Stage:

...Rosemary Harris is a fine heroine, and Philip Bosco gives an oddly conceived but very effective performance as Boss Mangan...

...Perhaps because the war years were the years of Taylor's childhood and adolescence, his memory chooses not to focus on a devastating war...

...and plain Helen, who, unlike Laura in Menagerie, is the understanding and sensible center of the house until she moves into a flat with her soldier, who has a wife and child in another town...

...the somewhat dotty grandfather...

...As a result, the likable, frightening steamroller of a Southern belle comes across as too much a thinking woman whose calculated pauses signal a self-awareness foreign to the character...

...A great chunk has been cut out of his very long play -- one character and his subplot is m i s s i n g , yet the wit and the pain of the original remain...

...And a Nightingale Sang . . . . . with less to offer than The Glass Menagerie, is more satisfying in the theater, primarily because director Terry Kinney, from the Steppenwolf in Chicago, has a stronger sense of the English play than the celebrated John Dexter does of the American o n e . Heartbreak House is no memory play -- it was written out of the immediate anguish of World War I -- but I will add a line or two here to indicate my pleasure in the revival at the Circle in the Square...

...Amanda Plummer lacks Laura's fragility, seeming too often a sturdy, sullen girl alongside the smaller Tandy...

...Most of the parts are well played (William Prince's Mazzini Dunn is the most disastrous exception) and some are excellent...

...One might say that the play is about the survival of the family, but it is less that than a conventional family comedy, full of funny lines, solvable contretemps, nice character bits...

...In the first instance, the roof darkens a r t then is spotted with lights that wheel above the dancers, fo~all, the world like the Starlight Roof in Indianapolis, the elegant big-city place to go when I was growing up in Indiana, although this dance floor is set in wartime Newcastle-on-Tyne...

...the pretty daughter in panic at marriage and sex...

...Tom, who must escape to save himself, deserts his sister as his father did his mother, and the family dissolves as the off-stage world is doing in 1939...

...And so does Shaw's strong point about political and personal responsibility...

...She, in turn, is not a piece of glass but a young woman fading into dangerous isolation...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal: 88...

...The contrasting tone of these two scenes -- the one ending in release, the other in withdrawal --- marks the differences between the two memory _9 plays, which happened to be on stage in New York at the same time...

...It should have been less appealing than Menagerie, for Bernard Shaw is being treated cavalierly in a way that Williams is not...

...If the hard edges are knocked off the Stotts in Nightingale, in Menagerie the Wingfield apartment is as much a battleground as it is a home...

...Point by point, I could probably find more flaws in the Circle's Heartbreak House than in the new Glass Menagerie, but, for me, the Shaw production was a more rewarding theatrical experience...

...Not much happens in the course of the play (1939-45...

...The Stotts are a working-class family: the father, an air-raid warden, a convert to Communism, and always and most sincerely a singer of pop songs...

...A great deal happens off-stage in those years, but it never seriously threatens what we see...

...Taylor's 1977 play, which reopened the Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, is the nostalgia piece, the sentiment fueled not only by those turning lights but by the songs that George Stott pounds out on the piano which sits in his kitchen...

...The character is primarily a watcher, a receiver of shocks, but in her one active scene, the one with the Gentleman Caller, Hummer finds the means to suggest the Laura who is not on hand for much of the evening...

...Joyce adjusts at last to her soldier husband, and Helen loses her lover to his wife, but emerges still strong from the experience...

...the mother, a Roman Catholic, completely absorbed in her church or at least in the well-being of the priests...

...Stage MEMORIES, HEARTBREAK THREE CONTRASTING PLAYS T HERE IS a moment in C. P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang . . . in which the slightly crippled heroinenarrator is persuaded by her soldier lover that she can dance...

...The Glass Menagerie, for all the sentiment in it, is a much darker play...

...Best of all are Rex Harrison's Captain Shotover, a believable old man whose physical and intellectual vigor is never in doubt, and Amy Iving's Ellie Dunn, played from the beginning with the kind of strength that makes credible her movement from romantic naivet~ to cynicism to new certainty...

...John Heard is excellent as the Gentleman Caller, the unsinkable role in the play, as Edward Albert impressively showed in the television produciton starring Katherine Hepburn -- another distinguished actress who somehow missed Amanda...

...Jessica Tandy is a remarkable actress, always a pleasure to watch, but her odd phrasing misses the rhythm of Amanda...

...Beautifully performed, particularly by Joan Allen as Helen, it is a warm and amiable evening in the theater, just made for anyone over fifty who wishes he could sing along on "The White Cliffs of Dover" or "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square...

...The current production of Menagerie does not do as well by Williams's memory as the Newhouse production does for Taylor's...

...A very funny play and a touching one, it creates an Amanda who is both loving mother and monster, whose memories help smother Laura...

...It recalls a similar scene in Tennessee WiUiams's The Glass Menagerie in which the Gentleman Caller leads the excessively shy Laura for a few turns around the Wingfield living room...

...In Menagerie, the romantic aura and the incipient triumph of the girl is broken, as the horn of the glass unicorn is, when Laura and Jim brush against the table...