“KOWALSKI” by Gregg Ostrin is opening this week at THE DUKE THEATRE in midtown Manhattan. It is directed by COLIN HANLON, and features: ALISON CIMMET, BRANDON FLYNN, ELLIE RICKER, ROBIN LORD TAYLOR, and SEBASTIAN TREVINO.
Last Friday evening my astute theater going companion and I attended a press preview of this eagerly anticipated addition to this year’s Off-B’way season. The nearly salivating excitement, at least in the professional theatrical community, for this latest offering of “what it would be like to have been there” plays along the likes of Maxwell Anderson’s, “Valley Forge”, Sherwood’s, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois”, Miranda’s, “Hamilton”, or ANY account of significant historical characters that have captured the imagination of the cultural as well as general public.
This particular moistening of the New York’s theatrical taste buds has been prompted by the informed, yet conjectured telling by our playwright, Mr. Ostrin of what the initial encounter may well have been like between one of 20th Century’s most gifted and prominent American playwrights, Tennessee Williams, and the man, who for many, became our nation’s, if not the world’s, greatest and most influential actor in living memory, that being of course, Marlon Brando.
This 90-minute stage version, sans intermission, takes place in the well-designed setting by DAVID GALLO, of Williams’ Cape Cod house, that appears to be more handsome than handsomely run. The plumbing has given out and the electricity is threatening to follow at any moment. This is not due to the resembling circumstances of Tom, Laura and Amanda Wingfield’s dwelling of the playwright’s fabulous success of previous seasons involving the tiny collection of crystal animals and their surrounding poverty. By now the poet/playwright of 36 years has amassed significant wealth, notoriety, and a rather attractive Mexican lover named, Pancho, (admirably portrayed by Sebastian Trevino).
The assignment of conveying the personage of the genius writer himself is hereby taken by Robin Lord Taylor, and he fulfills that task with a credibility of wit, vulnerability, and a certain acidic charm that allows we spectators as “flies on the wall”, and are given our parts in the chance to hear and see what that particular day in the life of not one, but two immortals may well have resembled.
It commences as a recollection in interview by the decades’ older Williams, very much in decline and tragically doomed to choke on a medicinal bottle plastic cap in his apartment at Hotel Elysee on February 25th, 1983, little more than a month before his 72nd birthday. In this play he’s responding to the question of how it was when he, in 1947, encountered the phenomenon known to his friends as, “Bud”.
Before we meet this other who was to become a legendary figure, we first encounter the significant person that held the respect of the author as one of the chosen few who could read Williams’ latest opus which he originally meant to call, “The Poker Night”, but newly christened, “ A Streetcar Named Desire”. She, being one Margo Jones, the producer/director from Dallas who was instrumental in launching the playwright earlier in the decade and connecting him with the all the more influential theatrical forces in the New York Broadway community.
Her character is amiably portrayed by Alison Cimmet and is first rate in so doing. Jones is beyond enthralled with what she’s just been allowed to read and is subsequently appalled and enraged when Williams informs her that she will not be assigned to direct the premiere, but must submit that “Gadge” (Elia) Kazan will, with his award winning and critical successes of that decade more likely to ensure the further success of what both Jones and the playwright himself consider to be the masterwork of Williams’ creative career, at least thus far.
Ms. Jones consoles herself by joining the loving yet menacing Pancho to the local bar in search of sexual allure from any members of the U S Navy. And so, left alone in his Cape Cod cottage with the faulty plumbing and dubious electrical circuits, who saunters in after some loud but unheard knocks by the celebrated resident? You guessed it, and the realization of this personage at the age of 23 is a charismatic performance, sans any cheap imitation, of one Brandon Flynn, (ironic first name!), and he does not disappoint!
Mr. Flynn conveys more than the obvious physical allure of this nascent genius of the Thespian art, but with the shrewd pen of Mr. Ostrin sketches a credible limning of a complicated, brilliant, chiefly self-educating young man who already possesses a self-confidence of his profession. It stems from already having appeared multiple times on Broadway, and his coming under the affectionate wings of Stella Adler (his teacher at The New School), Harold Clurman, Adler’s then husband and founder of the already legendary Group Theatre, and its most successful director to have emerged from that organization on the stage and Oscar winning Hollywood cinema, Kazan.
What ensues in the fiery dialogue of the already somewhat inebriated poet and the prospective auditionee for the role of Stanley as set up days previously by Kazan occupies the meat of the play’s meeting and its tantalizing premise.
Some of the opinions expressed by these two distinctive personalities are dubious to be sure. When Williams quotes Kazan to Brando how the director praised the young talent as perhaps being the best American actor since Tracy, this play’s Bud responds with,” Who?” Whether that’s meant to be a sincere or sneering reply is ambiguous, but unbecoming to the truth. Brando revered Spencer Tracy in real life, as he did Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, and above all, Paul Muni with whom he’d played in a propaganda play by Ben Hecht two years earlier when the Holocaust was revealed to the world and funding to create a Jewish state in Palestine played throughout the nation.
Still, the license Mr. Ostrin displays is no less poetic than Williams’ himself and this is in no way meant to be mistaken for a documentary, but rather, what Ostrin would LIKE to have happened and believes that the majority of his audience would agree with his desire of this particular streetcar in a home encounter.
There is a welcome addition halfway through the main characters’ investigating one another in the arrival of Brando’s latest romantic conquest named Jo, deliciously provided by Ellie Ricker. Jo has accompanied the would be and inevitable Stanley all the way from the Big Apple over the three-day late appearance to the Cape Cod house. The rivalry for her focused attention between the playwright’s fame and power and the visceral power of the young man’s virility, talent, and bad boy behavior is interesting to behold and indeed is reflective of what emerges clearly in what is become Williams’ most celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning play.
My highly astute theater going companion and I both found the play, well directed by Colin Hanlon, to be consistently engaging. She however observed that Mr. Taylor could have been somewhat “less forced”, particularly in the more overt feminine aspects of the playwright’s overall behavior. Brando, regarding Williams in the actor’s autobiography emphatically states that,” You wouldn’t have known he was gay if he didn’t tell you.”
Yet these are choices from this creative team that can be tweaked and may or may not manifest as it is now scheduled to run through February 23rd at The Duke on 42nd St.
It IS fun to be “present” when history is being made, even when, like so much history, particularly of late, is wholly revised!
Duke Theater 229 W. 42nd St, Manhattan
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