Flee as a Bird

By T. E. K.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

The Glass Menagerie is Williams' portrait of the artist as a young man. It is a family play, and as almost everyone learns sooner or later, home means both heart and hurt. In the home of the Wingfields, modeled on Williams' own, there is the memory of the absent father, the telephone-company man who "fell in love with long distance." The suffocating mother, Amanda, uses up all the oxygen in any room she enters. The crippled sister, Laura, is as fragile as her tiny glass animals, and the task of the artist-to-be, Tom, is to break out of this enmeshing spider web if he is to salvage his own soul.

Except for Our Town, there is no play better known to Americans than The Glass Menagerie; the audience becomes a casting director and makes rather exacting judgments. Maureen Stapleton is not quite right for Amanda. She is incapable of conveying the proper air of gentility, and she lacks somewhat the valiancy and authority Amanda should possess.

Rip Torn, always an exciting stage presence, is just right for Tom. He never lets the moody dreamer erode the spiky will to escape and achieve. While a trifle too young for the part, Paul Rudd as the "gentleman caller" captures a quality that is very difficult to project from a stage, the kindness of the man.

Doe at Bay. Pamela Payton-Wright's Laura is hauntingly evocative, a vision of a doe at bay. An actress who has done varied parts in the past several years, she is a pointilliste who composes every dot in a role into a harmonic whole. When she releases the driving passion she seems to possess, she may become an actress of immense power.

She could be a marvelous St. Joan, a Hedda Gabler or a Lady Macbeth.

Thanks to Director Ted Mann and his troupe of accomplished players, this revival finds our greatest living play wright in the best possible hands .

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