Gregory Mosher, who, along with Bernard Gersten, had reshaped Lincoln Center Theater, was directing this production. The cast included Jessica Lange as Blanche, Tim Carhart as Mitch, and Amy Madigan as Stella, as well as Jimmy Gandolfini and Aida Turturro in supporting roles. At the first rehearsal, an actor read a line from the New Directions edition of the play, and Maria St. Just, the coexecutor of the Williams estate, snapped, “That’s not the line!” Mosher arrived the following day, plopped down three other somewhat varied editions of Streetcar, and said, “What line do you want?” The Williams estate had yet to codify the playwright’s papers, and the extant texts of his classic dramas contained certain inconsistencies. Many had blamed the disarray of Williams’s official papers on Maria, who, through some unusual arrangement with the playwright toward the end of his life, wound up having approval of everything, including the casting of his shows. Mosher is smart and funny, and just the type of person I needed for this situation. He warned me that Lady St. Just (she was the widow of some guy with a title) would have notes about everything, and he was right. During rehearsals, Maria would ask if she could get a lift home in my car. On a couple of occasions, early on, I acquiesced. During the ride, she tore everyone in the cast to pieces and then sought my opinion on them, too. She was a shrill ferret of a woman with a British title and the power to at least try to tell us all what to do. Fortunately, Greg got her to fade into the background.
Jessica Lange had never performed on Broadway at that point, and making her debut playing Blanche DuBois in Streetcar was a very daring move. She was a celebrated film actress who had been nominated for an Oscar several times and would eventually win twice. It was assumed she was awash in theater culture and history, but her stage credits were slim when we started rehearsal. What many observed about the production was that if you were in the first ten rows, she was wonderful. If you were onstage with her, she shone in the role. To the majority of ticket holders, however, she failed to project in the way to which they were accustomed.
Greg Mosher was assumed, at one time, to be the heir to the Mike Nichols Chair in Film and Theater before a corporatized show business eliminated that position. Capable in ways that translated into great success directing early productions of Mamet’s work in Chicago, and later in his great run with Gersten at Lincoln Center, Mosher is the smartest guy in the room and doesn’t have to work to remind you of that. He just shows you and usually in an elegant way. He was enormously helpful to me in the role, both in terms of the text and in the psychology of taking on a role overshadowed by so iconic an actor.
I had never once hesitated to take the part, never once doubted I could play Stanley. And, up to a point, I never thought about Marlon Brando and the threat posed by comparisons to him. Brando, however, was twenty-four when he appeared on Broadway. I was thirty-four in 1992. I always contended that Stanley’s self-absorption, bullying, and passions were best served by a younger man. Therefore, in order to straddle the need to serve the script and my own hesitancy to lay into the brutality too hard, I tried to make it funny where I could. Other male actors my age would constantly say to me, “It must be great to get all of that anger out of your system every night.” My response was, “I don’t have that much anger in me.” Indeed, some nights I wanted to ad-lib a scene with Blanche in which we sat down, had a beer, and talked out our differences, ending up as good friends.
On opening night, though, it hit me. Brando owned the role to the exclusion of all pretenders. Now, I was the latest pretender, sitting in my dressing room, suffocating under the weight of a Broadway opening. What the hell had I done? Mosher came to see me, and I told him how I felt. Mosher, as kind as he is bright and talented, told me, “Marlon Brando is sitting up on Mulholland Drive right now. He’s three hundred pounds, he’s sixty-eight years old, and he’s not coming down here to do the show. So, if they want to see it live, you’re it. You’re Stanley now.” He wished me luck and headed out. Onstage, Williams’s writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you. You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime.
I worked out pretty hard for the role. My trainer was a boxing pro named Michael Olajide, whose son, Michael Jr., fought professionally under the name “Silk” Olajide. Olajide, a Nigerian émigré, was a gregarious and patient man who called all of his charges “Champ”: “How are you today, Champ?” Or, “OK, Champ, let’s hit the heavy bag.” Fred Ward had gotten me into boxing while we were shooting Miami Blues about four years earlier. Fred and I walked into the 5th Street Gym in Miami and right into the legendary Beau Jack, a world-class fighter who ran the place where Ali trained when he was photographed “knocking out” the Beatles in 1964. Over the years I fell in love with that form of training, which eliminates any downtime. The bell rings, you move. The bell rings, you stop. Repeat. Repeat. Ninety minutes of that, and you start to feel pretty good.
Olajide had me lift weights for thirty minutes after the bag, rope, and sparring work. I put on twenty pounds of muscle. I felt like if I hit a building, the building would wince. If someone leaned on me on the subway, I was ready with the look you flash only when you can back it up. I felt invincible. I was becoming Stanley. But the physicality of the role, the animal lack of self-consciousness, is counterweighted by the character’s obsession with and love for Stella. Each night, it was like Prelude again. Amy Madigan was more Annie Oakley than the languid beauties normally cast in the role of Stella, but she is a woman who beams talent, heart, decency, passion, and technique. She is right there at the top with Mary-Louise and Jennifer Jason Leigh as one of the greatest actresses I’ve worked with. With the deepest respect to Ed Harris, I fell in love with his wife on a regular basis, too, and loved her with all my heart and soul. In the iconic moment where Stanley wails for the loss of his one good reason to live, I imagined having and losing a woman as wonderful as Amy/Stella, something I would not know in my own life for some time to come, and the pain just poured out of me.