New Play in Manhattan

The Glass Menagerie (by Tennessee Williams; produced by Eddie Dowling & Louis J. Singer) arrived on Broadway (after a thirteen-week run in Chicago) to receive a loud welcome from Manhattan critics. As a play, The Glass Menagerie has its faults and needless frills. As a piece of theater, however, it is appealing and unusual, clothing an uneventful family history in plenty of stage color. And in the role of the mother, Laurette Taylor gives the most fascinating and memorable performance of the season.

Actress Taylor plays a middleaged, down-at-heel former Southern belle, long ago deserted by her husband, and living with her feckless dreamer of a son (Eddie Dowling) and shy, scared, crippled daughter (Julie Haydon) in a St. Louis alley. Nagging, grandiloquizing about her mint-julepy, porticoed youth, absurd in her foolishness, pathetic in her pretensions, she wants passionately to get her daughter married, demands endlessly that her son bring "gentlemen callers" to the house. At length he brings one--a gum-chewing extrovert who, though touched by the girl's plight, counts the minutes till he can escape.

The Glass Menagerie never overworks its material, astutely unfolds most of its human little story in revealing little scenes. It is the more touching, too, for not being cheaply sentimental. It portrays unfortunate young people who are also, quite plainly, fiberless; it balances what is pathetic in the mother's situation with what is comic in her character. But The Glass Menagerie veers off from straight realism to become a kind of mood play, something projected as a "memory." It makes use of a narrator, filmy curtains. dim lights, atmospheric music. All this adds something, on occasion, as theater; but it takes away a good deal as art. A mood that should flow delicately out of the play itself is artificially sprayed over it. Narrators, soft lights and atmospheric music, however, are a lazy man's theatrical devices.

But Actress Taylor's devices are those of a superb performer: with mumbled words, fluttery gestures, unpredictable movements, small changes of pace and stress, she bit by bit reveals what she is, was, thinks she was, pretends to be, vaguely dreams of yet becoming.

Lady in Retirement. Perhaps Broadway's most gifted actress, Laurette Taylor has appeared there only once before (in a revival of Outward Bound) during the last thirteen years. In the popular mind, indeed, her name is entirely linked with a play she starred in 33 years ago--Peg o' My Heart. Actress Taylor played Peg (the work of her husband, prolific Playwright J. Hartley Manners) 600 times on Broadway, 500 in London, then another 500 in Manhattan. To her it was "the worst play that Hartley ever wrote. It was written too much for me. I had everything. . . . The rest of the characters were preposterous caricatures."

Crushed by Manners' death in 1928, Laurette Taylor threw over the theater and "went on what, I suppose, was the longest wake in history." When the wake ended, Actress Taylor (who is 61) was well on in middle age, very choosy--and good roles for her did not grow on trees. Says she: "It was either acting old mountaineer crones who spit tobacco juice in their son's eye--or Ibsen. I couldn't chew tobacco and I wouldn't be found dead in A Doll's House."

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