Kowalski

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Tennessee Williams devoted two full pages to his first meeting with the then unknown Marlon Brando in Provincetown, Cape Cod, during the summer of 1947. It has been immortalized by his vacation guest, director Margo Jones, credited with founding the regional theater movement, by her declaration after the audition, “This is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard – in or outside of Texas!” Playwright Gregg Ostrin has written an entertaining and delightful conjecture as to that meeting in Kowalski now at The Duke on 42^nd Street with Robin Lord Tayor as Williams and Brandon Flynn as Brando. While it does require a knowledge of the more famous aspects of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, audiences who attend the new play will probably recognize it given the title named for its hero as well as the legendary movie in which Brando recreated his stage role.

The facts are these: although Williams and producer Irene Mayer Selznick were leaning toward film and stage star John Garfield playing Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway production of Streetcar set to open in December 1947, director Elia Kazan held out for the new young Marlon Brando who he has seen in his Theatre World Award winning performance in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, a quick flop that Kazan had co-produced the year before. Telling Williams that a young actor was on his way up to Provincetown to audition, he gave Brando $20 for the bus ride and sent him on his way. The broke Brando used the money for food and hitchhiked with a girlfriend, making him three days late. When Brando arrived, Williams was no longer expecting him and did not know who he was. Brando promptly fixed a power outage and the bathroom plumbing before Williams and Margo Jones heard him read for Stanley (which, in fact, he had prepared for with his audition for Kazan in New York.) And the rest, as they say, is history.

The play is framed as a flashback set in 1977 with the 66-year-old playwright being interviewed for television and asked about his first meeting with Brando. In the opening scene in 1947 Provincetown, we meet the anxious and tense 36-year-old Williams who is worried the critics won’t like his new and different play as much as they like his last, the 1945 The Glass Menagerie. His current lover, the muscular and lower class Pancho Rodriguez (Sebastian Treviño), abuses him while director Margo (Alison Cimmet) attempts to finish reading the recently completed script of A Streetcar Named Desire. She is mortally insulted when she discovers that Williams has chosen Elia Kazan of All My Sons fame to direct the Broadway production even though she had co-staged The Glass Menagerie to its legendary success. When the power fails, both Pancho and Margo leave to go to nearby Atlantic House for drinks and companionship. While Williams is out of the room, Brando finding the door open comes in and makes himself at home without being invited.

What follows is a cat and mouse game between Brando and Williams, with a swaggering Brando being flirtatious, arrogant, charming, mysterious, pugnacious, aggressive, and quick to anger. Williams, on the other hand, already a famous playwright, is behaving sophisticated, haughty, pompous and superior. Every action and statement Brando makes resembles Stanley, the part he is there to audition for: the way he sits with his legs spread wide open, his condescension towards the fascinated but fearful Williams, his disdain for famous film and stage stars who he feels just read lines, his implying that Williams is attracted to him. We never know for certain whether he has read the script until the end, but he certainly plays the part like he knows what is required to win the role.

Ostrin’s dialogue feels authentic, clever and cosmopolitan for these theater people, all over-dramatizing themselves and always “on stage.” Under Colin Hanlon’s assured direction, the play and the cast move smoothly to its expected resolution. (Don’t expect to see Brando’s audition: we have the Streetcar film instead.) Flynn has a great deal of charisma which he makes evident from the moment he appears on stage. Although he does not sound like Brando nor does he mumble, he gives off virility and testosterone, the two qualities that any Stanley needs. While his performance is very physical, it takes a while to see him as the later Brando we know from the movies.  As Williams, Taylor makes an excellent foil to Flynn’s Brando. He does seem a bit more fey and effeminate than one would expect for 1947 but Provincetown was not only gay friendly at that time but was a place one could go to be one’s self. As the famous playwright afraid he will not be able to impress the critics with his follow up to his first big stage success, Taylor is suitably nervous, irritable, uptight, apprehensive and catty.

As Margo Jones and Pancho Rodriguez, real people both, neither Cimmet nor Treviño are given enough to do but they make their presence felt: Cimmet is a bigger than life portrayal possibly taking her clue from Jones’ nickname “The Texas Tornado” while Treviño is convincing as the muscular gigolo who can wrap Williams around his little finger while at the same time being brash, threatening and hot-tempered, just the way the playwright seems to like it.  As Jo, Brando’s current girlfriend, a minor actress from New York, Ellie Ricker is excellent as an ingénue who knows her own limitations and is proficient at flattering Williams’ ego.

David Gallo’s atmospheric furnished beach house is marvelously detailed with its bar, living room and kitchen and a large archway to the unseen front door and unseen bedroom. The fussy flowered wallpaper and throw on the sofa suggest the sets for Williams’ own early plays and the hint of the garden on stage right is straight out of Williams’ own description in his memoirs. The set is enhanced by the authentic-looking props by Viveca Gardner. Lisa Zinni’s costumes, on the other hand, leave something to desired. Barndo’s grey tee shirt is not tight enough to give the desired Brando look and the color seems wrong. Williams’ sunshine yellow shirt with its large flap pockets seems too brightly colored for the 1940’s though it may be historically accurate. Margo’s dark outfits do not suggest vacation attire, particularly for someone from warm Texas. However, Pancho and Jo’s costumes are spot on.

Gregg Ostrin’s Kowalski is both entertaining and revealing, dramatizing Tennessee Williams at the height and Marlon Brando on the verge of his great success and the theater references are exactly right for the period. The playwright does not make any missteps recreating the 1947 period make us feel like a fly on the wall in Williams’ beach house. Director Colin Hanlon’s staging moves swiftly in this old-fashioned long one act play without scene breaks. The cast led by Robin Lord Taylor and Brandon Flynn seem to be reveling in their roles and give us an excellent show.

Kowalski (extended through February 23, 2025)

The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42^nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.KowalskiOnStage.com

Running time: one hour and 25 minutes without an intermission