In perhaps the most famous opening speech in an American play, Tom, the narrator of “The Glass Menagerie,” tells us that he’s the opposite of a stage magician:
“He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
With those blunt words, Tennessee Williams launched one of the most distinguished playwrighting careers in theater history and delivered one of its more fetching manifestos. The miracle of “Menagerie,” of course, a work Williams probably never topped, is that the rest of the drama maintains the high standard set by its opening lines.
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “Death of a Salesman” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’–all, curiously, variations on the “Menagerie” theme of an ultra-dysfunctional family — are its only conceivable rivals for best play by an American.
Steppenwolf Theatre’s upcoming revival Sunday through Jan. 30 will, in a way, be the 24-year-old company’s third crack at the drama, distinguished attention right there. The troupe mounted one celebrated production back in the ’70s, with John Malkovich as a blatantly gay Tom and Laurie Metcalf as a thoroughly whacked out Laura, and in the early ’80s, three other Steppenwolf members made up three-fourths of the cast for a production at Northlight Theatre in Evanston: Terry Kinney, Glenne Headley and Tom Irwin. Steppenwolf, home to the city’s most celebrated acting ensemble, has bestowed such honor on no other single play.
We’re also in a high tide of classics. Steppenwolf tackled Williams’ other masterpiece, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” only last season, and earlier this fall, Goodman Theatre mounted a “Death of a Salesman,” so acclaimed it’s headed for Broadway this winter. There is always a risk: A drama as performed as “Menagerie” might easily come off overly familiar or even mechanical.
Clearly, Steppenwolf thinks otherwise. “The risk you take in programming well-known work is that people might say to themsleves, `I’ve seen that,’ ” admits Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s artistic director. “Or that they’ll hold in their mind a particular performance, that they come to it with a firmly established pre-conception.
“But there are tons of people who’ve never seen it,” she adds. “I had that experience myself with `Death of a Salesman.’ As many times as I’ve read that play, I’d never seen a production. And I was so moved, so knocked out hearing those words and seeing those characters. I felt that way about our `Streetcar.’ These big old American classics endure.”
As if to underscore her point that the familiar is not always that familiar, Lavey herself has never acted in “Menagerie.” Neither have the four players in the Steppewnolf revival, directed by 40-year-old New York director Mark Brokaw (“How I Learned to Drive”), who is staging the classic for his first time too.
Whatever freshness they can bring is precisely the air of discovery that makes revivals worthwhile in the first place. “Yes, I think everyone feels he or she knows `Glass Menagerie,’ ” says Molly Regan, who plays the family’s mother, Amanda. “There’s this societal awareness, and certainly an awareness of it in the theater. But picking up the script again, I was surprised to find how much it goes right to the heart of many familial relationships.”
Williams, only 33 when this drama hit, wrote a number of plays before “Menagerie,” but its success in Chicago and later on Broadway in 1944 effectively launched his career. Unlike “Streetcar,” and its two larger-than-life characters surrounded by an orbit of minor players, “Menagerie” is a nearly perfectly balanced quartet. Blatantly autobiographical, though differing in key details from Williams’ actual life, the story tells of the Wingfields, led by Amanda, a woman abandoned by a telephone worker who “fell in love with long distances.”
She raised her two children, Tom and Laura, in a St. Louis tenement, and by the 1930s setting of the story, they are grown but offer her little consolation. Tom, an undisguised stand-in for Williams himself has an unpromising job at a factory, threatened by his penchant for drinking and other mysterious, unexplained nightly escapades. Laura suffers from a limp and the theater’s most heartbreaking inferiority complex, a girl so shy and terrified she runs in horror from a clerical class, dashing her mother’s hopes she’ll ever be gainfully employed.
Onetime southern belle Amanda can’t fathom why Laura doesn’t attract any gentlemen callers, either. She persuades Tom to bring home one, a buddy named Jim, who charms Laura in what may be the only romantic evening of her life. (Williams’ own sister, Rose, underwent a lobotomy that all but erased her personality.)
Steppenwolf’s cast members all cite the language of the play first and foremost; Williams’ poetry was rarely so pointed or beautiful. But they also seem to be tapping into the drama’s psychological riches.
Consider these contrasting views of the characters. “Amanda somewhat creates her own isolation by being so needy,” says Martha Plimpton, who plays Laura. “Even back then, women were capable of being independent. But being who she is, coming from a genteel life, she relies too heavily on her children to return her to that life of ease and in the process smothers them. She isolates herself and creates her own prison.”
“The desperation of Amanda’s situation is hitting me harder than I thought it would,” Regan says of playing the character. “I realize how she’s facing an abyss, grounded in the Depression when there was no safety net for such people. Here is a woman totally unprepared for what life brought her. Abandoned by an alcoholic husband, knowing her own son is probably alcoholic and about to abandon her as well, and then having a dysfunctional daughter creates a desperation that goes very deep. Of course, she’s silly and naive and funny, but that only adds to her problems. She combines ferocious survival instincts with genuine love.”
The great tension of the play is that between the need of the young to leave home to find fulfillment (Tom will be paralyzed if he stays) and the responsibility to tend to the needs of family (which Tom is increasingly incapable of meeting). Director Brokaw indicates he’s focusing straightforwardly on that tension. He does allow Hopper’s Tom, who both narrates and participates as himself throughout the drama, remain on stage even when he’s not speaking or in a scene–a departure from tradition. But mostly Brokaw seems inclined to focus on making the lines of the play come alive.
For instance, “In the monologues, I’m not trying to give a famous speech,” Hopper says. “I’m trying to tell the audience a story. The trick is to make the words active, to find some way of needing them, of learning why they’re the only words that will do.”
David New, who plays the only non-family member of the drama, has a strong sense of how Williams weighed his argument equally for each of the other characters.
“You always try to work a play like this from the positive, and every single one of these people is well-intentioned,” New says. “They just miss each other. That’s what’s heartbreaking. Amanda’s not really a nag. Laura’s not so much painfully shy as someone who is kind and concerned for her brother. And Tom desperately wants to make the domestic situation work. He only leaves when he realizes escape is the only option.
“And then he realizes he hasn’t escaped at all,” New continues. “I finish my scene, late in the play, and I stand in the wings and listen to Tim’s final speech. Except I have to make myself not listen. Because I know they don’t want me sobbing for my curtain call. It’s so exquisite, it’s so heartbreaking, because you know, when he tells her at the end, to blow out her candles, that it’s a plea. `Please, let me go. Let this memory stop haunting me.’ Those candles will always be back for him.”
“Menagerie” is about a basic need for freedom and the conflicts engendered by its elusiveness. Brokaw puts it this way: “Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but Williams seems to be saying that you can never really leave home.”
