Not everything is offensively fabricated in “Kowalski,” an account of the first time Marlon Brando ever met Tennessee Williams, to audition for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the play that would make him a star. It’s true the 23-year-old actor arrived three days late, having hitchhiked up to Williams’s summer home in Provincetown.  It is also true that, remarkably, Brando did repairs to the playwright’s house, unclogging the pipes and getting the lights back on.

But Gregg Ostrin’s often clunky script ultimately depicts the encounter as a homoerotically-tinged, menacing cat-and-mouse game. This is not backed up by any of the numerous historical accounts (such as the one in John Lahr’s biography of Williams), 

Does this matter? After all: Artistic license. Also: Both men have been dead for decades – Brando for two, Williams for four. Besides: Ostrin frames his play, in a prologue and an epilogue, as the unreliable reminiscences of a boozy broken down Tennessee a few years before his death. “How much of  what I remember is fact and how much is fiction I cannot say,” an older Tennessee says.

Yet, I do think the distortions matter,  not just because they do an injustice to the memory of these two talented artists, but because in this way “Kowalski” becomes self-sabotaging, undermining a well-designed, well-acted production, and especially the charismatic performance of Brando by Brandon Flynn.

Before Brando appears, we spend some twenty minutes with Tennessee (Robin Taylor Lord), his friend the great theater director and producer Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet) and his lover Pancho Rodriguez (Sebastian Trevift.), The interaction with Pancho shows us the mutually abusive relationship they have, from which it is easy to infer that it influenced his creation of the character Stanley Kowalsi. The interaction with Margo is to let us know about “Streetcar” and how brilliant it is:

Margo:“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers…” My God, Tom. It’s a breathtaking line. 

Tennessee: I know. I just came up with it. I think it’s inspired. 

Margo: It is, Tom. The whole play is. 

Brando makes his entrance when nobody happens to be around. He knocks loudly, but then enters the home, and wanders around, finding a cookie jar and helping himself.  When Tennessee returns, he’s alarmed at the intruder, thinking him a robber, then seeing him as rough trade, then, when Brando tells him he’s come up from New York, assuming he’s a fan. This entire routine is not as entertaining as intended, and entirely implausible – why wouldn’t Brando just tell him from the get-go he’s there to audition? 

Perhaps Ostrin is trying to tell us: Brando was the kind of jerk who would withhold that information. Perhaps, but there are many such scenes in “Kowalski” that feel imposed by Ostrin for effect, none more cringeworthy than the ones that occur after the sudden appearance of Brando’s female friend Jo (Ellie Ricker), which includes an odd power dynamic, in which Jo and Tom gang up on Marlon and tease him. The one pay-off to this approach is when Jo walks out of the house in a huff after a fight, and Brando rushes after her, yelling “Joooooeeeeeyyyy”  (the way Stanley famously yells “Stelllllaaa”)  It’s one of several jokes that depend on our knowledge of the real-life characters:

“It’s nice to see a young man taking an interest in the theater,” Williams says at one point.
“Hey, beats the hell out of movies,” Brando replies.

It’s not worth laying out all the little inaccuracies in “Kowalski,” and, to be fair, there is a lot of factual trivia about both men woven into the play, including points in their biography that they had in common. But “Kowalski” gets the big picture wrong in several ways. Williams is depicted as a kind of staid and snooty old school Broadway Brahmin while Brando is at the vanguard of a revolution in American theater. (If anything, they both were at the vanguard.)

 Worse, there is a clear implication in the script (and that “Joooeeeeyyy” joke is a part of it) that Williams was won over to Brando portraying Stanley Kowalski because he was very much like Stanley Kowalski. This does the real Brando a disservice.  “I was very much the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski,” Brando wrote in “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” “I was sensitive by nature, and he was coarse…He was a compendium of my imagination, based on the lines of the play. I created him from Tennessee’s words.” And that’s what gets too little respect in “Kowalski” – the artistic process.

It is possible, I suppose – if you know nothing and/or care nothing about the real-life Tennessee Williams or Marlon Brando – to find “Kowalski” a reasonably satisfying theatrical experience. This would largely be because of Brandon Flynn. Flynn is now best-known for his role in the TV series “13 Reasons Why,” but I remember him vividly portraying the kidnapped child at the center of “Kid Victory,” the 2017 John Kander and Greg Pierce musical. Flynn’sperformance moved us to identify with his character’s suffering, and joy, and confusion.The writing in “Kowalski” doesn’t get inside the characters in the same way, and when Flynn first appears, my main reaction was to size him up based on how accurately his voice and manner and appearance correlated to the real Brando. But by the end, his performance seemed less an impersonation, and more an argument for the power of a magnetic actor.

Kowalski
The Duke at 42nd Street through February 23
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $40 – $140
Written by Gregg Ostrin
Directed by Colin Hanlon,
Lighting design by Jeff Croiter, scenic design by David Gallo, sound design by Bill Toles, costume design by Lisa Zinni, movement specialist Nancy Renee Braun, casting director Stephen DeAngelis, and general management by Aaron Grant Theatrical. 
Cast: Robin Lord Taylor as Tennessee Williams, Brandon Flynn as Marlon Brando, Alison Cimmet as Margo Jones, Ellie Ricker as Jo and Sebastian Treviñ as Pancho Rodriguez,