‘The Glass Menagerie’ in New York

Perhaps, like young Tom Wingfield, you longed to leave home and find your way, but couldn’t. Or, like Laura Wingfield, you were a loner in high school who never fit in.

Let’s hope your plight wasn’t as dire as that of Tom and Laura, who struggle to survive in that suffocating St. Louis apartment (c. 1930s)— abandoned by their father and trapped into dependency by their overbearing mother, the seemingly helpless but destructive Amanda.

Hopeless lives

As you remember from the play, Tom is a frustrated poet who works in a shoe factory by day and escapes his tortured family life by going to the movies at night. He flees a delusional mother who lives in a fantasy world, where she was once a Southern belle besieged by “gentlemen callers.” (She now sells magazines over the phone to make a living). Meanwhile, Amanda tyrannizes her children with her unrelenting demands to change their hopeless lives.

Even more painful is the plight of Laura, Tom’s beloved sister. Crippled by an illness in high school, ashamed of her disfiguring limp, she has withdrawn into her own fantasy world of tiny glass animals, long-playing records and her high school yearbook. Though you may have read or seen this play long ago, the memory of their moving story endures.

For that reason, there’s a peril in reviving a play as delicate and poetic as this one. Frankly, I prefer to remember the past Menageries I’ve seen with fondness, rather than risk disenchantment with a new production that fails this fragile classic.

Isolated set

So it was with some trepidation that I ventured out on the heartless streets of Broadway (where revivals often fail, even with the best intentions) to see John Tiffany’s current production. To my great relief, I found the play as luminous today as it is in my memory.

Tiffany is a smart director– he listens to his author. Taking their lead from the play’s opening lines, Tiffany and his designer Bob Crowley set the stage– literally – afloat on a sea of memory.

The Wingfields’ world rests on a platform over a pool of black water. Their two-room apartment is bare, save for essential furniture. Above and around them— on the bare, black upstage and sidewalls– is nothing but darkness. They’re isolated from the world, lost, swallowed in time and space.

Unrequited but decent

Into this void (Beckett later calls it “the dark vast”) narrator Tom looks back, remembering those desperate moments when he tried to save both his sister and himself.

Alarmed that Laura is retreating further and further from reality, Amanda nags Tom into inviting home a co-worker— a “gentleman caller”, as she refers to him. The dinner is a disaster, from which Laura hides in shame.

Tom’s friend turns out to be Jim, the unrequited object of her high school fantasies. Meanwhile, Jim, who remembers her as “Blue Roses” (a nickname for her pleurosis), turns out to be a decent fellow, and, in the few brief moments they spend together on that fated evening, tries to encourage her out of her shell. The fleeting kiss they share is among the most painful moments I’ve experienced in the theater. You know it’s Laura’s first, and will be her last.

Tom eventually leaves, descending the fire escape in their shabby neighborhood where he, his mother and Laura spent their only hopeful moments together, watching “a sliver of a moon rising over Garfinkle’s delicatessen.” With Tom’s departure, the play descends into the darkness, as do Laura and her mother.

Consolation in memory

In Tiffany’s tender production, the individual performances offer heartfelt interpretations of these immortal characters. Cherry Jones may be the most formidable Amanda I’ve seen, while Zachary Quinto’s touching Tom is ironic to the point of tragicomedy.

Celia Keenan-Bolger’s stoical Laura breaks your heart, while Brian Smith’s Jim surprises you with his compassion and humor. Together, they form a tight ensemble, whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The only consolation for this play’s heartbreak lies, again, in memory— looking back on what must have been a hopeful time for its young author. Tennessee Williams, who was born “Tom” (like his character), also had a severe, puritanical mother and a fragile, beloved sister (who suffered from a mental illness and was eventually institutionalized). Like his character Tom, Tennessee worked in a St. Louis shoe factory by day, and wrote poetry at night. Ultimately, his father abandoned the family, too.

Playwright’s rise and fall

Like Tom, Tennessee also escaped. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a playwriting degree, moved to New Orleans and then to New York. There he found a literary agent, Audrey Wood, who placed him as a scriptwriter at M-G-M in Hollywood, where the penniless young author found himself making $250 a week (a “killing” at the time). Emboldened, he wrote an autobiographical screenplay called The Gentlemen Caller. M-G-M rejected it.

That rejection might be one of the more fortuitous footnotes in American theater. Undeterred, Williams returned to New York and transformed that script for the stage, where his true love lay. Wood found a producer and a star (Laurette Taylor), and the rest is theater history.

You know the rest of the story. After a triumphant career, Williams eventually suffered a devastating decline (in health, popularity and sanity), one as precipitous as his rise. I remember how dismayed Audrey Wood was when, after 25 years of representation, Tennessee suddenly turned on her in a public display of irrational rage and fired her during a rehearsal of one of his later, problematic plays.

(Wood was a close family friend and colleague of my father, whose theatrical agency represented Tennessee in his salad days. Audrey never recovered from the blow.)

Eventually, Tennessee turned against everyone and sank into paranoia, alcoholism and drug addiction. He died alone in a New York hotel room in 1983. So I prefer to remember the young, hopeful Tennessee Williams, when he was coming of age as a playwright and we were reading his beautiful coming-of-age play.

Like the lights that burned brightly and briefly in Tennessee’s life, Laura had hers, too— those candles shining on the night of her one-and-only gentleman caller’s visit. “Blow out your candles, Laura,” says Tom at the play’s close, in loving memory. And so, too, in memory of Tennessee.