One of the things that I have always admired in a Tennessee Williams’ play is the playwright’s ability to carry through a plausible dramatic situation, while simultaneously delving into a second level of meaning, that of symbolic significance. Williams’ investment as an author in the symbolic rather than the literal side of his characters, their actions and their words, has always struck me as a laudable way to create a functional distance between the realist framework of one’s work and the metaphorical fluidity of its message. This quality is particularly striking within the poetic texture of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), a memory play whose structure is organized around the narrator’s (Tom’s) re-memberance of the past that he can’t seem to shed off. He is haunted by the imagery of these events that grow stronger and stronger with time, trying to make sense of them by plunging into memory and its healing power.
Rarely does a staging of The Glass Menagerie focus intensely around Tom’s predicament both as the narrator and an active participant of the play’s central dramatic conflict, mostly due to the remarkable craftsmanship and authorial focus on Amanda and Laura (Tom’s mother and sister, respectively); as the two anchoring characters of Williams’ exploration into memory, they lend the play its poignant resonance with the role illusion and disappointment perform in ordinary people’s lives. However, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje’s re-casting of The Glass Menagerie (through the Friday night showings of Akademska Scena) offered a new reading of Tom’s play with memory, concentrating more closely on the cumbersome relationship Tom has with his past whilst he attempts to live out a freer present. The final effect: a looser interpretation of Williams’ drama, which brought into focus the otherwise neglected, ‘swept under the rug’, sexual orientation of the play’s narrator, Tom, modeled after a younger Tennessee Williams.
No matter how successful this staging may have turned out to be, I came out of the performance feeing a little bit disillusioned. The reason(s) for my own conflicting relationship with this production of The Glass Menagerie is/are tied to Williams’ stylistic choices, which I felt that the production failed to encompass. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, one which operates on several discursive levels. There is the literal and the symbolic, the social and the imaginary, the palpable and the elusive. One does not function without the other. The poetic textuality of Williams’ play is possible only when set against the social and the spiritual catastrophe of the 1930s. By taking out, even unwittingly, this social background from the play’s contextuality, what we are left with are traces of a once great experiment in expressionist drama.
With the exception of the brief mentioning of Guernica at the play’s beginning, the FDA’s production of The Glass Menagerie confines the world of illusion to the Wingfield household alone, ‘liberating’ the play from its vital social message, i.e., appropriating the lives of Tom, Amanda and Laura so that they may fit the outlines of a/any family in crises. Such a re-shifting/re-shaping of the play’s focus robbed the FDA’s production of Williams’ memory play off its grounding center: the ability to understand the confounding mixture of resilience and sensitivity existing in individuals confronted by unfortunate circumstances, whether they may be of historical (Great Depression, Second World War) or mystifying nature (namely, the futile pursuit for the American Dream). Without this seemingly obsolete modus operandi, The Glass Menagerie turns into just another play about men and women ‘not getting along’.
Subscribe