—Why are you talking about gender? —León complained—. When have we ever cared about gender? We’ll call him Blanco del Bosque. I’ll lose a bit of weight and fuck that brute Kowalski. If Tennessee could see it, he’d be thrilled to finally have a guy fuck Kowalski. It’s a lot more humiliating for the character than having fucked delicate little Blanche. I always imagined Kowalski would end up screwing some guy during one of his drunken binges.

Against all odds, and after attempting to convince León that we could be very bold as long as we didn’t fall into the grotesque, I got down to work and adapted T. Williams’s drama so that a 198-pound, forty-five-year-old León could play Blanche DuBois, without dressing in drag. It was a challenge for both of us.

For those who had known him since that start to his career, the second Streetcar was a metatheatrical show in which they witnessed a conversation between the León of twenty-five years ago and the delirious León-Blanco-Blanche of today, as strong and arrogant as the Polack, but more intelligent, with a mixture of fatal femininity and masculinity that disarmed all those around him. I don’t know if the show was very true to Tennessee Williams, I suspect not. Gone was the lyricism of a female Blanche, withered and mad, but the family tragedy exploded into a more brutal, more sinister, more contemporary piece, with hints of Jean Genet. Genet was a sauce we sometimes used to douse our work together.

León was ecstatic. Late triumphs are the ones you savor most intensely. With early triumphs, you don’t have time and you don’t realize how hard it will be to have another.