The Glass Menagerie

In the second part of The Glass Menagerie a Gentleman Caller finally enters the Wingfield home in a St. Louis slum, after half an evening of preparation for him, and is left alone with the crippled, morbidly shy young girl he had been invited there to meet. Trying to interest him in the collection of little glass animals that is her only solace, she offers him her favorite, saying, "Here's an example of one, if you care to see it." In the current H.D.C. production, she takes at this moment a quick, frightened, intensely poignant glance at him, to see if he will condescend to look at the glass unicorn she treasures so. Both to the interpreting mind and the receiving heart, the glance means more than the line.

The beauty of this moment may belong essentially to Kathryn Humphreys, who plays the young girl--her whole performance, the best in an excellent production, is compellingly pathetic yet radiant--but the whole evening is full of similar small epiphanies, finely executed by the company. The play's success depends entirely on an unbroken series of these momentary beauties; on the present occasion this success is never in doubt.

The Glass Menagerie has nearly no plot (first the Gentleman Caller is awaited, then he is there, then he is gone); it is all futility and grief in a shabby-genteel apartment, where Amanda, a woman uprooted from her way of life, her daughter Laura, who knows nearly no one and fears everyone she does not know, and Laura's restless brother Tom, try to escape their cul-de-sac, and help one another out of it, in every way they can. Uniquely, perhaps, among Tennessee Williams' major works, this one has no dominating masculine figure to bring it to an explosion of melodrama. "Because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material," the author says of it, "atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part." John Hancock, who directed the current production, has worked scrupulously and to beautiful effect with everyone concerned.

Mary Grayon is almost ideally cast as the nervously talkative mother, whose busy lack of understanding makes home unbearable for the children she loves. Miss Graydon's slim figure is adroitly made pathetic by the dresses Angela Brown has hung on her; and the break in her voice keeps always alive a sense that this woman lies on the edge of desperation. Moreover (much moreover), she is equal as an actress to the demands of the part--which is vastly more than can be said for anyone else I can think of in Cambridge. Her fluttery hand-gestures, her nods and becks and agonizingly wreathed smiles are brilliantly done. Her Amanda lacks a final dimension of bravery which might have made the pathos even deeper, but everything else is there.

About Miss Humphrey's Laura, with her amazing vocal resemblance to her mother and her triumphant avoidance of the nullity towards which the part so dangerously tends, I had better not say any more. Her brother Tom is played by Joel Crothers, who lapses at moments into the mere personableness of a movie juvenile lead; for the most part, however, he takes after the rest of his stage family and is admirable.

Peter Gesell's performance as Jim the Gentleman Caller presents something of a problem to the critic. Mr. Williams describes Jim as "a nice, ordinary young man," but he has written the part as a symbol of the expansive American spirit that has destroyed the world of gentility and graces in which Amanda Wingfield tries so desperately to live. If Jim occasionally comes across as crudely caricatured, like an American (like the American) in a British book or movie or play, it is largely because Mr. Williams has written him that way, and because Mr. Hancock has made him sprawl and slouch and lean. When Mr. Gesell is allowed to be nice and ordinary, as in most of his achingly poignant scene with Miss Humphreys, he too does fine work. If I have used word like "poignant" and "pathetic" with depressing frequency in this review, I should like to have used them a great deal oftener; for poignancy and pathos are nearly all The Glass Menagerie has to offer, and the only measure of the success of any production lies in how well it projects these qualities. The audience at Saturday's performance found a good deal of humor in it, but for the most part it made me want to whimper like a whipped dog at the unmeaning cruelty with which people live with one another. This is not my favorite reaction to a play; I do not unreservedly enjoy the sensation of clenching my fingernails into my palms to steel myself against a crescendo of misery. It would be easy to find The Glass Menagerie dreary; I myself would not want to see it again for a long time. If not done well it would probably be intolerable. But in the present representation it is inescapably moving.

Mr. Williams practices on the emotions of his audience with consummate skill, successfully using various theatrical devices to intensify the atmosphere. "The play is memory," says Tom Wingfield, who functions as narrator. "Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music."--and the music threads in and out of the action with a perfectly calibrated degree of obtrusiveness.

William E. Schroeder, the designer, has used the freedom from literal representation given him by the author to create a set consisting only of black curtains, a door, a few steps in necessary places, and a large fire escape that provides the characters with a refuge from one another. It is a serviceable job, but the convention that the blacks aren't there is weakened by hanging a picture on them, and the impressive fire escape occasionally hides someone's face just when we want to see it.

Mr. Schroeder's lighting sometimes brings strongly to mind the image of someone in the back throwing switches at an unwontedly rapid rate; but frequently he achieves stunning effects without loss of visibility, as when Tom appears to open the play, illuminated for a moment only by his cigarette lighter.

These non-realistic devices are the key to the success of a play that in the reading registers as an honestly told but unexciting story about ordinary people. They more than compensate for the slight drop in interest during part of the first act, and for the scattered signs of the pseudo-lyricism and pretentiousness that are so annoying in some of Mr. Williams' later plays. It is a rare experience for me to come out of a theatre changed, deeply respectful of the total effort I came to see and of all those who created it. If my gratitude is worth anything to them, I offer it thus publicly and freely.