New York Times Archive Article Review of the Glass Menagerie
Stage VIEW
Stage VIEW; A LUMINOUS 'MENAGERIE' GLOWS AT THE LONG WARF
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March 23, 1986
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While acknowledging Amanda Wingfield's cruelty, Tennessee Williams besides made information technology articulate that this phase portrait of his mother in ''The Glass Menagerie'' was intended to be sympathetic. She is a woman of gentility and warmth, someone who acts out of dearest - or, rather, her thought of love - for her children. In Amanda'southward memory, she is still that Southern belle, who, one Sun afternoon, received 17 gentlemen callers. Years later, abandoned past her husband, a telephone homo who ''fell in love with long altitude,'' she sustains herself and the remnants of her family with dreams of her ain romantic by and with hopes for the future of her crippled daughter, Laura. In the mother's fantasy, a gentleman caller volition come up for Laura, who - a sleeping princess - will be magically transformed into the lost Amanda. Once more, the mother's life will exist filled with jonquils.
In quest of Amanda, and in silent competition with Laurette Taylor who created the function, actresses tin be led to overplay her bitterness and her foolishness. Fifty-fifty Amanda'southward ''ascension and shine'' greeting tin seem like the bulletin of a termagent. In her performance as Amanda in Nikos Psacharopoulos'due south production at the Long Wharf Theater, Joanne Woodward avoids all the pitfalls of this sizable character and creates a luminous portrait, ane that captures the wistfulness as well every bit the desperation. It is a delicately shaded, grandly Southern characterization with sense of humour, gaiety and, finally, a tragic dimension. The operation brings to mind other Southern ladies Miss Woodward has played on screen - at the same fourth dimension that it remains resolutely in the spirit of Williams.
Her Amanda cannot help herself - and she certainly cannot help her children. We lookout man with fascination as her plans and her perceptions go awry. In Miss Woodward'due south functioning, we believe in Amanda'due south vision of herself as a woman who could have had 17 suitors including ''some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi delta.'' This is a adult female of insistent hospitality who remembers her Scarlett O'Hara adolescence surrounded by servants who now are ''gone, gone, gone'' with ''all vestige of gracious living.'' The idealized past becomes the only past she knows.
When Miss Woodward's Amanda dresses upwards to encounter her daughter's gentleman caller, she puts on a gown from her youth, but she does not become a effigy of fun - every bit tin can happen with actresses playing Amanda. The gown fits her personality, and, wearing it, she asserts her girlish vivacity. ''I was and then gay every bit a daughter,'' says Miss Woodward, and when the admirer caller responds, ''You lot oasis't inverse, Mrs. Wingfield,'' we laugh at the truthfulness of the remark. Without ever interim childish, this Amanda radiates youthfulness. The gentleman caller is charmed by her - as is the audience. Backside this desire for a remembered idyll is a terror of encroaching time. Amanda is fading and her daughter is having her first - and final - romantic opportunity. The disappointment clouds the play with rue. Even more than her daughter, Amanda needs her illusions.
As she should, Miss Woodward represents the strong, unmarried-parent eye of this household. For all the disengagement of her son Tom - dreaming away his days at the shoe factory - and for all the daughter'southward reverie, the iii are closely allied. This feeling of a blood tie complicity, a shared fate, is sensitively evoked in Mr. Psacharopoulos'due south production. Both Treat Williams and Karen Allen, equally Tom and Laura, are secure within their characters and within the sibling relationship. Repressing his anger, Mr. Williams listens to his female parent's cornball stories with a fond indulgence. He has heard all the stories before but he, too, can still be in her thrall. At the same fourth dimension, Miss Allen regards her female parent in awe - not as a tyrant but every bit a figure of lingering glamour, expressing a role that is far beyond her own aspiration.
Hitherto Mr. Williams'due south strength as an actor has been in far more than visceral areas (as in the movies ''Hair'' and ''Prince of the City''), although, surprisingly, he was not convincing every bit Stanley Kowalski to Ann Margret'southward Blanche in the idiot box version of ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' Playing Tom, he reveals a poetic self-awareness while underscoring the character with vibrancy. Through his acting nosotros can feel the grapheme's reverse impulses - his need for home, his craving for independence - as well as his increasing frustration. Eventually nosotros run across the selfishness that volition drive him to leave the family to follow his artistic goals, as the playwright did himself.
More clearly than in other productions, this ''Glass Menagerie'' becomes a double awakening - for Amanda and for Tom who begins his rite of passage. Only Laura remains a convict; the animals in her glass collection stay more than alive to her than people outside her insulated habitation, perhaps more than live than her relatives. Miss Allen keeps Laura a gentle kid, as vulnerable to the touch equally the glass unicorn that loses its horn.
Working in harmony, the three actors cause a familiar play to breathe with new vigor. Undercurrents of humor sally in unknown corners and Amanda's prattle flowers into lyricism. Nosotros hear in her churr an echo of the elegies evoked past Blanche, Alma Winemiller and other stake, sensitive women in Tennessee Williams plays. The son'south moodiness is viewed within the context of the family - and the sundering of the relationship achieves an inevitability.
The performances movement with precision to that late leap evening when Tom brings a friend dwelling house from the mill to play the role of Laura's gentleman caller. Characterized by the author equally a ''nice ordinary beau,'' Jim, the admirer caller, is a high school hero fallen from his height. Through a concerted course in cocky-improvement, he is trying to raise his prospects to their old level. Jim is intended to represent reality thrust into the rarefied Wingfield home. James Naughton somewhat overplays that reality, turning Jim into a convivial go-getter. Not content to sit on the floor, he walks restlessly around the room and otherwise makes his presence felt. Jim should be more of an aureola than a presence, as vivid to Laura in the pages of her yearbook as he is in person. Equally a result, the play is stirred from its own reverie, and that haunting scene between Jim and Laura - the equivalent of a love scene - loses some of its moving tentativeness.
The performance does non seriously tilt the residual of the evening, which is otherwise artfully modulated. The product began last summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival -Treat Williams joined the cast in New Haven - and would seem to accept benefited from the extended work. Andrew Jackness's setting gives the play an ballast in domesticity. In directly dissimilarity, John Dexter'south 1983 Broadway revival seemed to unmoor the play. That product unwisely intruded the playwright'south visual aids, the projections and scene titles that he added to the published version of the text. As Tennessee Williams explained in his production notes, he was not broken-hearted to see them used in performance. He hoped that interim would comport the play, as information technology did in the original production. Such is also the example in the Long Wharf revival, especially so with Joanne Woodward and Treat Williams offering two of their finest performances every bit female parent and son in this most plangent of retentivity plays.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/23/theater/stage-view-a-luminous-menagerie-glows-at-the-long-warf.html
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