titlehere; On her way to Broadway in a Tennessee Williams classic, Natasha Richardson talks to Adam Green about the role of a lifetime.(Interview)

Byline: Adam Green

Blanche DuBois, the doomed heroine of Tennessee Williams's 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, is often considered the female Hamlet-ubiquitous but notoriously difficult to play. By turns flighty, genteel, histrionic, and fragile, she was brought to life by Jessica Tandy in the original Broadway production and by Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film. Since then, many fine actresses, including Blythe Danner, Jessica Lange, and Patricia Clarkson-not to mention Marge Simpson, who starred in the Springfield Community Theater's musical version, Oh, Streetcar!-have tried to capture Blanche's mercurial essence. This month, the always superb Natasha Richardson takes her turn with this most demanding of roles, as the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway.

A few days before the start of rehearsals, Richardson is circumspect about the daunting challenge ahead of her. "Right now I wish I could call the whole thing off," she says with a laugh. "The more I research the play and the part, the more I think I must be out of my mind. It's scary taking on ghosts."

As the Hirschfelds and other memorabilia on the walls of her Central Park West office attest, Richardson has made a stage career as a kind of theatrical ghostbuster, taking on the specters of legendary performances and banishing them, for a few hours at least, to the wings. She first hit the boards in a 1985 West End production of Chekhov's The Seagull, as Nina, a part that had been played two decades earlier by her mother (and costar), Vanessa Redgrave. For her 1993 Broadway debut, Richardson chose Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, which at the time was remembered mostly for the 1930 screen version's terse ad campaign: "Garbo talks!" In Sam Mendes's 1998 reconception of Cabaret, she stamped her initials on a role that had long been marked, property of liza. Richardson's Sally Bowles was less a plucky little-girl-lost than a broken doll, clinging desperately to her good-times credo as the world fell apart around her.

Streetcar isn't Richardson's first encounter with Williams. She played Catherine in a 1993 BBC production of Suddenly, Last Summer, capturing the wounded delicacy of a young woman ill suited for a harsh world. She also played Maggie in a staged reading of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Vassar, with James Earl Jones as Big Daddy. But Blanche is the role she has always felt she had to play. "She's completely flesh and blood, filled with pain and sexuality and wit-all the contradictions," Richardson says.

From the moment that Blanche arrives at her sister, Stella's, squalid New Orleans flat, having lost their ...