Friday, November 6, 1998

SMT polishing its 'Glass Menagerie'

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Critics couldn't say precisely what it was about "The Glass Menagerie" when it opened 54 years ago in Chicago, on the way to the New York run that would establish Tennessee Williams' enduring name.

But after sitting through Williams' avant- garde exploration of tragic family dynamics, they knew it had the power to change lives.

So their support of "The Glass Menagerie" was immense, pushing it and its quirky author on to fame. The play's success surprised even the Mississippi playwright, who had been born Thomas Lanier Williams. His groundbreaking hit will be presented in the Seaside Music Theater production that runs today through Nov. 15 at the Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center, 399 N. U.S. 1, Ormond Beach.

From the beginning, Tom wrote poems, stories, little plays. That early calling was one of two great loves, second only to the one at the very heart of his existence: his sister Rose.

She was slightly older, petite, lovely and vivacious if, to some gentleman callers in her deb years, a bit frenetic. To Tom, she was perfect: his soulmate, and yet a phantom.

For years before "The Glass Menagerie" brought her story to the stage, Rose had been slipping away from the brother who loved her so totally that incest though it never actually occurred became a central theme in a body of work that includes such massive triumphs as Sweet Bird of Youth," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."

He expressed his feelings in 1937, when Rose was in a state asylum, diagnosed as schizophrenic, not long before she underwent the lobotomy that left her looking peaceful but that stole away her true personality.

"She is a metal forged by love/too volatile, too fiery thin/so that her substance will be lost/as sudden lightning or as wind," Williams wrote in the unpublished "Elegy for Rose."

"And yet the ghost of her remains/reflected with the metal gone,/ a shadow as of shifting leaves/at moonrise or at early dawn. A kind of rapture never quite/possessed again, however long/the heart lays siege upon a ghost/ recaptured in a web of song."

The "web of song," of course, was a landmark from the moment in opened on Broadway, at the Playhouse Theatre, on March 31, 1945.

"The Glass Menagerie" is the stunning story of reclusive, dream-enshrouded Laura/Rose. Spun from reality, tinted by poetry, Rose's story became a modern myth.

She and her brother had been isolated in childhood, under the thumb of a domineering mother, Edwina (Amanda Wingfield, played in SMT's show by Brenda Bradshaw) who herself was trapped in an anguished, repressive marriage.

As Tom later would recall, "My sister and I were gloriously happy.

"We sailed paper boats in washtubs of water, cut lovely paper dolls out of huge mail-order catalogues, kept two white rabbits under the back porch, baked mud pies in the sun upon the front walk, climbed up and slid down the big wood pile, collected from neighboring alleys and trash piles bits of colored glass that were diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds.

"And in the evenings, when white moonlight streamed over our bed, before we were asleep, our Negro nurse Ozzie, as warm and black as a moonless Mississippi night, would lean over our bed, telling in a low, rich voice her amazing tales about foxes and bears and rabbits and wolves that behaved like human beings."

Laura, like Rose, was expected to escape the torture of life with a very nervous mother and a dictator of a father via marriage, to Jim O'Connor (Matt Wolfe) or some other reluctant and confused gentleman caller.

Instead, she escaped into her own fragile world Rose into her mind, but Laura, symbolically, into a collection of glass animals so delicate that "they break if you breathe."

In SMT's "Glass Menagerie," directed by Les ter Malizia, Tom Wingfield (Derrick Peterson) interacts with his crystalline sister (played by Jennifer Johns) but also directly with the audience.

In life, the author continued to spend time with a Rose who had become the most fey of feminine creatures after the lobotomy, a procedure meant to "cure" mental illness by severing sections of the brain.

Lobotomies were experimental in 1943 when Rose underwent hers; within a short time they were viewed with horror.

Shocked when he learned of Rose's operation, Williams nonetheless welcomed her new placidity.

He missed his companion, and transformed her into a sort of secular saint, one who was later remembered by a real gentleman caller as lovely, but strange.

Writer Clark Mills in 1936 noted of Rose: "She was dressed in the most god-awful ankle-length, shapeless chiffon-type dress that looked like it dated from 1922.

"Very awkward, I remember her standing in the shadow in the dining room, unable or unwilling to come in and, as I recall she never spoke at all."

She didn't need to: Rose had Tom.

It took time for him to shape "The Glass Menagerie," but it had been with him forever.

"She went with morning on her lips/down an inscrutable dark way," he wrote about Rose's move to a state asylum in 1937.

"And we who witnessed her eclipse/have found no word to say.

"I think our speechlessness is not/a thing she would approve, she who was always light of wit/and quick to speak and move /I think that she would say goodbye/can be no less a lyric word/than any song, than any cry/of greeting we have heard!"

The Glass Menagerie" runs through Nov. 15. See the Calendar, Page 13D, for schedule or call (904) 252-6200.