The acclaimed Young Vic production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” brings Gillian Anderson (“X-Files”) back to New York in what is widely considered the Everest of female roles in theatrical literature: Blanche DuBois. The production of the Tennessee Williams classic opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on May 1 and its run has already been extended through June 4 due to high ticket demand.Anderson follows in a role trail blazed first in 1947 by Jessica Tandy and brought to new heights by Vivien Leigh in the London stage production two years later. Leigh also starred in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation, for which she won the Academy Award, as did Marlon Brando, who re-created his stunning stage performance of the brutish antagonist, Stanley Kowalski.In “Follies of God,” James Grissom’s brilliant new biography of Williams, the playwright charts the emotional arc of his most famous and heartbreaking character. “Blanche must always be ready to break, as well as ready to re-assemble and try a new tactic to survive,” he told his biographer. “If I had to give an actress only one salient fact about Blanche, it is this: she is utterly unsure of herself and her surrounds. She has no faith in anything or anyone around her.”The actresses who’ve assayed Blanche since her unveiling — Tallulah Bankhead, Rosemary Harris, Jessica Lange, Natasha Richardson, and Glenn Close — have often stumbled on the role’s tricky combination of poetic fantasy and animal vigor. But, according to the critics, Anderson deftly avoided its landmines in Australian director Benedict Andrews’s take, which premiered at London’s New Vic in 2014.“I staggered out of this shattering production of Tennessee Williams’s bruising modern classic feeling shaken, stirred and close to tears,” the critic Charles Spencer wrote in The Telegraph. “Never have I seen a production of the play that was so raw in its emotion, so violent and so deeply upsetting … The show lasts three and a half hours, but there isn’t a moment when the tension slackens or attention lapses. It is an absolute knockout.”Paul Taylor of The Independent also raved. “Anderson starts off as a slyly witty Blanche, her honeyed Southern draw a perfect vehicle for barbed tactical tactlessness and she seems to have the upper hand in her electrically risky relationship with Ben Foster’s hirsute, sweaty, exhibitionistic and macho Stanley.”That upper hand, of course, cannot last for someone who has, famously, always relied on the kindness of strangers. The “cleft in the rock of the world” that Blanche seeks to hide in turns out to be a trap. But the journey of getting there has always been one of the most sublime experiences that the theater has to offer, one that has inspired writers for decades, including Woody Allen. The filmmaker’s “Blue Jasmine” won an Oscar for Cate Blanchett as a Blanche-like woman hopelessly lost in the false safety of her delusions.Last year, Anderson directed a short film, “The Departure,” as part of her exploration of Blanche. It serves as a prequel to the events of “Streetcar” and centers around the legal tangle that forces Blanche to seek sanctuary with her sister Stella and husband Stanley in New Orleans. When a policeman advises to get out of town because of her scandalous dalliance with an underage teen, she tells him, “My sister lives in a palace, dozens of rooms, and cool air. More than one refrigerator, all the help that money can buy.”Of course, what Blanche encounters once she alights from a streetcar named desire and into the smoky tenements of Elysian Fields is far from heaven.
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