Theatre Review by Ron Fassler . . .
Gregg Ostrin’s new comedy-drama Kowalski, which opened Monday at the Duke on 42nd Street, falls into a category of plays I call, “The Day Something Really Happened.” Staged in relative real time, they often take liberties with the truth and tell slightly fictionalized version of real-life events that, in retrospect, turned out to be important or even monumental. In this case, Kowalski deals with how Marlon Brando was cast in A Streetcar Named Desire, a story that’s been told many times in just about every Brando and Tennessee Williams bio. Of course, it’s fresh to people who’ve never heard it and there’s certainly fun in seeing such well-known personalities played by actors having their own field day with such delectable characters. But this effort is problematic.
Ostrin sets the action inside a rental cottage Williams procured in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1947. Brando (all of twenty-three-years-old) was sent up from New York by Elia Kazan—Streetcar’s director—to meet with the playwright and read for the role of Stanley Kowalski. Arriving three days late (true), Brando immediately fixed burnt-out fuses that had Williams sitting in the dark when he got there, and a toilet that was backed up (also true). Impressed with the young actor as plumber-electrician, Williams had a harder time seeing that this was his Stanley staring him right in the face. He saw the character older and less pretty, but nevertheless, once Brando read the part with Williams, it was clear this was a perfect match of actor and role. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s not hyperbole to say that Brando as Stanley changed acting on the Broadway stage forever. The force with which he attacked the play and even his fellow actors who shared the stage with him, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, was a sensation. From all reports at the time, what was onstage was a real guy, not some actor. He painfully displayed anger and lust, mixing it with humor, pathos, and a brute sexuality that had simply never been seen before.
One potential problem with Ostrin’s play has been solved by his and director Colin Hanlon’s choice in the Brando casting. Brandon Flynn, who’s been working steadily the last few years in film and television, returns here to his stage roots for the first time since 2017 when he played the lead in the John Kander-Gregory Pierce musical Kid Victory. Flynn has Brando’s swagger down, his playfulness, and the necessary physical requirements that made the actor the sort of man every woman wanted (as well as many men). He has found Brando’s odd, reedy voice and never forces his charms. He also doesn’t dwell on too many mannerisms that might have otherwise forced him into caricature.
This unfortunately cannot be said about Robin Lord Taylor’s portrayal of Tennessee Williams. Broad and often unfocussed, Taylor opts for all the obvious choices. If the script calls for him to be sulky, he sulks. If petulance is required, he’s petulant. Taylor never plays any opposites with everything on the surface and little subtext. And Hanlon should not have encouraged Taylor to lean into Williams’s histrionics. The person onstage hardly seems to be capable of the poetry and depth of his greatest plays. Remember, this is Williams at thirty-six, not the sad creature he turned into due to years of alcohol and drug abuse.

Kowalski is not a two-person play. Ostrin includes three other characters in the mix, one of whom, Pancho Rodriguez, was Williams’s lover at the time and sharing the cottage with him. He’s given short shrift and only two scenes, one at the start and one at the finish. As played by Sebastian Trevino, he barely registers. There’s greater success in the writing and acting of two female roles: Alison Cimmet as Margo Jones, the renowned producer-director who was an early champion of Williams’s work, and Ellie Ricker in the role of Celia Webb (here called Jo), a young actress Brando was dating at the time and who accompanied him to Provincetown. From everything I’ve read over the years about this meeting, the false starts and mistaken intentions that Ostrin has created are cut from whole cloth. The whole thing was actually a rather cut and dried affair, which is fine. Ostrin’s not a biographer, he’s a playwright. The facts are that Brando showed up late, did some work around the house, and read for the part where he was given the role. It’s hard to make an 85-minute play out of just that and yet, here we are. Kowalski strives for electrifying conflict between Williams and Brando, but if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.
There’s a nice set design from the reliable David Gallo and Lisa Zinni’s costumes are right and fitting. Jeff Croiter’s lighting is suitable and the staging is clean and concise. But as a play, many of the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” moments that draw from both the playwright and actor’s careers strain for laughs. As one example, when Williams refers to Jones as “Margo, my sweet bird of youth,” it’s the kind of writing that doesn’t help the situation. Rather, it harms what should naturally be dialogue that flows effortlessly. After all, if you’re going to put words into Tennessee Williams’s mouth, they better be good ones.
Kowalski is at the Duke Theatre, 229 W 42nd Street, 2nd floor, NYC in a limited engagment through February 23. For further information, please visit https://cur8.com/40137/project/127803.
All photos by Russ Rowland.
Headline photo: Robin Lord Taylor and Brandon Flynn.