizes’ Stanley for her sister Stella (indifferently played by Lee McCain), her sarcasm is wither ing. Even in the harrowing final scene, Dunaway finds the comedy in Blanche's’ prediction that she will die of :eating an unwashed grape. By making the most of this survival humor, Dunaway allows us to see‘ the strength of Blanche's sensitivity. Her Blanche is not easily destroyed; she has resources.
In other moments, Dunaway controls the pathos of the long memory speeches, and her hysterical outbursts have a frightening charge to them. The one thing that eludes her is Blanche's fragile poetry. During the scene with the young newspaper boy, the audience laughs. When Vivien Leigh played the scene, the tenderness of her yearning took away all the tawdriness. Dunaway is remarkably impressive but she misses the lyricism; there are no transcendent moments in her performance.
Admittedly, Dunaway doesn't seem to have had much help from the director in apprehending the poetic level of “Streetcar.” James Bridges never achieves the dreamlike atmosphere that this play about illusion re quires. His direction is efficient and decent enough, but, depressingly literal‐minded. When the old flower‐sellerone of the playwright's less felicitous devices has to hawk her flowers of death, she lands on stage with a symbolic thud. Couldn't she have been dispensed with, or at least turned into a more bizarre nightmare apparition? Nothing teases the imagination in this plodding, prosaic “Streetcar.”
Bridges may have been inhibited by the management of the Music Center—Los Angeles’ equivalent of Lincoln Center. The board of directors of the Center Theater Group — wives of Los Ange les millionaires and movie notables like Rosalind Russell, George Cukor, Charlton Heston, Ross Hunter, George Seaton and Lew Wasserman —manage to put their middlebrow stamp on most productions at the Ahmanson. Controversy and experimentation are verboten—unless imported from England. “A Streetcar Named Desire” gets the stiff prestige treatment that the Ahmanson audience has come to expect; it has been mounted for museum exhibition — and it's really too early for that.
Considering all these obstacles, Tennessee Williams comes through virtually unscathed. The language of the play is still exhilarating; and in spite of all the social changes that might seem to have undermined “Streetcar,” it continues to speak to our concerns. The production doesn't help to clarify the pertinent issues, but one of the things that intrigued me on this viewing was Williams’ perception of the destructiveness of sexual role‐playing. Blanche plays the demure southern maiden, the fluttery coquette, but it is wrong to see her as a sheltered flower, a doomed butterfly too frail for the world. She has probably suffered and survived more than Stanley and she has not been defeated. [/italic]
(CONT'D)
