In the Land of Molière, an Oriental 'Streetcar'

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

PARIS — When the fabled Comédie-Française chose the first American play it would perform in its 330 years, producers promised a fresh French approach for Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.”

They hinted that an androgynous Stanley Kowalski would trade his iconic white undershirt for a brief appearance in the nude. They debated whether Blanche DuBois and Stella should switch from traditional French accents to spicy Louisiana Creole.

But in the end — with firm guidance from a New York director with a long career in avant-garde theater — the company went for a fantasy world of dogugaeshi, sliding Japanese screens painted with menacing waterfalls and warriors, masked kurogo figures in black, and a long-haired Stanley in baggy pants and a satin tiger jacket. The white undershirt? Replaced by a bath towel. It barely covers key parts of Stanley as he shouts for Stella, who descends toward him like a stringed puppet in billowing white drifts.

“How are you going to capture Tennessee in classical French? Have you heard Tennessee Williams without a Southern accent? It’s not easy, but we are using Orientalist Japanese, with its elegance and decadence, as a metaphor for the antebellum South,” said Lee Breuer, the director, who broke purposefully from Elia Kazan’s steamy 1951 film classic starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando.

With the opening Saturday of “Un tramway nommé désir,” which is performed in French in a new translation and runs through June 2, the Comédie-Française has passed a milestone in a broader effort to raise its international profile. The troupe — founded by royal edict in 1680 and today heavily subsidized by the state with a €34 million annual budget — is weighing another step forward: performing Molière in English.

Like other public institutions throughout Europe, it is searching for new sources of revenue and attendance as the state is cutting back on cultural spending. “Our future is international, and it’s necessary to enrich our repertoire,” said Muriel Mayette, the first woman to lead the company, who since her appointment in 2006 has done such things as introduce English subtitles for Molière’s “Malade Imaginaire” (The Imaginary Invalid.) “I’ve told my actors that one day I would like to do a little piece from Molière in English. It’s difficult to perform another language because it’s not the same rhythm, but it’s like a costume.”

It was Ms. Mayette who pushed for the first American play in the Comédie-Française repertory and sought Mr. Breuer to direct it. She vividly remembered seeing his production of a Samuel Beckett play when she was 16 years old in New York, and has followed his long career with Mabou Mines, a New York theater company that fuses various art forms.

In the French troupe’s cardinal red and gold Salle Richelieu theater, Mr. Breuer took command with no qualms about directing actors in a language he didn’t know. It wasn’t the first time: last year he directed a Russian version of a Sam Shepard play.

Mr. Breuer, 74, roamed the theater with two translators at his side, looking like a cat burglar with his trademark black T-shirt and matching watch cap.

Occasionally, he shouted instructions laced with traces of an accent from Brooklyn, where he lives with his partner, the actress Maude Mitchell, who was the dramaturge and acting coach for the play.

Mr. Breuer said he had pondered a variety of ways of bringing the drowsy South of New Orleans to a Paris stage. Ultimately the Comédie-Française tinkered with text and pronunciations: Blanche is pronounced with a proper French accent — Blahnche — and the director changed a reference to Blanche's dream of retreating to the Left Bank of Paris to more exotic Rome. More than 60 years earlier, Jean Cocteau had staged the play in French in Paris and transformed it so that characters spoke with the southern accents of Marseille, a production that Williams scorned: “I don’t understand why Cocteau filled my work with crudities.”

The Comédie-Française sought a middle ground. “We tried to make it as American as possible with characters who happen to speak French in an American context,” Mr. Breuer said, noting that one of the characters roars onto the stage on a motorcycle.

With a team of Americans — Basil Twist designed the sets and John Margolis arranged and performed music ranging from Fats Domino to James Carroll Booker III — the troupe gave up on Creole accents. Mr. Breuer said it was “impossible” to recreate the language. “It’s vanished, it’s gone,” he said.

So they settled on an Orientalist, Japanese style, which was popular in France in the early 1900s. For the set, they employed the 16th-century dogugaeshi technique, which involves sliding painted screens that divide and open to reveal other images.

“We needed a metaphor for the South, but a south that makes sense within the French cultural context,” Mr. Breuer said. “This play has been dominated by Elia Kazan’s concept of how to stage it for 63 years. So why not try something different? A Japanese Orientalist style was not so distant from the faux aristocratic style of a Southern belle and it was popular in Paris.”

Above him, huge screens flowered pink with Japanese cherry blossoms, but Mr. Breuer was constantly on the lookout for signs and symbols that he considered jarring in an American play. He targeted the belt of the actor Éric Ruf, who plays a hip postmodern Stanley capable of changing his baby’s diaper and leering with a wicked smile modeled after Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 Hollywood film “The Dark Night.”

“Ce n’est pas américain — c’est français,” Mr. Breuer said, speaking the key French words that he has mastered. “That is not American. Take the belt. Move the buckle on the side.”

Mr. Ruf and Anne Kessler, who plays Blanche DuBois in silken geisha-style robes, both studied Mr. Breuer, straining to hear the low echo of his translator, who was channeling a foreign and also a foreign technique that included improvisation and Actors Studio method acting.

The actors in the Comédie-Française’s permanent troupe are accustomed to more fixed techniques, but Mr. Breuer was pushing them to make their own choices about how to act. The actress Françoise Gillard, who plays Stella Kowalski, sometimes found that freedom “destabilizing.”

“In France, for reasons of time and production, we have a tendency to follow the road, and Lee works on the journey and the passage,” said Mr. Ruf, a member of the troupe since 1993. “We are generally very precise about movement and advancement. With him, we are improvising. For example, he said, ‘I want to see your sexuality,’ but there was nothing in the scene about it.”

At times, the language divide posed both risks and benefits. “You are forced to read the behavior and it makes work more visual,” said Ms. Mitchell, the acting coach. “It is also rife with possibilities for miscommunication.”

For example, when Mr. Breuer urged two actors to interact by moving and freezing like children playing a red light/green light game, the two actors simply stopped looking at each other.

“Lee tells us that the French perform fast and the Americans perform slow,” Ms. Kessler said. “So sometimes he tells us to perform a particular scene like the French and another scene like Americans.”

After a week of performances, Parisians seem to responding well to Mr. Breuer’s vision of “A Streetcar Named Desire” stirred in a cocktail shaker of bourbon and sake. The play is sold out through mid-April, with 65 tickets available an hour before each performance.

But some critics with an indelible memory of Kazan’s 1947 Broadway production and his later film were skeptical of dogugaeshi screens as a metaphor for Blanche DuBois’s unconscious world.

A critic for the French daily Le Monde questioned the Japanese setting, and the review ran under the headline “A Streetcar Stopped at the Boredom Station.” In another French daily, Le Figaro, the drama critic called the production “powerful, profound, grand and unique.”

The reviewer for Les Echos was measured, observing that no one could have dreamed that one day Tennessee Williams would crash the house of Molière.