January 2009
Satellite Theater By Shamrock McShane

Magical Menagerie

It was the day after Christmas in 1944, and people in Chicago were going to see a play that in no way took part in the holiday spirit. The unseasonable new play, The Glass Menagerie, would seem to be approaching Broadway most unobtrusively. How could anyone know that an unsteady Laurette Taylor was about to deliver a performance for the ages?

There was some sentiment at the time that Tennessee Williams had simply constructed an acting vehicle for Laurette Taylor. Wise man if he did. More than half a century after life's curtain descended on Laurette Taylor, her stature as the greatest of all American stage actresses is largely unchallenged.

The Glass Menagerie is simply one the greatest of all American plays.

It is with the greatest of expectations that I approach the Hippodrome's 2009 production of Menagerie, because, like the premier production, it steals in on cats' feet, unobtrusively, subbing for another play in the Hipp's subscription series that fell through when there was a problem with the rights. We are the winners in this. It means that Lauren Caldwell gets to really direct a great play, not just call the same prescribed shots culled from a recent Off–Broadway show.

Lauren Caldwell can interpret Glass Menagerie, bring a personal meaning to the story of these now iconic characters: Tom, the poet; Laura, the broken girl; Amanda, the matriarch; and Jim, the gentleman caller.

The vehicle for Laurette Taylor falls to Sara Morsey, and thus our brush with greatness. The Hippodrome's premier actress, like a diva on tour, is fresh from her performance as Amanda in a production of Menagerie at Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers, noted in these pages, lauded by critics. Now she is surrounded by a stronger ensemble and guided by a virtuoso director.

This is a memory play, and the memory plays tricks. The memory is dispersed over time, and the slight action of this story plays out from fall to winter to spring, presented in seven scenes with a screen to project text.

It is the Time of the Depression. Tom, the poet–narrator, tells us that the Americans then "were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy." We know what that's like.

Is Tom an idealized version of Tennessee? Tennessee as Merchant Marine? The boy whose father called him Miss Nancy? Tom is a poet, known as Shakespeare.

At one point Tom lashes out at his mother, Amanda, and calls her a witch. The witches in Macbeth were necromancers, in love with death.

Tom whiles away his hours in a movie theatre replete with stage shows. At one he is entertained and entranced by Malvolio the Magician, who performs Jesus–like miracles, turning water into wine, then into beer, then into whiskey.

Tom wants to show Laura's story. It's Laura that he really cares about. Amanda just keeps getting in the way. That's the way Tom remembers it. He doesn't know perhaps that what we see is Amanda's energy like lightning strokes.

Laura flees Rubicam's Business College and proceeds into full retreat from life, because life is just too tawdry and awful.

Amanda can't believe that Tom goes to the movies as much as he claims to. And maybe he doesn't. It is doubtful that he frequents the opium dens of St. Louis, if such exist, but he might give them a try.

What family is this? "Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum."

"Instinct is something that Christian people have got away from," Amanda preaches. "It belongs to animals."

The father who is missing is an important character in the story. He has walked out on Amanda despite her gift for the art of conversation. Which is to say, she never shuts up. The missing father must have been the winner in the contest among the seventeen gentlemen callers.

These people are doomed. This family is doomed. And Jim is a chump.

It's the fact that they are aware of it to varying degrees that is compelling. Amanda is in denial. Laura is in retreat. Tom confronts it, but to what end?

The warped dysfunction of this unholy fatherless family turns mother and daughter into sisters. It is a lonely sisterhood that Laura is about to enter, lifelong and secluded in darkness, as a devotee of the Church of Heavenly Rest.

When Jim kisses Laura, this girl he thinks of as his sister, there is no escaping the incestuousness. Nor is there any escape in Tom's eternal yearning after his sister Laura, as the poet Tennessee would yearn evermore for his lamented sister Rose.

Amanda cavalierly drops the N–word into her first reminiscence of Blue Mountain. The word is inextricable from the idyllic South that Amanda has brought to the North in her fallen grandeur. The family has gone from a mansion, it would seem, to a cramped apartment with a fire escape in downtown St. Louis.

Tennessee hated St. Louis, but that is where he is buried — against his wishes. It was his brother Dakin's idea. Tennessee hated him too. He told me Dakin was a fool, the night I had dinner with him in his conch house in Key West a few years before he died.

Tennessee's sister Rose lived in a house he had bought a few blocks away. Tennessee was taking care of her.

The Glass Menagerie opens on January 9 and runs through February 1 at the Hippodrome State Theatre.