But in a tiny casting room in the far corner of a bare-bones rehearsal studio, lethargy has been left at the door. The Oscar-nominated actor Paul Mescal is leaning toward me with quiet intensity. Nicole Kidman loved it so much she visited Mescal backstage. The London production, which won three Olivier Awards, including acting honors for Mescal and Vasan, is preparing for a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mescal, when I speak to him, is clearly delighted to be in rehearsals.
I find it dangerous. Streetcar is one of a trilogy of stripped-back Williams plays Frecknall has developed. With Streetcar, Frecknall wanted to overturn tropes that have dominated productions of the New Orleans—set show since the movie, starring Marlon Brando, came out in Yes, her take follows the unraveling of DuBois, an aging Southern belle, as she moves in with her younger sister, Stella, and her rough-edged brother-in-law, Stanley.
But this production feels more intimate, more empathetic—fairer to its antiheroine. And the audience feels that. And I think sometimes mine can be pretty close to the surface. I meet them in Ottolenghi, a bourgeois deli a few miles up the road, which on weekdays smells of baking pastries and Le Labo. Valencia-born, and raised in England and the Netherlands, the year-old Ferran is jittery and angular, wringing her hands and playing with the zipper on her shearling gilet.
She was a reluctant Blanche. When called up just days before the Almeida run opened—after original cast member Lydia Wilson got injured—she was unsure what to do. Frecknall was determined though.
The risks she took have allowed Blanche to feel like no other: less flighty, less flirty, more desperate, more witty. The actor, who grew up in Singapore and went to drama school in Cardiff, has a fierceness about her. What about feral reactions from fans at the stage door? Is he ready for that attention in Brooklyn?
