The Glass Menagerie

It is a tribute to Michael Murray and the Charles Playhouse company that they have attracted an actress as uncommonly sensitive and versatile as Betty Field to play Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. (She played most recently in Strange Interlude in New York.) Miss Field is the first actress of real renown to come to the Charles and her performance makes Tennessee William's play into a remarkable evening of theater.

Amanda is one of the best of William's characters, but also one of the most difficult to play. She must reminisce dreamily about the easy gentility of her youthful days in the South, where she once entertained seventeen "gentlemen callers" with kitty talk, and at the same time must show through as an insipid and very ungenteel middle-class mother, the kind of woman who would fall for an alcoholic telephone man despite her "fastidious" tastes. This is a hard contrast to handle without making Amanda merely laughable. Another contrast is even more difficult. Amanda must be a nagging, tyranical mother, who tries to force her crippled daughter Laura to be a southern belle, who shouts continually at her son Tom and refuses to let him write poetry in the house. On the other hand, the audience must believe that Amanda loves her children deeply, that she is determined only that they avoid their parents' mistakes. When she tells Tom that "I'm old and don't matter," it must be evident how sincerely she means what she says and yet how woefully it contradicts her vanity.

Miss Field resolves these subleties with astonishing perceptiveness. Her most powerful instrument is her voice, which at its best moments is trying desperately to attain Southern elegance and always barely missing. Especially striking is her use of it in a scene at the end of the first act. Alone on the stage, she telephones an acquaintance to offer her a subscription to a pulp magazine, and when she speaks the listener mocks her smallness yet nearly weeps that a Southern Lady should rejoice so at finally making the sale. There is another extraordinary scene later, when Amanda tries to entertain Jim O'Connor, the "gentleman-caller," and her empty Southern sweetness is revealed. Miss Field avoids a caricature and keeps just enough of the Old South in her reading to show Amanda's desperateness.

But in praise Miss Field I am ignoring the fine performances of the rest of the company. Eunice Brandon, as Laura, handles her long scene with Jim O'Connor especially effectively. Her shyness slowly disappears, then returns as she makes the one human contact of her life and loses it. I wish only that she were a bit shier at the beginning of the play so that the transition to the scene with Jim would seem less abrupt.

Carlton Colyer plays Tom (he resembles Miss Field so strikingly that I thought for a while he was her real son) and is convincing both in his tenderness toward Laura and his angry frustration with enslaving responsibilities. I quarrel only with his reading of the narrative passages which open and close the play. These are certainly some of Williams's most beautiful lines, but they sound false when Tom puffs so suavely on his cigarette and speaks them so flatly. Mr. Colyer is trying to be "natural"; I would have him let the lines ring out.

The face of Tom Keena (playing Jim) skillfully combines elements of the smooth seducer and the half-hearted social-worker as he shows his studied concern with Laura's small tragedy.

Director Michael Murray merits high praise for inter-grating these four performances so that none blares out. His gentle pacing of the play sets a perfect mood. Judiciously used background music, which often catches the players in delicate poses, provides part of the "pleasant disguise of illusion," which, as Tom says, covers the play's frightening truth.