Kowalski
Gregg Ostrin
Directed by Colin Hanlon
The Duke on 42nd Street
Jan. 25 – Feb. 23, 2025
In theater school, I had a teacher who was fond of relaying an anecdote about Marlon Brando in the film, A Streetcar Named Desire. There’s a moment where an errant feather from one of Blanche’s boas drifts across his eyeline, and Brando flicks it with his finger without breaking his focus, incorporating the stray object into the scene and, by extension, his character. It was that brand of naturalism that revolutionized screen acting, but the new play Kowalski meets the actor, and the playwright who created this breakout role, before the mystique had taken hold.
Gregg Ostrin’s play begins in 1977 with a sozzled and garrulous Tennessee Williams (played by Robin Lord Taylor), camping it up and flirting with the (unseen) host of a TV chat show, until a pointed question leads him to recall his first providential meeting with Brando. This being a memory play, in an appropriate nod to the playwright in question, we’re transported back thirty years prior to Williams’ clapboard beach house in Provincetown, where the toilet’s backed up, the electricity is on the fritz, and his hunky, testy lover Pancho (played by Sebastian Treviño) is off to cruise sailors at the A-House. Williams is showing the script of his newly completed play, his follow up to The Glass Menagerie, to Margo Jones (played by Alison Cimmet), the Texan director who rescued his production of Menagerie, but who he’s bypassing now for theatrical hitmaker Elia Kazan.
It’s Kazan who wants Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski, and he supposedly palmed the actor $20 for bus fare from New York to Cape Cod to read for Williams. It’s from this kernel of theater history that Ostrin’s play extrapolates out of, spinning out a tale of professional and personal dynamics. When Brando (Brandon Flynn) arrives three days late, after pocketing the cash and hitchhiking from New York, he enters David Gallo’s lived-in beach house set with a confident swagger. Some light farce ensues when Williams discovers the young man in his home, confusing the actor for a smitten fan, or a bit of eager trade, and is ready to be wooed. And he is, just not in the manner he’s expecting.
Compressing the action to this one single night, the meat of the show is the back and forth between this odd couple. While other characters appear in the story, this is essentially a two-hander. Initially we’re meant to think they’re assessing each other across broadly drawn binaries—brains and brawn, effete and masculine, intellect and instinct—until we understand Ostrin has been subtly tweaking those expectations throughout. The collision of personalities and game of one upmanship is fueled by a steady stream of liquor (no beer, to Brando’s dismay), as the pair banter and bond over bullying fathers and a hatred of critics. When Williams critiques Brando’s mumbly speaking voice, he falls to his knees and performs a crystal-clear recitation of one of Hamlet’s soliloquies. As they dig into each other, there seems to be a question of who’s authentic in this theatrical milieu—is it Tom who goes by his nickname Tennessee, or Marlon Brando Jr., who doesn’t want to be associated with his father and whose girl calls him by his nickname ‘Bud’?
Colin Hanlon directs the brisk eighty-five minute play, and even though the supporting roles are somewhat thankless they are well-crafted, especially Ellie Ricker as Jo, Brando’s lady friend, who’s initially starstruck by Williams and overjoyed at getting to queen out with the famous playwright, but savvy enough later to realize she’s being used by both him and Brando as a pawn, exposing some casual midcentury misogyny.
Any devoted Williams fan might be trepidatious to approach this production, but thankfully neither Taylor nor Flynn are doing a caricature of Williams or Brando; these are fully wrought performances, not shallow impersonations. They’re aided by signifiers for each of their respective characters: the cigarette holder and the Remington typewriter for Williams, and the bicep hugging t-shirt for Brando. Taylor is all silky Southern voice and histrionics, while Flynn is rooted and tactile, licking chicken grease from his fingers and pulling on his cigarette. The play is seeded with small references to Williams’ work and biography, bits of theater lore that are catnip to certain audiences. And while the speculative nature play might rub purists wrong, no one goes to Tennessee Williams for objective truth, but rather a poetic one, and in that this play also succeeds, exploring the needs and neuroses of an actor and a playwright at the point of a career-defining collaboration.
If Ostrin’s play is concerned with origins, however loosely they’re tied to fact, it leads one to also think of afterlives. Streetcar ran for 855 performances after opening on Broadway in 1947. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. The film version, released in 1951, captured on celluloid the same erotic charge Brando sent through the theater world with his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski. The play has been adapted as an opera, ballet, and television series, and inspired countless pop culture references. It is a play that is never far from the footlights or the theatrical imagination. Currently, there is a starry revival playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Irish actor Paul Mescal in the lead. There are productions scheduled in cities and towns from British Columbia to North Carolina.
There was a question as to the afterlife of Kowalski, following its brief off-Broadway run at the Duke Theater in Times Square. It is a play that should be seen onstage again, for a more sustained run, to give it more time to breathe and settle. That seems the aim of the producers. There is an offer to invest in the Kowalski Coin, a cryptocurrency funding model for participants eager to involve themselves in the IP that is Kowalski. The linked whitepaper discusses a potential Broadway expansion, global licensing, and so on, to entice investors. Broadway on the blockchain? Sure, I suppose. It could be interesting to see how that funding model turns out, though that is a concern of commerce, not art. Whether the play itself can sustain interest, have a cultural currency beyond its initial outing, likely won’t be something determined by investors. That said, it was recently announced that, after closing this past February, the play is transferring to Broadway this fall, with dates and a theatre to be announced.
Mike Dressel lives and writes in New York. His creative work has appeared in publications such as The Berlin Review, Warm Brothers, Bachelors, and Chelsea Station, among others. He’s also contributed reviews and criticism to The Drift and Impulse Magazine.
