The Smash Menagerie

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS did not call his memory play The Glass Zoo for good reason. "Menagerie" hints at the intimacy of three creatures with a fragility and warmth that is distinctly not zoo-like. All too human, The Glass Menagerie remembers the post-adolescent longing for freedom and adventure of a young poet caged in a fading, depressionistic tenement, but more, it characterizes the last generation that could daydream innocently. That era's dream machines were the phonograph and the movie projector, but they worked songs and pictures that opened romantic vistas so different from today's defined and redefined motion-coloring-books. The surpisingly good production at South House evokes Menagerie's melancholy past but knows also our electro-mood present and cries beautifully at the future that has passed into everlasting regret.

Ann Ames, as the mother, Amanda Wingfield, bursts as gloriously as the jonquils that send her into raptures. Amanda is a withered Southern belle, ever unquiet about her lost life on the plantation, regaling the tressed-up, padded-bosom, stuck-smile days of her girlhood. Amanda lives in a cocoon of memories, deceiving herself about plans for the future, acting out an existence that is worse than old-fashioned--it is dead. She sparkles beautifully, like a jewelled kinetoscope, cascading through the same wistful images at the drop of a penny-word. Amanda mothers her children, Tom and Laura, with the artifice of a rebel Donatello creating paens to an obsolete god of refinement and good living. Deserted by her husband, "a telephone man who fell in love with long distance," she is a "Christian martyr," a saintly hen, a charming and troublesome relic.

Ames is a small, beautiful woman who proctors freshmen when she is not acting. She appeared delightfully last year as the gum-chewing, breast-swinging hussy in How to Succeed in Business but she outdoes herself as Amanda. She sings her lines in a sliding Southern melody of speech, seducing with blue eyes and a wary but blooming smile. With a few early words, she captures at once Amanda's aging person but equally as well evinces her bubbling, sometimes annoying childlike penchant for story-telling.

Amanda's mood swings precariously from the incomprehension of the distraught mother to the glee of the spooning debutante and Ames swings with her. Frustration and her anger singe the air as she peels her gloves commando-like, strutting lost in her own home, crying "Deception" at her daughter Laura, who has dropped out of secretarial school without posting notice. And her shivering silence after a bitter fight with her dreamer son, Tom, is wonderfully moving.

In that scene, the mother and son circle the stage, his blind tom-cat to her broken-winged sparrow, until Tom lowers his tail, breaks the silence in order to regain the peace of their barren thicket. A breakable pane hangs between them always, a horse-drawn past and jet-lured future caught in the same jam of traffic but still enveloped in the mist and mystery of dreams.

TOM IS THE play's narrator and the images materialize from his harrowing memories. He is Tennessee Williams--ne Thomas Lanier--in the shadow of the footlights. Williams had a long-distance father, moved from the deep South to St. Louis and spent three miserable years in a shoe warehouse, presumably writing poems on shoe boxes--just like his character Tom. But Tom is more than the stage presence of the author. He is a voice, a specter in his own dreams, giving "reality in the form of illusion" but always running to the illusionary happiness of movies and liquor until he breaks free, like his father, sacrificing his mother and sister for his adventure.

Jamie Hanes portrays a strong, if unspectacular Tom. He delivers best in Tom's narrator role, reflecting over the poetry of his own sentences, speaking softly, a clear ribbon of regret winding through the words. But at tims, Hanes' voice rings too smoothly, Shakespearean in tone, stagy. Tom is a writer, not an actor, and the immense presence that Hanes gives his character is oddly wrong, too smug, too fulsomely gesturing, too much exterior acting. It is a terrific role, at once subtle and obvious, but the actor's energetic anger, bitterness and sense of adventure must come from deep within. In the scenes that call for dynamic confrontation with Amanda, Hanes is very good, but at other times he is too pompous, too unselfconscious. Lines like "it don't take too much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin" and "how lucky dead people are" lack a profound fear and pain that are essential to Tom's nature.

The last of the menagerie's precious trio is the glass animal herself, the crippled--"not crippled, you have a defect," says Amanda--Laura. Laura evokes only sympathy, smothered in abuse and pain, hopelessly shy, wandering alone in her own world of phonograph music, long winter walks and dear glass creatures. Williams is at pain to show that she most resembles her favorite glass friend, a tiny unicorn--"aren't they extinct in the modern world?" who is "crippled" by his horn but loses it in an accident, suddenly, like all the other glass horses, less freakish.

Laura loses her horn when Jim, a friend of Tom's conquers her shyness by whirling her on the dance floor and warming her to a slow kiss. Jim's visit is the play's climax, the culmination of a search for a "gentleman caller" for Laura, a visitor from the outside who might show her another--married--life. And to Amanda, he is a mythically important guest, for he reflects the ultimate in preparing for the future, just as she once planned for the future by entertaining 17 gentleman callers in one afternoon. Like Amanda, who chose wrong from among her suitors by opting for the charming but elusive Wingfield, Laura fails in her timid bid for Jim.

Though Maggie Topkis is fine in several scenes, particularly when relating the story of her first and last high-school love, she has none of the delicacy and fragility that link Laura to her glass animals. And her acting is annoyingly obvious at times, showing instead of feeling.

APPEARING FINALLY in the last scene, James Dolbeare makes a hilariously corny yet forthright Jim. Saddled with old-fashioned attempts at sensitivity and a gosh-gee-well vocabulary, he gives a winning performance as the simple, clear-minded alien visitor to this stifling, decaying planet.

A few quibbles with director Kathy Lo: Tom and Jim wear suits though they both labor in a warehouse. Why? Tom's makeup is too heavy, almost feminine. A subtle grittiness is missing. Also, Tom gives his narrator speeches front and center stage, not separate enough, not isolated enough. A perch on the fire escape/balcony, even a stroll nearer the audience would have been a nice touch. The lighting was properly dim, but the frequent blackouts for scene changes were too stark, too sudden, t.v.-like, often disturbing the sense of a flow of dream images. Finally, Williams' script calls for fiddle music at the beginning and end of the play, framing it in a Southern, story-telling manner but also providing an old-fashioned whine, a tug into the heart of this play and a sorrowful serenade at the finish. There is sometimes a brusqueness to this production that contrasts with the warmth and intimacy of the play.

But these are really minor concerns. In the Harvard theater world, which is always constrained by time and limited resources, this Glass Menagerie sparkles as important and well-crafted drama.