A One-Act Play, ‘Kowalski’ Re-Envisions an Encounter Between Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando

In Gregg Ostrin’s one-act play “Kowalski,” a playwright and an actor meet cute. It’s a summer night in 1947, and Tennessee Williams is at his Provincetown beach house discussing his upcoming project, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with a friend and colleague, the director Margo Jones. During their chat, he mentions a young, relatively unknown performer who’s set to audition for the male lead, though he has more established names in mind. Tennessee — or Tom, as Margo and other pals call him (Williams’s given name was Thomas) — can’t even remember the fellow’s name at first; it’s “something strange,” he says. When the name finally comes to him, Margo is taken aback. “Marlon Brando?” she repeats, amused. “Definitely needs to change that.”Marlon turns up shortly after Margo leaves; he’s three days late, having hitched a ride from New York. Tennessee has no idea who this handsome stranger is, and despite appreciating his pulchritude is distinctly unimpressed by his behavior: Marlon lets himself in through an unlocked door and helps himself to a snack before his host even realizes he’s there. Worse still, the fledgling actor mumbles.Mr. Ostrin based “Kowalski” on an account included in the autobiography of Elia Kazan, the legendary director who would helm Brando both in the original Broadway production of “Streetcar,” which earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize, and the screen adaptation, which landed Brando his first Oscar nomination — for his portrait of Stanley Kowalski, the hunk of unbridled, menacing masculinity who prods the fragile Blanche DuBois toward her inevitable doom.Alison Cimmet and Robin Lord Taylor in ‘Kowalski.’ Russ Rowland“Kowalski” is framed, cleverly, by a couple of scenes set in 1977, in which Tennessee, now in his 60s and obviously inebriated, reflects on the meeting. “How much of what I remember is fact and how much is fiction, I cannot say,” he notes near the end, confirming that, while his basic premise and some details were drawn from Kazan’s anecdote, Mr. Ostrin has taken dramatic license, as dramatists do. (Williams’s prototypical memory play, “The Glass Menagerie,” is conspicuously referenced.)The product is a briskly entertaining piece, directed with a sure hand by Colin Hanlon, who culls vivid performances from his cast. As Tennessee, Robin Lord Taylor, an alumnus of the TV series “Gotham” and “You,” minces and preens a bit overzealously at first; when he’s threatened by his lover, Pancho Rodriguez — presented here as an obvious muse for the character of Stanley, and played with appropriate brutishness by Sebastian Treviño — you half expect him to faint. Mr. Taylor’s performance becomes more nuanced and engaging when he’s joined by Brandon Flynn, the rising star who plays Marlon Brando. Mr. Flynn, who proved himself a heartthrob with chops as a complicated teenager in Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why,” brings an easy authenticity to the part, capturing not only Brando’s distinctly nasal voice and effortless sex appeal but also the sheer naturalness that made him a revolutionary performer.Parrying Tennessee’s questions and peppering the playwright with queries of his own, Mr. Flynn’s Marlon exudes a sinuous charm, but he can also turn tough or achingly vulnerable on a dime. Alison Cimmet and Ellie Ricker provide agile support as, respectively, the dry-witted Margo Jones — who co-directed “Menagerie” in its Broadway bow, and helmed additional works for Williams and other celebrated playwright in the 1940s and ’50s — and Jo, the spirited young woman who has accompanied Marlon on his journey, and is delighted when Tennessee, eager to make Marlon jealous, receives her with gushing enthusiasm.In his frustration, Marlon ends up lashing out at his companion, who seems to have his number. “Bud doesn’t like anyone to get too close,” she explains at one point, using his nickname to irritate him further. “He likes people to think there’s a big mystery about him.” In other scenes, Mr. Ostrin underlines parallels between his central male characters to suggest how a camaraderie might have evolved between them. When Marlon remembers how his dad “put me down, so he could feel better,” Tennessee concedes. “My father did the same thing to me. The man bullied me from the day I was born. Nothing I ever did was good enough.”There’s a whiff of banality in these lines, and some others, and if you’re looking for searing psychological insights into either Williams or Brando, you won’t find them here. Still, for fans of these theater and film giants, “Kowalski” offers a canny and absorbing study.

A One-Act Play, ‘Kowalski’ Re-Envisions an Encounter Between Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando

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