‘Streetcar’ Rides on Lange’s Performance

Television and “A Streetcar Named Desire” have a grand thing going. It began in 1984 when ABC aired a shimmering adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that traveled far on Ann-Margret’s striking Blanche DuBois. It continues Sunday with a fine CBS production, starring Jessica Lange, that marinates in sweaty seductiveness the way Blanche soaks languidly in her tub.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is the first of three dramas set to air under a new “CBS Playhouse 90s” shingle chipped from “Playhouse 90,” the network’s anthology series of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s that yielded TV’s boldest, most provocative original drama of that age. The two yet-to-arrive “90s” programs are Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women” and Ernest Thompson’s “West Side Waltz.”

“Playhouse 90” was the most famed of the weekly anthologies that prevailed on TV in its toddler years. Execution was hampered by a TV technology rudimentary by today’s standards. These anthologies were mostly live, moreover, carrying not only the potential for exciting spontaneity but also for disaster. A different play and different cast appeared each week, giving all involved one shot at the camera with no safety net. Thus, audiences saw the gaffes along with the good stuff. Production polish was absent.

Yet when compared with today’s TV movies and series, the breath and freshness of the material presented by these anthologies were exceptional, even though encumbered by the era’s reactionary political climate and political blacklisting.

Whether the new “CBS Playhouse 90s” can build on this yellowed tradition of originality is doubtful, given the irregularity of its scheduling by the network, to say nothing of how hard it is to crack prime-time program lineups that approach the uniformity of housing tracts. Through 1995 eyes, moreover, there is nothing original or fresh in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in some ways a regional period piece whose wilted attitudes about manners and relationships seem almost antebellum.

Yet its universal theme of pitiable loneliness is as vital today as ever; the roles of Blanche and her tormentor, Stanley Kowalski, are as juicy as ever; the potential for audience reward is as high as ever. In the right hands, “A Streetcar Named Desire” still works wondrously. Led by Lange and producer-director Glenn Jordan, some of those hands are present Sunday.

Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama opened on Broadway in 1947, but it’s the acclaimed 1951 theatrical movie, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as her brutish brother-in-law Stanley, that other versions are usually asked to match. Nourished by Lange’s stunning performance, the three-hour CBS telecast largely meets that test, even though the ferocity of Brando’s defining Stanley may never be equaled, and filming in black and white gave the theatrical movie an interesting darkness that’s missing here. (Not that Fred Harpman’s CBS sets are not great to look at, however.)

Waif-like, suitcase in hand and wearing her musty decadence like cobwebs, Lange’s Blanche arrives in sultry, sticky, working-class New Orleans, a mental crackup waiting to happen, intending to live with her younger sister, Stella (Diane Lane), and Stella’s husband, Stanley (Alec Baldwin), in their shabby, tiny flat. The sisters are all that remain of an old but impoverished Southern family whose Laurel, Miss., mansion has been lost through incompetence by the boozy, neurotic, delusionary, unmarried Blanche.

From almost the moment he sets eyes on her, the crude, food-slurping Stanley is outraged by the phony, pretentiously buttery, fluttery girlishness and refinement of Blanche, who “showed up here, hoity-toity, describing me like an ape.” He fumes, his anger rising to a boil just below the surface before exploding, as “Dame Blanche,” as he snidely calls her, preens in her feathers and furs or monopolizes the only bathroom before emerging “all freshly bathed and scented” to face the heat of the evening. You feel the combustible mix of hatred and sexual tension that connects Blanche and Stanley.

Lange got some bad reviews while playing Blanche (also opposite Baldwin) on Broadway in 1992. Whatever her flaws then, if any, they’re not evident here. Whether constantly harping or floating airily on fantasy or dripping in muted, flirty sexuality or hopelessly bleak and psychotic or self-consciously pawing her neck and fiddling with her hair, Lange’s Blanche is ever persuasive and real, earning your compassion and your contempt.

As a sponging home-wrecker, it’s no wonder she gets under the skin of Baldwin’s Stanley, who not only rages with conviction and effectively conveys his social-class resentment of his sister-in-law, but also fills out an undershirt well.

Lane is a credible, angst-ridden Stella, whose loyalties are split between her husband and sister. But John Goodman is little more than a pliable bozo as Mitch, whose rejection of Blanche--after Stanley has maliciously exposed the secrets in her past--helps shove her over the edge.

Something rarely discussed is Blanche’s sensitivity about her age, a fixation that threads the entire play, as if she were Norma Desmond worrying about her next close-up. The point is made almost immediately when, upon arriving, Blanche tells Stella to dim the lights: “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare.”

Yet Blanche is supposed to be somewhere in her late 30s or, at most, 40, too early for gnarling. So when middle-aged Mitch forces her into the light, observing that she’s older than he thought, there’s no logic to it, even taking into account that men generally looked at women differently in 1947 than now. He appears to be describing an antique, not the beautiful, taut-skinned woman (Lange is 46) on the screen.

As a stage play viewed from afar, it wouldn’t matter as much. On TV, it makes the illusion slip a bit in an otherwise excellent production.

* “A Streetcar Named Desire” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channel 2).