In the summer of 1947, when Marlon Brando was young, beautiful and not yet famous, the director Elia Kazan gave him $20 to get himself to Provincetown, Mass., from New York to audition for Tennessee Williams.
Less than three years after bestowing “The Glass Menagerie” on the world, Williams had a new play on the fast track to Broadway: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which needed a Stanley Kowalski. But Brando, at 23, was in no hurry to get to Cape Cod. He pocketed the travel funds, hitchhiked there and turned up at Williams’s rented beach house days late.
Enticing little anecdote, isn’t it? Gregg Ostrin has taken that historical reality and run with it in “Kowalski,” a diverting new comedy that blends fact with speculation. Brandon Flynn stars as a rough and clever Brando opposite Robin Lord Taylor as a Williams whose default setting is high dudgeon.
“Let me make something clear,” the playwright tells the actor in a Southern lilt that stays, thank goodness, well this side of sorghum. “You can be late for Thornton Wilder. You can be late for Bill Inge. You can even be late for Arthur Miller. But you cannot be late for me.”
Directed by Colin Hanlon at the Duke on 42nd Street, “Kowalski” neatly sidesteps the largest trap lying in wait, because neither Taylor nor Flynn is doing an impersonation. Each is after an essence of his character, and finds it, satisfyingly.
That’s a crucial achievement, since mining treasures of theater history to make new work is always a double-edged endeavor. Audiences, like artists, love the prospect of a show that speaks a language we have already learned; familiarity helps at the box office. But our preexisting notions of who the characters are — whether because they were real-world celebrities or because they are borrowed from canonical dramas — can make us awfully tetchy about other artists’ riffs on them.
Like “Kowalski,” which flatters the audience’s knowledge of “Streetcar” and Stanley, two other current plays on Manhattan stages use classic dramas as points of departure: Barbara Cassidy’s “Mrs. Loman,” which imagines the widowed Linda Loman’s life after the end of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” and Forrest Malloy’s “Nina,” set among the student actresses at a conservatory where they perform Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” More about those shortly.
On a New Englandy set by David Gallo, with a whale weather vane atop the cottage, “Kowalski” finds the 36-year-old Williams living lovelessly and tempestuously with his younger boyfriend, Pancho (Sebastian Treviño in a thankless role). The director Margo Jones is also on hand, disgracefully underappreciated by Williams and portrayed so vibrantly by Alison Cimmet that it’s too bad the play has so little room for her. Jo (Ellie Ricker), the young actress who traveled to Provincetown with Brando, gets more of its attention.
The heart of the play is the cagey dance between Williams and Brando, each perhaps more interested in collaborating than he is willing to let on — though Williams ought to suspect Brando’s eagerness when (historical tidbit) he fixes not only Williams’s fuses but also his toilet. Instead, Williams phones Kazan, complaining that Brando “has not shown me one ounce of respect.” Tennessee, man, get a grip.
It isn’t a deep show, but it is fun. Taylor and Flynn make these two good company.
“Mrs. Loman,” directed by Meghan Finn at Theater Row, is much more serious-minded. In a note in the script, Cassidy writes that she admires “Death of a Salesman” but has “always had immense trouble with the female characters and the misogyny” that she perceives in the play. So she has envisioned Linda Loman (Monique Vukovic) reshaping a life that had been almost entirely focused on her now dead husband, Willy, and their two sons, Biff (Matt McGlade) and Happy (Hartley Parker).
It is an appealing prospect, yet the play is schematic, and Linda is disappointingly bland. She makes a new friend — the brash Esther (Linda Jones), who shows up at the Lomans’ house after Willy’s funeral with a dubious story about how she knew him — and begins to expand her world. But you can feel the playwright firmly pushing Linda and Esther together when they give in to a romantic chemistry that is, to the audience, undetectable.
The strongest performance comes from Ara Celia Butler as Lena, Biff’s girlfriend, ever watchful for opposition to their interracial relationship and other dangers of dating a Loman. The most vivid character is Happy, obnoxiously condescending to his mother and violently dangerous to other women. His rancidness finally stirs Linda to action, yet the play’s flatness blunts any catharsis.
“Mrs. Loman” wants to be, like “Death of a Salesman,” a potent social commentary. But it is reaching for something it hasn’t figured out how to grasp.
Directed by Katie Birenboim at Theaterlab, “Nina” is the most inside-baseball of these three plays, which is precisely what makes it tantalizing to the drama-school crowd.
In Malloy’s fictional, Juilliard-esque conservatory, five actresses in their 20s share a dressing room (the set is by Wilson Chin) during their final year of training. It will culminate, in the spring of 2016, with a production of “The Seagull,” a drama about theater artists and their dramas. Nina, the young actress who chooses the undeserving older man and the ill-advised path in Chekhov’s play, is for these young actresses the most coveted role.
Favored to get the part is Zoe (Katherine Reis), the teachers’ darling, and one teacher’s darling in particular. As she tells her classmate Kyla (Jasminn Johnson), who does not need the stress of such a confidence, Zoe is in love with their director, Andrew, who is 15 years her senior. But that is not the only secret to detonate among this group, which also includes the cautiously coupled up Erika (Aigner Mizzelle) and Lilith (Nina Grollman), as well as the rigid Cate (Francesca Carpanini).
Each of these roles is juicy, and each is fully inhabited. If there is a cast standout, it might be Mizzelle for the devastating softness she brings to lines that could easily, and less effectively, have an edge. But all of these performers are funny, and at least a little heartbreaking.
It is a #MeToo play, and generally a persuasive one. But it seems strange that John Patrick Shanley’s “the dreamer examines his pillow” comes in for such adoration from these millennial women, and that Joseph Campbell gets a shout-out. However influenced the students may be by their curriculum, these are more likely idols for fanboys than fangirls.
Chekhov’s Nina, though, traces a graceful ghost arc through the play, even as Kyla scoffs at the very notion of putting “The Seagull” on.
“No one wants to see a play about people who do plays,” she says. “It’s so self-indulgent.”
Sometimes, sure. But she’s wrong about the appetite for them. When they’re delicious, it can be ravenous.
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