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Photo: Dario Acosta
Our 2012/13 Season continues with a new production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. This is the first time in A.R.T. history that we have produced a play by Williams, so I am especially thrilled to bring you this production, led by the creative vision of director John Tiffany. We first met John when he was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2010/11 when he joined the A.R.T. to direct a developmental workshop of the musical Once, Diane Paulus, which went on to win eight Tony Awards Artistic Director including Best Musical and Best Director of a Musical. I’m delighted to welcome him back for this exciting revival! I am also thrilled to welcome this stunning cast: Zachary Quinto, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Brian J. Smith, who are making their A.R.T. debuts, and to welcome back the incomparable Cherry Jones, who steps into the iconic role of Amanda Wingfield. Cherry is returning to the A.R.T. for the first time since 2002’s Lysistrata, and her long history at the A.R.T. includes performances in some of our most memorable productions, like Three Sisters (1982), The King Stag (1984), and Twelfth Night (1989). Coming off of our recent revival of Pippin, magic and illusion are never far from the A.R.T. stage; though Tennessee Williams’s character, Tom Wingfield, is a different kind of leading player. As he tells the audience in his opening speech, “I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Tennessee Williams was still a young writer when The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago in 1944, and the play has gone on to become one of the most well-known and beloved works of the American stage. Like so many of his greatest plays, The Glass Menagerie glows with equal parts passion and poetry. I hope you will join us for this memorable production. Read on in this Guide for more details about the play and the creative team, and then flip it over for news about our spring shows at the Loeb and at OBERON, our second stage and club theater. As always, welcome to the A.R.T. experience!
The Glass Menagerie
welcome to the A.R.T.!
A.R.T. BOARDS Board of Trustees Donald Ware, Chairman Laurie Burt Paul Buttenwieser Kevin Cole Costin Mike Dreese Michael Feinstein Provost Alan M. Garber Lori Gross Ann Gund Sarah Hancock Steve Johnson Fumi Matsumoto Tom McGrath Rebecca Milikowsky Ward Mooney Bob Murchison Diane Paulus James Rhee
Dina Selkoe Diana Sorensen Lisbeth Tarlow Board of Advisors Kathleen Connor, Co-Chair Rachael Goldfarb, Co-Chair Frances Shtull Adams Joseph Auerbach* Philip Burling* Greg Carr Antonia Handler Chayes* Bernard Chiu Lizabeth Cohen Rohit Deshpande Susan Edgman-Levitan Jill Fopiano
Erin Gilligan Candy Gold Barbara Wallace Grossman Horace H. Irvine II Dan Mathieu Travis McCready Ellen Gordon Reeves Linda U. Sanger Maggie Seelig John A. Shane Michael Shinagel Sarasina Tuchen Alfred Wojciechowski Yuriko Jane Young *Emeriti Founding Director Robert Brustein
Winter Cover Photo: Jimmy Ryan Photography
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Special Collections, Butler Library, Columbia University
The Glass Menagerie
the glass menagerie february 2, 2013 - march 17, 2013
By Tennessee Williams | Directed by John Tiffany While Amanda Wingfield desperately struggles to provide her fragile daughter with at least one “gentleman caller,” her son, Tom, dreams of escaping from his job at a warehouse and his oppressive life at home. Tennessee Williams (RIGHT) with mother and sister
From Tom to TennesseE By Alexandra Juckno On the frigid December night in 1944 that The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago, the woman who originated the role of Amanda Wingfield, Laurette Taylor, came face-to-face with the woman who had inspired the character. “Well, Ms. Williams,” asked Taylor, “how did you like yourself?” Edwina Dakin Williams, ever the Southern belle, politely changed the subject, “Oh, Laurette, you were wonderful.” This freezing Chicago night catapulted Amanda Wingfield to the pantheon of great roles for actresses, and also made a star of Tennessee Williams, who had used his early years in St. Louis as a source of inspiration for the play. With his fame grew the myth of his domineering mother, and Edwina Williams has become inseparable from the character she inspired. Likewise, The Glass Menagerie is often seen as a snapshot of Williams’s life, with Tennessee as Tom Wingfield and his sister, Rose Williams, as Laura. But these comparisons can do the play a disservice; Williams certainly used his own experiences as a framework for the play, but The Glass Menagerie represents Williams’s dramatic manifesto, his
first wholly successful attempt to transmute life into art. Tennessee Williams’s life begins like a Tennessee Williams play. Edwina Dakin, who prided herself on being the “only Southern girl from Ohio” and harbored hopes of becoming an actress, fell in love with Cornelius Coffin Williams, a travelling salesman from Memphis, in 1907. Although he was a playboy who loved whiskey and a good poker game, Cornelius managed to win over Edwina (triumphing over several other suitors) and her parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Walter Dakin. After the marriage, Cornelius was often on the road, leaving his children to enjoy the indulgence and undivided attention of their mother. Though the name Tennessee suggests otherwise, Thomas Lanier Williams III spent most of his childhood in Mississippi, where he was born, and in St. Louis, the city he claimed to hate. Young Tom began writing on the typewriter Edwina Williams bought for her “writin’ son” when he was twelve. By then, his Gulf Coast upbringing had already supplied him with many of the people, places, and events that would populate the mythological South of his plays. continued on next page > 3
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When Cornelius obtained a permanent position with the International Shoe Company, he moved his family to St. Louis in the brutally hot summer of 1918. The Williams children had few friends, as Edwina disapproved of many of the neighborhood children, and their classmates mocked their Southern accents. Poetry served as a refuge for Tom, but Rose, though vivacious and pretty, struggled to adjust and became withdrawn, often fighting with her parents. Cornelius ignored his daughter, and Edwina criticized her daughter’s growing interest in boys, clothes, and parties. When Tom enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1929, Rose was left alone. While at “Ole Mizzou” Tom discovered the work of D.H. Lawrence and Shelley and, encouraged by his drama professor, wrote his first play. Cornelius pulled strings to get his son accepted to Alpha Tau Omega, and his fraternity brothers remembered Tom as quiet and quirky, although popular with girls as a dance partner. Jim Connor, the inspiration for Menagerie’s Gentleman Caller and Tom’s closest friend at the time, later recalled that Tom spent much of his time writing. The beginning of 1932 found Tom trapped in the Celotex interior of International Shoe. Upset over his son’s poor grades, Cornelius secured him a job as a clerk, forcing Tom out of college. Tom chafed at the job, recalling later that the three years he spent in the warehouse felt like the same day played over and over again. He ultimately found release in 1935 after heart palpitations caused a nervous breakdown. This incident inaugurated a lifelong fear of dying and madness that Williams would see reflected in Rose. After a disappointing social debut, she had begun experiencing unexplained stomach pains. The night of the breakdown that saved her brother from International Shoe, Rose wandered into his room and declared that Tom, Rose, and their younger brother Dakin “should all die together.” While Tom recovered in Memphis, Rose began seeing a therapist, who diagnosed her pains as stemming from a fear of sex. Edwina Williams subsequently orchestrated a parade of gentleman callers. Tom returned to St. Louis and enrolled in Washington University, where he met poet Clark Mills McBurney and began writing “social plays” for the Mummers, a St. Louis theater troupe. Tom’s success with the Mummers and friendships with the young literati of St. Louis strained his relationship with his
sister. He criticized Rose to her face and in his diaries, calling her habit of wearing negligees in the house and her desperate behavior toward men disgusting. Rose, ignored by the brother who had formerly been her most loving companion, slipped further into her delusions. Cornelius and Edwina admitted her to a sanitarium in 1937, after which Cornelius gave his daughter up as a lost cause. Tom, already afraid that he, too, would go mad, had a nervous attack upon visiting her, and after a brief visit in 1939, wouldn’t see his sister again until 1943. Tom finally completed his college studies with the prestigious University of Iowa playwriting program. One play, Not About Nightingales, revolved around a war-torn family crushed by poverty, and another, Me, Vashya! featured a heroine driven mad by her blood-thirsty arms dealer husband. Though both deal with the major social problems of the day—The Depression and looming war—both show a young playwright struggling to depict the private tragedy of a family unfolding against a larger societal tragedy. Eager to take flight from St. Louis, Tom decamped to New Orleans in 1939 and along the way became Tennessee Williams. He mailed several plays to the Group Theatre’s new play contest, knocking three years off his age to qualify for entry and impulsively signing the works “Tennessee.” The plays won him $100, enough to support himself through his writing, and the patronage of Audrey Wood, a powerful New York literary agent. The next five years in Williams’s life were a restless whirl of travelling and writing. His notebooks and diaries of this period are part portrait of the artist as a young man, part pillowbook, and part travelogue. “Okay again. Writing really good scenes. Sex ok,” reads a typical entry. Williams’s wanderlust carried him across the country through New Orleans, Florida, Georgia, Hollywood, and New York. Despite Tennessee’s stated desire to break away from his family, the Williamses bled into his work. Williams wrote stories about brothers and sisters, drafting Apt. F, 3rd Flo. So., set in a white room like Rose Williams’s St. Louis room; If You Breathe, It Breaks about a “front porch girl” with two brothers who refuses her mother’s offer of gentleman callers; The Spinning Song, which deals with a decaying Southern family that contains seeds of both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire; and The Purification, a verse play about an incestuous relationship between siblings.
teenage tom Tom accepting Drama Critics ’ Circle Award in 1945 Actress Laurette Taylor and Tennessee Williams after opening night of The Glass Menagerie
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[HTC Ms Thr 553, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University]
World W ide
(left to right) Tom and Rose as Children
PHOTOS
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In these stories, Caller is expanded. the kinship between Tennessee assured Wood the brother and sister that he would soften represents the divide the ending of the film to Williams saw in himself make it palatable to the between the artist Hollywood starlets who and the lunatic. In his may fill the role of Laura. sister, Williams saw This soft ending can be a mind ravaged by seen in The Pretty Trap, what he called “blue a one-act in which Jim, devils,” which had single and charmed by turned their father into Laura’s strange beauty, a drunk and threatened invites her out for a walk to destroy the young at the end of the play. writer’s own mind. The curtain falls on a Writing became his triumphant Amanda, who salvation. A diary entry gives her son her blessing from Williams’s time in to leave his family. Macon, Georgia showed When the film studio his determination to dismissed Williams’s overcome this shadow treatment, he finished of madness: “I have to his stage version of consider my family and The Glass Menagerie. their love and be brave Williams accidentally and enduring as long as left the manuscript in it is humanly possible… the dorm room of a messy and prolonged. Harvard student he had What happened to my hoped to seduce, but the sister.” Without writing student kindly mailed it to save him, Williams back to him. The play feared his mind would finally made its way to fail as had his sister’s. his agent, Audrey Wood, The Glass Menagerie in the autumn of 1943. frequently receded in (She was horrified that Tennessee’s diary from 1943, while working on The Gentleman Williams’s priorities as Williams sent his only Caller—an early title for The Glass Menagerie he worked on Battle of copy through the post; Angels, Camino Real, You Touched Me! and a cavalcade of poems he replied that if the play were lost, he could just rewrite it.) The and short stories. It surged ahead in January of 1943, when play was then picked up by Chicago producer Eddie Dowling. The Edwina broke the news that Rose had undergone a prefrontal former stage-star Laurette Taylor insisted she play Amanda, and lobotomy to pacify her delusions. A devastated Williams returned the cast began rehearsals in Chicago in December 1944. Taylor to St. Louis; Edwina Williams thought her son never forgave her for frustrated the cast by mumbling and appearing uninterested in the decision, which doctors had assured her was the best way to rehearsals. When Tennessee admonished her—“My God, what treat Rose’s diagnosed schizophrenia. corn!”—she threw herself into the role full force, moving Williams What playwright and Williams expert Tony Kushner calls and Julie Haydon, who played Laura, to tears. Taylor had been “ur-Menageries” began to take shape during this period. Williams biding her time studying the other actors’ performances; Williams first tried a short story, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, in which loved her performance so much that he allowed Dowling to cut Laura is the central character and has no physical defects. The the screens and slide projections indicated in the script in order to unnamed mother is a charming nag, but lacks the force of Amanda focus on the power of the performances. After a successful Chicago Wingfield. Tennessee called the story “dismal,” and abandoned it run, the play opened on Broadway in March 1945. to pen Daughter of the American Revolution: A Dramatic Portrait From the life and memory of Tom Williams, Tennessee of An American Mother (A Comedy). Infused with Edwina’s Williams had created one of the most enduring portraits of a family Southern mannerisms, this Amanda hawks magazine subscriptions ever staged. Although Tom Wingfield runs from his memories, to genteel Christian ladies. Audrey Wood and Williams agreed that Tennessee Williams used his own past to create something never the mother was the strongest character of these disparate drafts, before seen on the American stage—a lyricism born of truth, in the but Williams’s thoughts kept returning to Laura. pleasant disguise of illusion. These embryonic drafts led to The Gentleman Caller, which Williams adapted into a film treatment for MGM during the Alexandra Juckno is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ summer of 1943. In this version, Tom Wingfield and Amanda Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater gain primacy, Laura is made lame, and the role of the Gentleman Training at Harvard University. [HTC MS Thr 397, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University]
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The Glass Menagerie
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love, tom
[HTC MS Thr 552 (19), Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University]
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The Harvard Theatre Collection is one of the oldest and largest performing arts collections in the world. For 111 years, its staff has been acquiring, preserving, and making available to researchers the documentary evidence of the performing arts: from manuscripts to costume designs. The Theatre Collection began acquiring Tennessee Williams’s writing early in his career. The playwright himself gave several typescripts in 1963, and the papers bequeathed by his estate in 1988. Buoyed by other gifts, including several from Frederick R. Koch ’55, Harvard is now one of the primary sites for Tennessee Williams research. There are drafts in the collection for most of the stage plays from the 1950s onward: from early work like The Rose Tattoo and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to his final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere. A small amount of material related to even earlier shows is present, such as the promptbook for the landmark 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Also in the collection are numerous drafts of screenplays, essays, and fiction. Williams’s interior life is documented in several diaries, which start just before the buildup to his success with The Glass Menagerie and continue into his later years, intermittently covering 1942-1981. Correspondence includes both the professional and personal, ranging from actors and agents to family members and friends. His early life is also visually represented in photo albums, one of which was assembled by his sister Rose, a source of inspiration for Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.
Special thanks to Micah Hoggatt, Dale Stinchcomb, and Mary Haegert from the Harvard Theatre Collection for their assistance with the Tennessee Williams Collections.
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Interested in visiting the Harvard Theatre Collection? Harvard College Library Special Collections are open to all adult researchers, regardless of academic affiliation. Register for a Special Collections Account online at aeon.hul.harvard.edu. 9
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John Tiffany and Cherry Jones
Stage Magicians
A.R.T. Dramaturg Ryan McKittrick speaks with director John Tiffany and actress Cherry Jones, who plays Amanda Wingfield Ryan McKittrick: John, when you and Diane Paulus started talking about what you might direct at the A.R.T., you told her that The Glass Menagerie was your favorite play. What do you like so much about this play?
Jenny Anderson/Broadway.com
John Tiffany: It’s a staple of great twentieth-century American plays. It’s a great family drama where everything is within a family and within one living room—which is what I think American dramatists do amazingly. The architecture of the United States and even the whole world gets created within a living room. I feel very connected to what Tennessee Williams writes in The Glass Menagerie because it’s about fragility and it’s about people. What he’s trying to say is that the world should be a place where damaged people like these can live, and it’s a disaster that it isn’t. Because Williams was a damaged, fragile person himself, I find the way he writes about damaged people deeply moving. So that’s why I’ve always loved this play. But I’ve never directed it, and I only suggested it to Diane after meeting you, Cherry. You’d just come back from your parents’ home in Tennessee. You’d been clearing out your mom’s things, and you talked about the letters that you’d found. And you started speaking in your mom’s voice. Cherry Jones: Really? Without being aware of it? JT: Without being aware. And my research at Harvard at that time was all about dialect and code switching, which is when you subconsciously move between the different versions of yourself. And after talking with you, I realized I had my Amanda Wingfield. So I sent you an email a few weeks later, didn’t I? continued on next page >
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John Bottoms and Cherry Jones in Three Sisters
Three Sisters 1982 Baby with the Bathwater 1983 The King Stag 1984 The Serpent Woman 1988 The Miser 1989 Life is a Dream 1989 Mastergate 1989 Twelfth Night 1989 Major Barbara 1990 The Caucasian Chalk Circle 1990 King Lear 1991 Lysistrata 2002
photos: Richard Feldman
CJ: Yeah, and I think I said, “Oh, John…” JT: You said “No way!”
Cherry Jones was a founding member of the A.R.T. and appeared in numerous productions including:
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Cherry Jones with Derek Smith in the serpent woman
CJ: I said I would absolutely love to work together but there is no way I’m going to do that role! I was certain that I never wanted to do Amanda Wingfield once my Laura years had passed. And, by the way, I never played Laura, either. So once my Laura years passed I took all my copies of The Glass Menagerie off the shelves and gave them away. Because I thought that if I rid the house of those copies, then when I got the call for Amanda I could say, “I’m so sorry but I don’t have it in the house. I just can’t do it!” But wouldn’t you know? The bastard keeps going on about The Glass Menagerie! And you said, “Just once! We’ll just read through it together once.” JT: Right, and when you came to that reading you said, “Well, this is the first and last time anybody will ever hear me read Amanda Wingfield.” RM: What was the experience of reading the play out loud like for you, Cherry?
away like a phantom before my very eyes, because there was no one else on the planet like this small group of women in my hometown. I knew it was unique—like Laura’s glass unicorn. And I loved them. They all had marvelous names—they were Aunt Margaret Porter and Miss Lorraine Davis and Miss Annie Warren Mills, whose favorite prayer was “Dear Lord, I can’t. You can. Please do!” They were extraordinary women. And then I realized that Blue Mountain [the place where Amanda Wingfield used to receive her gentleman callers] is in Mississippi, just two hours from where I grew up in Tennessee. So I started to feel some kind of responsibility to take this role because I’m a dramatic actress and I’m from that part of the world. And I always loved Tennessee Williams. I love reading about him. I love his letters, the people he touched, the people that he ran from. I love reading about the people he was there for. I’m just fascinated by him. RM: What is it you love about him? CJ: I love that he figured out a way to survive. Because he shouldn’t have survived. Genius doesn’t count for much, but he made it work for him, and he had enough stability through his grandparents.
CJ: Well, I must have read the first act a lot more than the second, because I had no idea what to do with the second act. But when I read the first JT: And it was his writing act, I started thinking that “It’s that that helped him survive, this is a possibility. I realized narrative thrill too, wasn’t it? that I’m one of the last people who is the right age to play that The Glass CJ: Writing and that part who actually knew Menagerie swimming every day of his those kind of women. I was manages adult life. born in Tennessee in 1956, to achieve. which means that when I JT: And the sex! was ten years old, the women It’s also pure who were Edwina [Tennessee theater.” CJ: That, too! Williams’s mother] and Amanda’s age were in their JT: There’s an amazing section in the late 70s and still vital to our community. biography, Tom, that moved me so deeply I knew them well. They were the choir that I had to stop reading it for a couple directors at the church, they were the days. There was a period when Williams little ladies who would invite us over for was still living in St. Louis when he felt cheese biscuits and hot chocolate out of like the failed son of a failed man. That’s demitasse cups. They were women whose how he puts it: the failed son of a failure. grandfathers had fought in the American Because his father, Cornelius was a Civil War. Only they didn’t say Civil War, complete failure. they said “See Ah Vul Wa Wah” [with a pronounced Southern accent]. It’s a CJ: And the gay son of a failed straight sound and a sensibility, and I knew even father. as a ten-year-old that this was passing continued on page 14 >
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JT: Exactly. And his sister, Rose, experienced the same sense of failure. But she didn’t have an outlet like her brother. So she absorbed it all and it sent her mad. But the writing saved Tennessee’s life. And it just makes you realize how many of us have actually been saved by this thing called theater—this outlet that we have. RM: Let’s get back to the day you all read the script aloud together. What happened by the end of that reading? JT: Well, Cherry closed her script, and then…I think what happened…I hope I’m not mythologizing this! CJ: Oh, go ahead! JT: Yorkshire people are Southerners at heart! Why let the truth get in the way of a good story, right? So, Cherry closed the book and said, “When do we start?” And we went round the corner to a coffee shop and started talking about… CJ: The set. JT: The set. You, me, and Bobby [Set Designer Bob Crowley]. RM: You have an incredible design team for this production. How did you end up with this group? JT: During technical rehearsals for my production of Once, I was talking about the reading of The Glass Menagerie and the set designer Bob Crowley said, “OOOH, that’s my favorite play! And I’ve never designed it.” And then the lighting designer Natasha Katz said “OOOH, that’s my favorite play!” And then the choreographer Steven Hoggett came in and said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing a reading of The Glass “It’s pure Menagerie,” and he said, heartache “OOOH, I love that play!”
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RM: Perfect how? CJ: Because it’s pure heartache and pure craft. JT: And it’s got an amazing story, which plays set in living rooms don’t always have. It’s that narrative thrill that The Glass Menagerie manages to achieve. It’s also pure theater. I remember when I was at university studying Tennessee Williams. It was his introduction to The Glass Menagerie, where he writes about plastic theater and the philosophy of plastic theater, that made me understand theater. I was really into the Wooster Group at the time, and when I went to see them in Glasgow I understood that they were doing plastic theater. RM: Could you talk about the conversations you’ve had with the set designer, Bob Crowley?
photo: M. Sharkey for Out.
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John Tiffany is the 2012 Tony Award-winning director for his production of Once. He was a 2010/11 Radcliffe Institute Fellow when he developed the production of Once at the A.R.T. He was the Associate Director for the National Theatre of Scotland, where he created the acclaimed production, Black Watch. Tiffany was recently honored as one of Out magazine’s people of the year.
JT: Our first thought was to start with an empty stage, so that Tom could pull the set out. But I’ve seen that quite a bit, and then we realized that the exciting thing is how Amanda and Laura are still there when Tom takes us and back to the house. It’s like the molecules of Amanda and Laura pure craft.” are still there, and the water of RM: I had the same Tom makes them appear and take response when I reread form again. So then we started the play last year. Why do so many people thinking about the floor. We knew we love this play? wanted an infinity curve, like they were in the middle of a galaxy. And both Bob JT: Because it’s pure craft. It’s a perfect and I looked at an artist called Richard play. Wilson. He has a piece at the Saatchi
Gallery called “Oil” where he’s coated the entire floor with black sump oil. The smell is incredible. And we started thinking that we could have two hexagonal platforms floating like a hydrocarbon molecule, with the fire escape coming out of the floor like a unicorn’s horn. Or a lightning bolt. The reflection on the surface will be absolutely stunning. It will look like they are floating in a galaxy. RM: Cherry, what kind of preparation have you been doing for this role? CJ: I love to familiarize myself with the continued on page 16 >
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Movement with Steven Hoggett The Glass Menagerie features movement by the distinctive British choreographer Steven Hoggett. In 1994, while studying literature at Swansea University in Wales, Hoggett co-founded the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly. At Frantic Assembly he developed his distinctive “non-dance” choreography style, drawing movement from his performers rather than planning steps for them. His collaborations with director, and childhood friend, John Tiffany include his Olivier Award-winning movement work for The National Theatre of Scotland’s Iraq War drama, Black Watch, and choreography for Once, for which he received a Tony Award nomination. Hoggett’s compositions blend real behaviors, such as the alert, cautious movements of soldiers on patrol in Black Watch, with more expressionistic interpretations, like the musicians of Once stomping in unison as they fiddle and strum. Hoggett has also worked on music videos for artists including Bat for Lashes and Goldfrapp, as well as commercials.
text and go to the first table read knowing for this Southern woman living in the it well. But I don’t want to know this godforsaken North in a world that has just play too far in advance because I want changed forever for the dire worse. All the to be able to be alive to Celia and Zach beauty is gone. It is gray and it is bleak. and Brian. I want to be alive to the So now I’m trying to figure out what that experience. I keep running into all these engine in her is—that engine that makes women who take my shoulders and her so abhorrent to her son. And yet at basically say, “The play will guide you.” the same time he obviously respects her, Donna McKechnie played the role, and because he knows what she’s done for when I ran into her the other night she them. It’s just fascinating. said to me, “It will forevermore enrich your life.” There’s not one role that I’ve JT: I salivate when I think about enjoyed playing that didn’t make me characters like Amanda being on stage throw the script across the room a few because she’s an absolute treat! times in the early stages of reading it. And I do feel that way about this character. CJ: She is a treat! Amanda is a woman who leans forward, as all great theater characters must. They JT: She’s like one of those Yorkshire don’t lean back and wait for something women I know: why say one word when to happen. She is propelling. I knew 418 will do? I speak, therefore I am. If Southern women like her who I stop speaking, I’ll die. never stopped talking. They’d “Amanda say, “Oh Cherry, I’m just RM: What questions are on is a woman ever so glad that you’re here your mind as you head into today and your mother and rehearsals? who leans I were just talking the other forward, as all day, and I heard about that JT: My oxygen is working great theater show that you were doing with actors on text. And characters up in so and so and did you finding precision and know that Bobby Joe came making choices. It’s all must. They back the other day and would about choices. Then the don’t lean you like a little something in detail will emerge. I don’t back and wait that? Would you like a little have big questions about cream in that? Would you like the play because I know for something a little sugar?” You know, all it works and I know it’s to happen.” that mindless stuff. Amanda gorgeous. is purposeful, but there’s that engine in her – you just want to hear Tom CJ: We just need to get it right and give it scream, “SHUT UP!” this completely new breath of oxygen that Tennessee would be so thrilled by. JT: She’s a peacock. Jt: It’s a lovely thing that the question CJ: She is a peacock, but she’s also isn’t “does this play work?” The question an engine. She’s an engine of a woman is “how does it work?” who has survived the twenties without a man. When the rest of the world was prospering, her family wasn’t. They were barely getting by and then they were laid low by The Depression. To me, the most profoundly moving of all Amanda’s lines is when she says to Tom, “You are my right hand bower.” She means that, because it has been virtually impossible Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T. Dramaturg and co-head of the Dramaturgy Program at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
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The Glass Menagerie 17
The Glass Menagerie
2012/13 SEASON americanrepertorytheater.or g
Cherry Jones
Zachary Quinto
I’m from Tennessee so I probably was aware of Tennessee Williams earlier than many children just because I was captivated by his name. My mother was an English and American literature teacher so I’m sure she must have taught The Glass Menagerie, and I must have heard his name. I don’t remember reading it in high school, but I did This Property is Condemned at high school speech tournaments and used that piece to get into Carnegie Mellon when I was seventeen. The first time I saw The Glass Menagerie was probably in a regional theater production in Syracuse, New York on a very snowy night. I took the train from New York City to Syracuse to see my friend Victoria Boothby as Amanda. And I’d probably at that point already auditioned for Laura, one of the many, many times I auditioned for Laura with no success. I think I was a little too large for most Lauras—I was tall and big-boned; an equally tall young man, whom I auditioned with to play Laura to Julie Harris’s Amanda, suggested that the two of us could never play Tom and Laura unless Nancy Marchand was playing Amanda. I never wanted to play Amanda, ever. Ever. But here I am with an extraordinary group, blessed to play this part. Life is surprising this winter, wonderfully so.
My first experience with Tennessee was in high school reading A Streetcar Named Desire and then in college watching people work on little snippets of his plays here and there. But I somehow always felt distant from what was underneath the work until it became clear that I was going to be working on this play, and I started to learn more and more about him. I realized how many echoes there were for me in his experience and in what he was trying to unlock inside of himself. Playing this character has necessitated a deep delving into his personal life and experiences, so I feel like my biggest connection to him is through this production and playing what is ultimately the most autobiographical character in his canon. I feel so connected to him now on such a personal level, and I don’t think that would have been possible when I was younger. There’s something about coming to this play at this particular time in my life that has allowed me to really, really understand him, his work and his poetry on a much more intrinsic level.
Encountering The Glass Menagerie
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What was your first encounter with Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie? What drew you to this project?
Celia Keenan-Bolger
Brian J. Smith
I first read Tennessee Williams on a trip with my dad to Tulum, Mexico. I borrowed a Tennessee Williams anthology from the library and read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire. I remember, as a high school student who was obsessed with musicals, thinking how much I could hear the music of The Glass Menagerie, both in the music cues that Tennessee Williams had included in the script and also in his characters’ language. I’ve admired Cherry Jones for as long as I can remember, and I remember seeing Black Watch and thinking that if I ever got to work with John Tiffany or Steven Hoggett, I’d go anywhere and do anything. So when I found out that all of those people were going to be working together on a production at A.R.T., I just wanted to be a part of it so badly.
I remember studying The Glass Menagerie in high school. We watched the movie with John Malkovich, and I just remember lots of amber light and gauze and fog. It was a very academic approach… in high school, and I guess the play didn’t mean much beyond a high school reading project. I think Tennessee Williams really started becoming meaningful to me when I started reading his notebooks, and I started drawing my own connections to his life and why he wrote plays and the struggles that he went through writing them. The thing I always take away from The Glass Menagerie is the idea of freedom and that there’s a price for freedom. Anything I read by Tennessee Williams always makes me want to go out and live my life. I don’t want to stay home, and I don’t want to be safe. I want to go on an adventure. I want to meet new people, go to new places, use parts of myself I haven’t used before, and just explore being alive. I think that’s what Tennessee did so beautifully, and I think that’s what is great about this play, that it’s a call to do that, even if there is a price for it, and even if it does hurt a little bit.
Compiled by Alexandra Juckno, first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
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The Glass Menagerie
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