An American Classic

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. It is not pure happenstance that the three truest plays of the modern American theater, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' The Glass Menagerie, are family dramas. When the domestic relationship is illuminated by a playwright of size, intensity and perception, it becomes the perdurable stuff of human existence. All of these plays share two touchstones of the classic: inevitability and immutability. One cannot imagine their happening in any other way, and one cannot imagine a time when they did not exist.

Only O'Neill's family is sufficiently doomed to be called tragic. Miller's people are defeated; Williams' clan is haunted, principally by "the long delayed but always-expected something that we live for." The Glass Menagerie is thus the most Chekhovian play of the U.S.'s most Chekhovian playwright. Its mood is mist before the eyes; yet it is propelled as inexorably as the tides. At its heart is the demonic mover of the seemingly motionless--time. The texture of the play is music: nocturnal, poignant and poetic.

The plot has the simplicity of a short short story. A Southern mother (Maureen Stapleton) long since deserted by her husband, and subsisting on delusions of genteel grandeur, wants to secure a suitable suitor for her slightly crippled daughter (Piper Laurie) who has withdrawn into the reverie world of her collection of tiny glass animals. The restive son of the house (George Grizzard) brings home a "gentleman caller" (Pat Hingle) who arouses the girl's interest and then, guiltlessly, inadvertently, breaks her pet unicorn and --by revealing that he is already engaged--her heart.

It is a tribute to the resilience of the play and the mastery of the playwright that, in the current revival. The Glass Menagerie somehow survives the guiltless and inadvertent miscasting of three of its four roles. The gentleman caller, expertly modeled by Pat Hingle, can be of the commonest clay, but the three family parts must be made of glass just like the toy menagerie.

The mother should be transparent, a ruin of beauty. Maureen Stapleton is as solid as a mountain of pasta; one cannot see through her to the mythic past. There is bougainvillaea, and weeping willow, and a century of wounded Southern pride in the prose arias that Tennessee Williams gave the role; all one hears in Miss Stapleton's voice is the jagged, chop-chop talk of a tenement mother. The garrulity is present but not the gallantry.

The daughter should be fragile, but Piper Laurie is invulnerable, too blooming healthy by half. The acting task is noticeably beyond her when she tries to convey an unanticipated breath of life with cocktail-party animation. As for the son, he should be as insubstantial as glass, a dreamer caught between his mother's mirage of the past and his own dream of the future, but there is more petulance than poetry in George Grizzard's steely eye and shifty stance.

Despite all this, The Glass Menagerie is so much the best play on Broadway that it is as if a graveyard of mediocrity had abruptly kicked off its tombstones with a sudden ineluctable rush of life. Perhaps it is moving precisely because it is a play of the spirit that moves from death toward life. The mother is throttled by her illusions, the daughter is felled by the brute strength of the world, and the gentleman caller founders in the anonymous quicksand of being average. But the son Tom, the writer-to-be in this distinctly autobiographical play, is about to be born to his vocation and to the appalling and enthralling adventure of becoming himself.

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