Actor relishes simmering role in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'
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GIANNI TRUZZI, SPECIAL TO THE P-I
There is little of the brute about Jonno Roberts, a tall drink of water with an unstudied grace. He jokes easily about his native New Zealand, how, for an ambitious young actor, the sheep that outnumber the people there make a fantastic audience.
Start him talking about his character, Stanley Kowalski in Intiman's production of "A Streetcar Named Desire," and that joviality slows to a chilling trickle.
"I really get him," he says, punching the third word. His shoulders start to fold, as if his neck suddenly feels the weight of a head grown thick. His steel-blue eyes fix like a falcon's on a distant point. His fists clench. "I connect with the passion of the guy. I know how frustration boils over into violence."
The moment quickly fades.
"I've not always been a nice person in my life," he admits.
The ability to draw on that churning intensity should serve Roberts well, especially as he takes on one of the most iconic roles of the modern stage. When a young unknown actor named Marlon Brando originated the role in 1947, his raw masculine sexuality exploded audiences' ideas of what the theater could be. It was, by reports of all who saw it, a moment that changed everything.
All parts of that original production hang heavily on any subsequent rendering, especially as most of the original cast -- Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden and director Elia Kazan -- reunited to make the film version. (The London stage production's Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy as Blanche.)
Tennessee Williams' second Broadway success (after "The Glass Menagerie") was rooted in the swell of life's vigor he found in New Orleans, particularly in the working-class bohemia of the Vieux Carré. It's into Stanley's writhing den of heat and ambition that Blanche DuBois, the sister of his wife Stella, arrives, a fading Southern flower seeking shelter. And it's here that she meets her final destruction.
Roberts feels the burden of playing a role so strongly associated with another's electric performance.
"It's like playing Luke Skywalker, a very singular character," he says, shaking his head. "The job becomes how to do it yourself."
Director Sheila Daniels agrees, observing that one can't act the history of the play, only finding what works truthfully to speak to us now. For this reason, she insisted that her cast come to the play as if for the first time. With the vibrancy of old New Orleans at its center, she aims to bring the electricity of the setting to life, in part through live music.
"Everything about that world is present and now."
While Blanche's phony lace delicacy and her laments for the lost ancestral home drive the story, it's Stanley's virile pulse that spurs the conflict. He is the new man, the one who will demand possession of postwar America through fierce sweat and insatiable hunger, at the bloody expense of the nation's old, genteel lies.
It may seem a strange quirk, then, that someone from New Zealand has been given the part. But Roberts, nine years into an unexpectedly indefinite stay in the U.S. (marriage will do that), graduated from Harvard's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, which emphasizes Stanislavsky's "method" approach. It was Brando's revolutionary performance in "Streetcar" that legitimated the emerging American method (although more current practice eschews the inward approach of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio).
For Roberts, who began in European-style experimental theater, it's yet another chance to play on the dark side, a type that has become his stock in trade. From parts like the scheming Edmund in "King Lear" to the deranged war veteran in the Off-Broadway production of Tracy Letts' "Bug," Roberts embraces characters that are complex and at least a bit unhinged.
Somehow, he says, "I always very rapidly connect with whatever it is that drives them."
GIANNI TRUZZI