Interview: With Streetcar, Patsy Ferran Recaptures a New York Dream Cut Short by Covid

Five years ago this month, London stage star Patsy Ferran was making her Broadway debut opposite Laurie Metcalf, Rupert Everett, and Russell Tovey in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Covid shut that production down in previews on March 12, 2020; it’s one of the few shows that never reopened after the shutdown. Ferran’s New York dream was over before it even really got started.

Cut to: Brooklyn Academy of Music, half-a-decade later. The Olivier winner has returned to the New York stage in a transfer of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, playing Blanche alongside Paul Mescal’s Stanley and Anjana Vasan’s Stella. It’s Ferran’s second collab with director Rebecca Frecknall (after 2018’s Summer and Smoke) and it allows her to experience the Big Apple anew, in a show that’s very dear to her heart.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’ve done A Streetcar Named Desire in a few different iterations now. What have you learned over the course of four different runs, from the Almeida Theatre to the West End to now?
Amazingly, this play is a never-ending pool of discovery. You would think the fourth time around we would know what the play was, but we keep finding new things after having time away.

I learned that the play actually still lives in you in some kind of way. When you revisit it, it’s more in the marrow of your bones rather than something you learned two months before and it’s living on the surface.

What does that mean for you as an actor?
It means that we’re able to become more playful and braver, I think, with the portrayal of it. Also, this is a new audience. We’re in New York.

Does that have a greater impact in the way the story is absorbed?
The New York audience feeds the play in a way that British audiences didn’t. It’s not that it’s better in New York, but it’s different, and we’re sort of relearning the play again. Most of the time, we’re telling the story to people who know it very well. I can only judge from previews, but it’s just been a relief and a joy to have an American audience somewhat vocally accept us. It’s been really magical so far.

Have you ever been to New Orleans?
When I did Summer and Smoke with Rebecca, we had a month before rehearsals began, so me and my dad went to New Orleans. We had a father-daughter bonding trip, and we started in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Tennessee Williams was born, and then we flew over to New Orleans and spent a couple of days there.

That’s so fun.
And I remember eating beignets, and then we did a Tennessee Williams walking tour. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was actually incredibly informative. The landscape, especially in Mississippi, is so vast. You can understand why people take their time talking. His language is so full and poetic, and you get that. You’ve got lots of time to speak in Mississippi, because the pace is slow. You can take your time.

Did that trip impact any of the work you’re doing here? This is such a different kind of Streetcar, so maybe not.
Yeah, exactly. As a person, I’m quite quick-thinking. My version of Blanche talks a lick. If anything, it feels very New York. New York is quick. But I don’t know. When Mitch says “That don’t make no difference in the Quarter,” when he suggests going for a cigarette with Blanche, I do have a stronger image of it [in my head], because I’ve been there.

Five years ago this week, you were doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway. Obviously, it closed because of Covid. Does this New York experience feel like a little bit of closure now?
Absolutely. When we shut down early, of course there was an element of relief to go home because of the uncertainty of everything. But it hit me quite late, like six or nine months later, and I had a wave of grief for a while. I couldn’t watch anything that was set in New York. I had a New York jigsaw puzzle, and I couldn’t do my jigsaw puzzle because it hurt too much. I felt I was very much in my honeymoon period of New York when it shut down. So I’m happy to be here. I think I’ve been waiting for this moment for five years.