Three years ago, Cate Blanchett brought a nerve-jangling, intense Hedda Gabler from Australia to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater.
Now the actress is back with an even more neurotic, psyche-exposed creature — Blanche DuBois — in a fierce, almost savage revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire."
There are many ways to play Williams' legendary heroine, and Blanchett has opted for the extravagant approach. Extravagant but surprisingly effective in what is a supersized, almost operatic performance that gains in poignancy as the long, more-than-three-hour evening progresses.
There is no doubt here about Blanche's eventual descent into madness, something that's signaled almost from the very beginning of the bold, feverish Sydney Theatre Company production, which has been directed by Scandinavian actress Liv Ullmann.
Subtlety is out, which may be a good thing because, scenically at least, this stripped-down revival with its dour, dingy setting looks a little lost on the wide, expansive Harvey stage. Yet the luminous Blanchett moves as if she owns it. Right from the start, when this pale, blond Blanche, dressed primly in a powder-blue outfit, sits fidgeting on the side of the stage, you can't take your eyes off her.
Yet there's nothing ethereal about this Blanche, who despite her proclamations about refinement and art, is more predatory than passive when her survival is at stake. She knows what she wants and goes after it, often with disastrous consequences.
Blanche also knows what she has lost, particularly the family's Mississippi plantation, which, along with some dubious liaisons, have forced her to flee to New Orleans' French Quarter and an extended stay with her sister Stella and her brutish, antagonistic brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski.
It is the primal battle between Blanche and Stanley that fills much of "Streetcar," and Blanchett has a worthy opponent in Joel Edgerton's beefy, yet boyish Stanley. The ghost of Marlon Brando (Broadway's original Stanley who later re-created the role in the film version) may hover, but the physically imposing Edgerton has the necessary bravado and the all-important booming voice with which to yell "Stella."
The actor captures Stanley's innate pride as well as his instinctive intelligence, the street smarts that make him a formidable foe. It's a pride that comes across most potently in a beautifully staged scene where Stanley listens unseen while his sister-in-law denigrates what she calls his animalistic, subhuman behavior.
It makes the final confrontation between the two all the more powerful, a drunken rape that spills across the stage in an almost bestial fury that is staggeringly theatrical and more than a little scary.
Robin McLeavy's Stella exudes the genial accommodation that is the hallmark of a woman whose loyalty is divided uncomfortably between her husband and her sister. Tim Richards' Mitch, a possible beau for the unlucky-in-love Blanche, also generates the necessary goodness that this straightforward, unaffected man should possess.
And Blanche knows how to manipulate both. At least until her world collapses into one of the more famous stage exits in 20th century American drama. And what a leave-taking it is. Blanchett handles her departure with such haunting desolation that it is impossible not to be moved.
"A Streetcar Named Desire" plays at BAM through Dec. 20.