Summer Camp of the Stage

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The casting would have aroused excitement on Broadway. Joanne Woodward as Amanda Wingfield, the desperate matriarch. Karen Allen, star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman, as the soulful daughter Laura. TV Star James Naughton (Trauma Center, Planet of the Apes) as Laura's "gentleman caller." And John Sayles, filmmaker (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and novelist (Union Dues), making his professional stage debut as Tom, the restless, seething son who narrates Tennessee Williams' doom-struck "memory play" about his family. Add a designer who has won a Tony nomination, a director who has mounted more than 100 productions at venues including the New York City Opera, and even a speech coach who has worked on eleven Broadway shows, and the package was one producers would hasten to sign.

This sold-out Menagerie, however, was staged for just six days, by performers working for about $400 a week, at a 479-seat theater in a woodsy resort nearly five hours by bus from Manhattan. Almost anywhere else, the production would have been an astonishment. At the Williamstown Theater Festival, it was what audiences have come to expect.

Williamstown is the summer camp of the American stage. Since the inaugural in 1955, it has attracted established stars to work with esteemed journeymen and expectant beginners. Everyone in American theater, it seems, has sojourned there, and over the years nearly 200 company members have earned awards for stage, screen or TV work. Among them: 1985 Tony Winner Stockard Channing, Oscar Winners Rita Moreno and Christopher Walken, Emmy Winner Nancy Marchand. What lures them to Williamstown? A casual atmosphere, the chance to experiment without commercial pressures and the sylvan pleasures of the Williams College campus in the Massachusetts Berkshires. This year the company staged 78 events in a variety of spaces, some for just one night. Says Woodward, who made her Williamstown debut last week: "Last year I came up to see a couple of plays and fell in love with the creative environment. You do things you wouldn't otherwise try, and you relax when you come offstage by going to watch something else." Adds Naughton, who first appeared there in 1972: "The real crime is that a place like Williamstown does not exist in the wintertime. Then we could have a true national theater."

This summer's other participants included Richard Thomas, raging through the title role in Howard Fast's bawdy, sermonic adaptation of his novel Citizen Tom Paine; Christopher Reeve, shrewdly underplaying a Barrymore-like matinee idol in a meticulous and uproarious revival of The Royal Family; and Bernadette Peters, trying out portions of Song and Dance, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravaganza that is booked to open in mid-September on Broadway.

Unlike most artistic directors, who announce their seasons long in advance and lure actors with specific roles, Williamstown's fey, mercurial Nikos Psacharopoulos makes up his schedule as he goes along, books performers with last-minute phone calls and rehearses even main-stage productions for as little as eleven days. Psacharopoulos, a Yale drama professor, joined the company as associate director its first season and became artistic director the next year. Glass Menagerie, typically, was slated four weeks before it opened, after Psacharopoulos publicly considered other potential casts.

Most productions of the play have been dominated by the actresses who have played the coquettish Amanda, from Laurette Taylor to Katharine Hepburn to Jessica Tandy. She can seem a self-abasing victim of the husband who left her / or a termagant who drove him away. When she recalls the day 17 men came to court her in Blue Mountain, she can be lamenting her lost chances or inventing a family mythology to inspire her laggard son and daughter. Woodward, forgoing the opportunity for a star turn, made the character a panicky, sexless, menopausal mother who lives only for her children. When she said she lay awake all night worrying about their future, she meant every word, and her children were all the more disheartened by her contagious fear.

The crippled, withdrawn Laura, based on Williams' sister Rose, who underwent a lobotomy, is a part that entices actresses to romance. They portray her as retreating from life because she is too fine for it. But Allen grasped the truth of a line spoken by Laura's brother: she seems special to her family because she is theirs. To an objective observer, she could well appear childish and shallow. Allen's pretty face was frozen in hopelessness, almost never illuminated by understanding. The gentleman caller is a character whom Williams borrowed from Sinclair Lewis: he is a budding Babbitt, a secular Elmer Gantry, zealously preaching the virtues of pep and good fellowship yet somehow dimly grasping that his residual adolescent vitality is no substitute for intelligence. Naughton avoided the pitfall of being too obvious a loser. The visitor's coarse charm, mercantile drive and fevered if directionless activity made him a persuasive lure to the passive Laura.

Sayles, a novice stage actor, proved himself enormously gifted. He, not Woodward, emerged as the star of the show. Although he has played tense and unfeeling characters in his films, he pulsed with neurasthenic sensitivity as the young would-be writer. His voice was twangy and braying and Southern, his movement gangly and boyish, his manner petulant. Sayles demonstrated that the character can match Williams' own manic energy and embrace of life and thereby be all the more haunting in his inability to escape his past. He remains bound to the mother who unnerves him and the sister for whom he despairs. Sayles' bearing suggested that Tom, like Williams, would not find any other women among the great romantic loves of his life.

Perhaps no American theater except Williamstown, with its college setting and relaxed, busman's holiday approach to acting, could have allowed Sayles and his colleagues to explore the text so freely. His splendid performance and the fine production left no doubt that the playwright, not his sister, was the , great and thwarted soul.