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Into the Theater. For the first time in his life, Marlon worked hard. In his first Broadway part, playing a 15-year-old in I Remember Mama, he struck the critics as merely "charming," but theater people began to take notice. "Incredibly good," exclaimed Director Robert Lewis, and the offers began to pour in. In Truckline Cafe ("quite effective"), Candida ("superb") and A Flag Is Born ("the bright, particular star"), Brando raised high hopes; and in A Streetcar Named Desire he fulfilled them.
Streetcar's Stanley Kowalski, as Brando conceived him, was a man to match the blast furnaces and the man-killing mines of an industrial age—"one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They're so muscle-bound they can hardly talk. Stanley didn't give a damn how he said a thing. His purpose was to convey his idea. He had no awareness of himself at all." As he lived the part, Brando dragged his audience back by the hair of their heads to the Neanderthal cave of human origin, and made them stare at the animal leavings on the floor. "It was awful and it was sublime," said one director. "Only once in a generation do you see such a thing in the theater."
Complete Scale. How could a youngster of 23, with only four Broadway parts behind him, strike so deep and come up with so much? His teacher, Stella Adler, has an answer: "Marlon never really had to learn to act. He knew. Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him. He had the potential for any role. It's incredible how large the scale of his emotions is—he has complete scale. And he has all the external equipment—looks and voice and power of presence&$151;to go with it." Right from the beginning, says Director Robert Lewis, Marlon's instinct was to fit himself to a character, not the character to himself-"to work from the inside out." "He has an inner rhythm that never fails." says Director Erwin Piscator; and Lewis speaks of "a natural dangerousness and unpredictability that's always exciting in the theater"All these qualities, his friends say, are symptoms of an almost frighteningly susceptible nature. "He's like a glob of the yeast of creation," says one. He picked up a working knowledge of French and Spanish in a matter of days. He can imitate someone precisely after watching him for two minutes. He almost never answers the phone in his own voice, usually convinces the caller that he is someone else. His sense of humor is as graphic as an otter's. One day a woman columnist walked up to him and said in a sugary voice: "Why, you look like everybody else!" Marlon stared at her for a moment in silence, then turned without a word to the nearest corner and stood on his head.
Lao-tse & Yoga. Marlon's physical co ordination is equal to almost any task his imagination sets. He can play the bongos well enough to take a Saturday night seat in a Latin combo. He can box and fence and do an interpretive dance with all but the pros, and he has mastered enough yoga to demonstrate an exercise in which the abdominal muscles are rotated in a flowing movement around the navel.