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Written by Michael Muckian
Jun 16, 2011
Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” is considered to be the iconic gay American playwright’s most autobiographical work. The drama of the Wingfield family and its dashed dreams, crystallized in a collection of small glass animals, opens American Players Theatre’s summer season at Touchstone, the intimate 201-seat indoor theater on the company’s Spring Green campus.
“The Glass Menagerie” is only APT’s second foray into Williams’ work. “The Night of the Iguana” was performed Up the Hill at APT’s outdoor amphitheater in 2007. But “Menagerie” marks a step forward for the company both in terms of intimacy and in exploring some of Williams’ most poignant themes, according to director Aaron Posner.
“This is one of Tennessee Williams’ great works and unquestionably a seminal work of American dramatic literature,” Posner said. “I think of the play as emotionally autobiographical, in the sense that it was inspired by real people in his life and speaks a great deal to how life feels to him, even though the events are not the ‘real’ events of his life.”
Premiered in Chicago in 1944, “Menagerie” is introduced as a memory play by the character of Tom Wingfield (Darragh Kennan), who represents the playwright (whose real name was Thomas) as a younger man. Tom recalls his life in a cheap St. Louis apartment with his mother Amanda Wingfield (Sarah Day), a former Southern belle abandoned by her husband, and his sister Laura (Susan Shunk), who suffers from a disability. The three scrape by financially and emotionally, all of them living lives of extreme disappointment.
Amanda yearns for all that she has lost, not only for herself but for a daughter whose world centers on a collection of miniature glass animals. Amanda is determined to find a suitor for Laura, and when Tom brings coworker Jim O’Connor (Marcus Truschinski) home for dinner, she has great hopes. But some things are simply not meant to be, and subsequent actions lead to the dissolution of what little family there was to begin with.
“Williams was remembering something that occurred during the Great Depression,” said Day, who plays Amanda. “We’ve all had different expectations during our youth than what our lives turned out to be, and this speaks to anyone who has survived economic tough times or whose life didn’t go as anticipated.”
From a literary standpoint, “The Glass Menagerie” is a play about broken promises and disappointed expectations, and scholars note themes that range from the failure of capitalism to the failure of families and even fathers, who leave their loved ones in dire emotional and economic straights. As a play about families in general, and Williams’ family in particular, the narrative may strike some as being close to home.
“I think when you are dealing with family, you always see yourself in multiple characters, since that is the reality of a family,” Posner said. “We tend to be so intertwined with our families, particularly a complex and troubled family like the Wingfields – that it is often hard to say exactly where one ends and another begins.”
The family component has always operated centrally to “The Glass Menagerie,” which developed almost concurrently as a screenplay for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had Williams under contract at the time. The play, reworked from Williams’ short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” opened to critical acclaim in Chicago, going on the next year to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
The most famous anecdote about the play concerns the night Williams’ mother Edwina Williams saw the play and refused to acknowledge any connection to the character of Amanda, which the playwright had based on her. Despite his mother’s denial, the Wingfield family helped establish Williams as a major playwright and continues to be a source of autobiographical angst for those who experience it.
“Whenever you put family members on stage together you have something special,” Day said. “For all the hardship and hurt, there is still an undercurrent of love. I hope that audience members walk away better appreciating their own families.”
“The Glass Menagerie” runs June 21-Oct. 15 at American Players Theatre’s Touchstone Theatre in Spring Green. Go to www.americanplayers.org.
