On Stage

...And though Thomas Skelton is an able lighting designer, he apparently was not allowed to follow the author's instructions and provide less naturalistic, more El Grecoish lighting...

...The scene a faire between Chance and Heavenly is missing, and the entire final scene, which should show us Chance growing into a tragic hero, concentrates instead on the Princess' triumph as she learns that her last movie is a surprise hit...

...Although Williams, in his newly published Memoirs, avows his homosexuality, he continues to deny that characters like Blanche DuBois and Alexandra Del Lago (note the parallel last names?of the woods,'' "of the lake") are men en travesti, and here time has proved him right...

...Here, again, the stage shape is partly to blame: The called-for scrim that is a wall while Tom sets out on his evocations, then grows transparent to reveal memory becoming the play, is irreproducible in arena staging...

...Granted, too, that the playwright, who started writing (as he says in the Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth) at 14 to escape the teasing of his father and schoolmates because he preferred books to baseball, may be incarnated as much in the timid, retiring Laura as in the reminiscing merchant seaman Tom...

...the other by slightly tarnished youth, looks, and opportunism—are locked into a self-seeking duet for monsters, a lust-and-hate-riddled minuet, heavily autobiographical, that Williams manages extremely well...

...The middle phase is, perhaps, not so much middling as flawed: potentially splendid plays whose inspiration flags, like Summer and Smoke and Night of the Iguana...

...Menagerie is a dream play —a play of pictorial recollection, of images that need the picture-book aspect of the proscenium stage...

...As Laura, Pamela Payton-Wright, a good actress, is nowhere near fragile enough, has none of that aching translucency that Julie Haydon brought to the part...

...plays that try too hard to be commercial, like The Rose Tattoo and Period of Adjustment...

...and several other motifs too numerous to mention, simply refuse to coalesce...

...As directed by Theodore Mann at the Circle in the Square, however, it gets the worst of both possible worlds: staging in the round, and direction that is embarrassingly square...

...But the political subplot...

...that it does not push its discreet symbolism into attitudinizing pretentiousness...

...The older woman and the gigolo —the one sustained by money and remnants of her art...

...Now, while the Boss is carrying on his racist and totalitarian campaign—on Easter Sunday!—his brutish son and a bunch of cronies threaten to castrate Chance in retaliation...

...So what...

...Even the scenery refuses to comply with Williams' bidding: "The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic...

...It turns out that the last time Chance came home, he unwittingly passed a venereal disease on to her, requiring hysterectomy and somehow ruining her for life...

...Maybe it's a blessing in disguise.' Mann's production drops the poetry far too many times for the play to be more than an ordinary horse...

...Like people in elongated railroad flats, actors stand around in unsettling configurations, at overextended intervals...

...Arena staging is distracting here...

...and plays that cravenly skirt the real issue, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth...

...Sweet Bird of Youth comes to us as yet another Xerox-sponsored Bicentennial production from Washington's Kennedy Center, and displays the characteristic shoddiness of previous attempts at dramatic xerography...

...It is instructive, therefore, to be given concurrent productions of The Glass Menagerie, from Williams' best period, and Sweet Bird of Youth, from his shaky but not yet deplorable middle period...

...Nor is there any living up to the exotic Southernness of the language...

...Starting with The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore and Slapstick Tragedy, we enter the third phase, where nothing works for Williams any more...

...that all of its elements are sufficiently developed, rather than remaining fragments, caricatures, some kind of shorthand...

...is derived, but how genuine, persuasive and alive the character is...

...she bullies them with a much less formidable, jovial bounciness...

...Maureen Stapleton's Amanda (a far cry from the immortal one of Laurette Taylor) is not a faded Southern belle, but a homely woman who has actually somewhat improved with age, so there is no tragic pathos...

...It becomes possible to see simultaneously the good and the incipient bad—a double exposure that, as it were, brings into focus what went wrong...

...Oh yes, an occasional line or even situation may have a dash of authenticity, a moment of lyricism in it, but the body of the later works (though "body" is precisely what they lack) is ghastly self-parody...

...the business with the Boss' mistress and with a calculating young doctor, a former friend of Chance's, now about to marry Heavenly...

...Nowhere in Ming Cho Lee's convincingly ramshackle apartment is there the "poetic license" Williams expressly asks for...

...Both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, two of the best plays to come from America (a land not rich in best plays), are from Williams' good early phase...

...Rip Torn is a passable Tom in the bumptious scenes of comic banter, but does not for a moment suggest the nostalgic-poetic mariner whose loving memories recreate the play...

...The construction throughout is similarly arbitrary and creaky, with themes left undeveloped, motivations unconvincing, and that aura of meaningless, aborted (or hysterectomized) symbolism hovering over all of it...

...Mood has been altogether shortchanged, and mood in this play is essential...

...Yet even if under Ed Sherin's direction, sprawling enough to let the play fly apart far more than is unavoidable, most of the performances are pale or downright bad, the Alexandra Del Lago of Irene Worth is the definitive monstre sacre, and could not be bettered...

...yet neither does he quite manage the awkward bonhomie that, confronting Laura's brave pretense, should wring our hearts...

...but Williams' writing still manages to suggest a unicorn in disguise...

...For the few not yet aware of it, Miss Worth proves conclusively that she belongs to the world's great artists...

...Laura touchingly hides her loss: "Now it's just like all the other horses...

...First, of course, there are the weaknesses of the play itself...

...The symbolic beast of the play is a little glass unicorn...

...In The Glass Menagerie, to be sure, the problem does not really arise: This is a piece of fictionalized autobiography, its three main characters being the playwright's mother (Amanda), sister (Laura) and self (Tom...

...Williams can be quite cavalier with his medical data, but never mind that...

...The original production boasted a superbly evocative score by Paul Bowles that should have been reused in preference to the claptrap provided by Craig Wasson...

...Granted, Williams' real sister had grave troubles in her head, and not, like Laura, in her leg...

...On Stage WILLIAMS IN DOUBLE EXPOSURE BY JOHN SIMON Asked by a captious examiner to name the three phases of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, a bright college friend of mine answered: "Early, middle and late.' Were one asked to do the same in the case of Tennessee Williams, one could offer "Good, middling and bad,' as corresponding periods...

...Chance has steered them to his Deep-South home town of St...

...If a dramatist cannot project himself equally into all his characters, he is no dramatist at all...

...Though both the Boss' mistress and even the egocentric Princess try to help Chance escape, he suddenly feels that he can't make it any more either as star or stud, and, guilt-ridden to boot, chooses sacrificial castration...

...knocked over by Jim, it loses its horn...

...She blows hot and cold simultaneously, is devastatingly charming while being insidiously destructive, manages to make egomania and its ancillary excesses human and almost lovable, and, above all, uses her body and voice with the control a sculptor has over his clay...

...In the sure-fire part of Jim, the gentleman caller, Paul Rudd does not—cannot—fail...

...Still, even the most acute diagnosis cannot fully account for the coarsening of an imagination, the creeping paralysis of a language and form...

...His monologues are gruffly snorted at us in a way better suited to banishing than to summoning remembrance...

...For what matters in the end is not how a character is conceived, whence he or she (how helpful that awkward construction can be sometimes...

...Cloud in an attempt to regain his lost love, Heavenly, the daughter of powerful, sinister Boss Finley...

...the Southern lynch gang out to get Chance, while various offers of help are rejected by him (a device apparently lifted from Durrenmatt's The Visit...

...that it coheres structurally...

...Above all, the play makes sense: You know what it is telling you, and can't escape its truth...

...There is too much space to contend with, and Mann did not find the right movements and rhythms with which to conquer this space and fill it up...

...The casting, too, is faulty...

...It concerns the rich, aging movie star Alexandra Del Lago, now a dubious Princess Kosmonopolis, traveling with a cinematically ambitious gigolo, Chance Wayne, himself beginning to wilt a bit...

...What puts the present Menagerie slightly ahead is that it is the better play...

...Unfortunately, neither of the current revivals does justice to the playwright...

...Cloud, Heavenly, Chance, Kosmonopolis (cosmos and polis), Easter Sunday and expiation —all this nomenclature and machinery fail to add up either to the Christian myth of regeneration and redemption, or to the pagan myth (e.g., Adonis) of earthly rejuvenation, which they weightily portend...

...plays that depend on pure sensationalism, like Suddenly Last Summer...

...Stapleton does not delicately goad her children to distraction with the requisite demented fastidiousness...