One Small, Unhappy Family

By William Tynan

"The play is memory," declares the narrator of The Glass Menagerie. In the poignant, powerful 50th-anniversary revival that has just begun a limited run on Broadway, the memory in question is clearly that of Tennessee Williams. A large photograph of the playwright looms over the set that confronts the arriving audience. Cigarette holder in hand, he contemplates a written page. After the houselights dim, a young man comes on stage and begins to type. The projection changes to a blank piece of paper. The young man lights a cigarette, then addresses the audience, his wry drawl and courtliness gently recalling Williams himself.

He is called Tom, as in Thomas Lanier Williams, the playwright's full name. He will be both narrator and player, providing "truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." The message: we will be witnesses to Williams' personal history as well as to dramatic fiction. The fusion results, of course, in a richly poetic play about three people who are trapped by circumstance and one another. Amanda Wingfield, an erstwhile Southern belle, clings to the past. Her daughter Laura is a physical and emotional cripple who can bear to do nothing more challenging than tend her collection of miniature glass animals. Laura's brother Tom, a warehouse worker with a poet's soul, longs to escape the family he is obliged to support.

Director Frank Galati, a Tony winner for The Grapes of Wrath, has given this production a slow, loving pace, as is required to reveal the characters' anguished, complex inner lives. The cast, led by five-time Tony winner Julie Harris, is splendid. As Tom, Zeljko Ivanek is particularly fine. With quicksilver facility, he is now the sly commentator standing outside the action, now the hot-tempered and frustrated artist. When he nearly upsets Laura's menagerie, the look that flashes across his face is a tiny cornucopia of rue, love, self-disgust, fear and resignation. Calista Flockhart's Laura is near perfect, her pathological shyness so organic that it is painful to watch. Only a tendency to sing her words mars her performance. As the Gentleman Caller upon whom Amanda pins her great hopes for Laura, Kevin Kilner is properly hearty, even if his self-assurance seems a bit put on rather than intrinsic.

Julie Harris is so beloved and so seemingly well suited to Amanda that one wants and expects from her an emotional tour de force. Harris fusses and chatters and bullies with supreme invention, but what she does not do sufficiently is show us Amanda's vulnerability. If Amanda is not revealed to be as much a victim as her children, the play can't achieve its full heartbreaking effect. Still, Harris is expert, and taken as a whole this production is achingly right.