Johnny Galecki is quite the revelation as Tennessee Williams. Why? Because Galecki clearly understands — and knows how to actualize on a stage — the famous 20th century playwright’s bespoke cocktail of vulnerability, humility, humor, horniness and lust for power.
Or, to put all that another way, Galecki, a superb stage actor with an early career history at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, reveals to us a character in equal measures sweet as iced tea and as ruthless as Stanley Kowalski, a fictional creation wherein he revealed far more of himself than most fans of “A Streetcar Named Desire” realized.
Sure, Williams’ persona flavored that play’s Blanche DuBois, too. But as his biographer John Lahr later argued with gripping veracity, Williams’ real self-portrait was Stanley, not Blanche.
In what I assume is a bid for a potential Broadway run to follow — a very reasonable goal — Galecki has been added to the cast of a Chicago tryout of playwright Gregg Ostrin’s “Kowalski,” an off-Broadway play from early 2025 that re-creates and riffs upon the real-life meeting in Williams’ Provincetown, Massachusetts, home between Williams, basking in the rise of his post-“The Glass Menagerie” reputation, and a young, raw Marlon Brando.
The film director Elia Kazan had sent the brooding and combustible young actor to Williams to gain the reluctant playwright’s favor as a potential Stanley in “A Street Named Desire.”
The 90-minute play, now ensconced along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, is a very enjoyable bit of showbiz apocrypha, imagining how Brando, who now is most zestfully played by Jacob Moskovitz (“Elle”), used his method-acting training from Stella Adler’s studio to audition in Williams’ living room in ways that went way, way beyond reading the lines.
Also in the mix are Williams’ famously handsome, famously restless lover Pancho Rodríguez (Reece dos Santos) and Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet), the naive, Dallas-based director who championed Williams’ early career and whom he later discarded as superfluous to his now bloated requirements, and Jo (Ellie Ricker), Brando’s girlfriend and, you might say, his accomplice in the Williams seduction.
Galecki has taken a multi-year break from acting since the end of “The Big Bang Theory” and, frankly, I’m not sure many people outside of those of us who saw him in Steppenwolf’s “Drawer Boy” (with John Mahoney and Frank Galati) and “Pot Mom” with Laurie Metcalf ever knew what he can do on a stage. Well, he can do plenty; he is something of a method guy himself, consciously or otherwise, and he struck me Saturday as a consummate Tennessee, at least as I have come to imagine him through reading his diaries, watching his media appearances and devouring the voluminous biographies. And, of course, seeing the relentlessly autobiographical plays.
Ostrin really has penned a gossipy, juicy little play, packed with humor and action and smoldering with sex. Audiences tend to like shows where they know more than the characters and since we all are aware of what happened with Brando and “Streetcar” (and beyond), the pleasure here comes mostly from watching Galecki’s Williams figure out this hurricane that just hitchhiked to his door and fixed his plumbing.
More Top Picks Watches
The one thing I’d suggest working on would be the underwritten Jo, especially because the fabulous newcomer Ricker is so provocatively guileless in the role. We never quite know if, or how, she is in on Brando’s plans, personal and professional and, well, that is worth further exploration.
Still, the core of this highly entertaining show, directed by Colin Hanlon, is the interplay between Galecki and Moskovitz, who dives deep into Brando in every way except his signature mumble. That’s something else to work on, I guess, although actual impersonations always are a trap in these kinds of backstory treatments. Both of these men evoke the essence of their celebrity characters and that’s what works; we want to be surprised by what we see as much as we want to be comforted by the familiar.
This show manages all of that in a strikingly intimate way, thanks to a very clever mid-century set from David Gallo and the configuration of Lookingglass, which has never lent its enviable Water Tower Water Works space to a commercial producer before.
Galecki spent years on hit sitcoms, of course, and he reflexively knows how to time a laugh line or mine a subtle reaction line. Williams was very much a self-manufactured persona in an era when a playwright could be a genuine celebrity, so that is apropos, which, knowing Galecki, was not surprising to me. What I did not anticipate, but that Galecki delivers so well here, is how Williams reacts when his soft defenses are penetrated, and Brando gets the writer’s dander up. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Kowalski” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 25
Where: Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works, 163 E. Pearson St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $37-$97 at 312-595-5600 and lookingglasstheatre.org
More Top Picks Best Electric Tricycles For Seniors