Prompt Pack / education resource
THE COOPERS MALTHOUSE Merlyn Theatre 18 May – 15 Jun
A production by
© Copyright 2016 Cover Image / Andrew Gough Production Photos / Pia Johnson Design / Hours After Prompt Pack created by Vanessa O’Neill and Meg Upton for Malthouse Prompt – Malthouse Theatre’s Youth and Education program. Thank-you to Belvoir Theatre for sharing some of their education materials with us for this resource.
Contents
Page 2
About Malthouse Theatre
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Videos
Page 3
Cast and Creative Team
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Introduction to the Prompt Pack
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Tennessee Williams Bio
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Contextual Information
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Activity // Contexts
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Contextual Information
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Activity // This Production
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About the Director
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Activity // Discuss the Following
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In Conversation with Eamon Flack
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Activity // Discuss the Following
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ABOUT THE The actor PLAYING TOM WINGFIELD // Luke Mullins
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Activity // Discuss the Following
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Activity // Meet Pamela Rabe
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Activity // Discuss the Following
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Activity // Stagecraft
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Learn More
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Cast & Creative Bios
Season 2016
about malthouse theatre
Malthouse Theatre is at once, a theatre company, a creative site and an engine for change. It is also the imaginative expression of a committed team of artmakers reaching out to an even larger number of local, national and international artists. All are dedicated to an ongoing conversation with audiences of exciting diversity and character. This conversation chooses contemporary theatre as its vehicle: a compelling annual program of adventurous, multi-disciplinary work inspired by writers, directors, designers, choreographers, sound artists and performers. Here, the combined possibilities of all theatre arts are offered centre stage – for entertainment, for inspiration, and even for fun.
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videos
Actor Pamela Rabe discusses The Glass Menagerie
cast and creative team
Tennessee Williams Writer
Eamon Flack Director
Harry Greenwood Jim O’Connor
Luke Mullins T o m W i n g f i e ld
Pamela Rabe A ma n da W i n g f i e ld
Rose Riley L au r a W i n g f i e ld
Sean Bacon Video Design C o n s u lta n t
Stefan Gregory Composer & Sound Designer
Damien Cooper Lighting Designer
Katie Hankin A s s i s ta n t S ta g e Manager
Michael Hankin Set Designer
#theglassmenagerie
Isabella Kerdijk S ta g e M a n a g e r
Mel Page Costume Designer
Caitlin Porter Audio Visual Operator
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Season 2016
PROMPT // CUE, INDUCE, MAKE, MOTIVATE, PERSUADE, ENCOURAGE, STIMULATE, IMPEL, INSPIRE Welcome to Malthouse Theatre’s Prompt Pack for The Glass Menagerie. When an actor forgets a line in rehearsals they may call for a prompt to provide a clue or a cue so that they can keep telling the story. This document aims to provide just that – a next step, a reminder, a series of provocations. This pack is full of information, but also poses many questions and discussion points for the audience. The Prompt Pack invites you to see how relevant and exciting contemporary theatre can be. As a resource, these pages are by no means definitive, but we hope they’ll take you on an interesting journey and keep you travelling through the world of the play well after the curtain call. We encourage you to make particular use of the articles by both director Eamon Flack and actor Luke Mullins, as well as the in-depth interview with Pamela Rabe. Many of the questions and discussion points that we have outlined in this resource are a direct response to the articles and video. We hope that this Prompt Pack will help you to engage deeply with the work.
Vanessa O’Neill / Youth & Education Manager *** 4 *** 4 — —> pgPage
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Tennessee Williams Bio The Glass Menagerie
‘In memory everything seems to happen to music’ — Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, the second child of a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman and an archetypal southern belle. He started writing as a teenager and studied journalism and arts at various universities. At the same time, he wrote poetry, essays, stories and plays—especially when he was hauled out of school by his father to work at a shoe factory. When his first play, Battle of Angels, was panned at its 1940 Boston premiere, Tennessee Williams was devastated, feeling that the audience was unwilling to take on the play’s sexual and religious themes. Boston City Council members called for the play to be censored and it ran for less than two weeks. Then, during the winter of 1944– 45, his ‘memory play’ The Glass Menagerie #theglassmenagerie
premiered in Chicago where it garnered good reviews. When it transferred to New York, it became an instant and enormous hit during its long Broadway run – winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the season. It was the beginning of a decadeand-a-half in which Williams would establish himself as one of America’s truly great writers. He followed The Glass Menagerie with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Orpheus Descending (1957, a rewrite of Battle of Angels) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), among others. Williams continued to be a prolific author of plays, screenplays, short stories and two novels until his death in 1983, aged 71. ——> pg 5
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Season 2016
CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION // The Glass Menagerie ‘I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’ The Playwright
Social and political contexts
More clearly than with most authors, the facts of Williams’s life reveal the origins of the material he crafted into his best works. The Mississippi in which Thomas Lanier Williams was born March 26, 1911, was in many ways a world that no longer exists, “a dark, wide, open world that you can breathe in,” as Williams nostalgically described it in Harry Rasky’s Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. The predominantly rural state was dotted with towns such as Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale, in which he spent his first seven years with his mother, his sister, Rose, and his maternal grandmother and grandfather, an Episcopal rector. A sickly child, Tom was pampered by doting elders. In 1918, his father, a traveling salesman who had often been absent—perhaps, like his stage counterpart in The Glass Menagerie, “in love with long distances”—moved the family to St. Louis. Something of the trauma they experienced is dramatized in the 1945 play. The contrast between leisurely small-town past and northern big-city present, between protective grandparents and the hard-drinking, gambling father with little patience for the sensitive son he saw as a “sissy,” seriously affected both children. While Rose retreated into her own mind until finally beyond the reach even of her loving brother, Tom made use of that adversity. St. Louis remained for him “a city I loathe,” but the South, despite his portrayal of its grotesque aspects, proved a rich source to which he returned literally and imaginatively for comfort and inspiration. That background, his homosexuality, and his relationships— painful and joyous—with members of his family, were the strongest personal factors shaping Williams’ dramas.
1937…the setting
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TOM: To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labour, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis. This is the social background of the play… [from the opening monologue to the play] 1944…the premiere Within a month of play’s opening, V-E day brought an end to the war in Europe, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies. Fueled by longing and by loss, the republic, which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of Depression and five years of war, assumed, seemingly overnight, a new momentum, a glorious and guilt-ridden race for its own survival. Recalling this time as “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history” in his novel American Pastoral, Philip Roth wrote, “Sacrifice and constraint were over…The lid was off”. In the next decade, American per-capita income would triple, the greatest growth of wealth in the history of Western civilization. Inevitably, given such enormous social and economic change, the American consciousness also underwent a sort of mutation. “Everything was up for grabs”. Arthur Miller said. “They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self” – from Tennessee Williams: mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr (2014), p. 64.
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Activity // Contexts
‘Everything was up for grabs’. Arthur Miller said. ‘They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self’
The play is set in 1937 in St Louis, Missouri, in America, a country emerging from the Depression and hurtling towards a war. 1. How does the material provided here give insight into the social and political world that the playwright grew up in and wrote about? 2. How does this comment by playwright Arthur Miller offer insight into how the play may have been received in 1944? 3. What do the descriptions of the history of the play and this production suggest about the world of the play itself and the life that the Wingfields lead? 4. What insights does the contextual material offer with regard to how The Glass Menagerie may have changed understandings of American theatre and what it could be?
#theglassmenagerie
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Season 2016
CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION // The Glass Menagerie ‘I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’ The Play The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams’ first successful play. It premiered in 1944 in Chicago and opened on Broadway on March 31, 1945. The applause that greeted that opening night was thunderous. The cast took twenty-four curtain calls. To the young playwright Arthur Miller, The Glass Menagerie represented what he called a ‘revolution’ in American theatre. ‘In one stroke,’ Miller wrote, ‘The Glass Menagerie lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history…In Williams, American theatre found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and amplitude of feeling.’ The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It catapulted Tennessee Williams from obscurity to fame and signaled his future as one of the twentieth century’s most significant playwrights. The Glass Menagerie is set in 1937 and the action takes place in the Wingfield family’s apartment in St Louis, Eastern Missouri – a Midwestern state of America. Tom Wingfield (an aspiring poet) works in a banal job at a shoe factory to support his mother (Amanda Wingfield) and sister (Laura Wingfield) in the absence of his father. Amanda wants to find a suitor – a ‘Gentleman Caller’ – for Laura, who has been crippled by a childhood bout of pleurosis and is painfully shy. The play explores the Wingfields’ complex familial relationships and the events leading up to Tom’s decision to leave the family. The play has strong autobiographical elements with the character of Tom Wingfield based closely on Tennessee Williams (who grew up with the name Tom). His mother Amanda and his sister Laura are closely based on his real life mother and sister. His sister, Rose, who did experience crippling shyness, suffered a botched lobotomy after Tennessee’s departure and was eventually institutionalised, requiring full-time care. The title of the play, The Glass Menagerie, is a reference to the collection of small glass animals that Laura lovingly keeps in the play. Small, fragile and easily broken, they are very similar the character of Laura (and his own sister Rose).
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Tennessee Williams’ vision for The Glass Menagerie ‘Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.’ In his Production Notes at the start of the published script, Williams introduces The Glass Menagerie as a ‘memory play’, a term that he coined himself. The script plays with theatrical structure in a new way. Tom Wingfield is both the narrator and character in the play, and unlike the other characters, Tom at times addresses the audience directly. We understand that the play is taking place in Tom’s mind, some years after the events that we witness in the Wingfield apartment. ‘Being a memory play, The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom from convention.’ Williams’ aim in this play was to use unconventional techniques to more closely convey the truth. He wrote that he felt that the ‘straight realistic’ play was limited. For Williams, it was only through poetic imagination, and what he called, ‘a new, plastic, theatre’ could there be a far more vital, and vivid expression of things as they really are. Williams also outlines in these Production Notes his ideas for a screen device to be used throughout the play. Williams notes that this device was omitted from original production of The Glass Menagerie. Many subsequent productions over the years have also chosen to omit the screen device. Tennessee Williams’ idea was to have magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles at key points throughout the play. Williams’ aim with this device was to ‘give accent to certain values in each scene’. In his Production Notes, Williams commented that imaginative use of staging can bring ‘a mobile, plastic [plasticity] quality to plays of a more or less static nature’.
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Activity // This production
Williams looks forward to a time in the future when: ‘An imaginative producer or director may invent many other uses for this device than those indicated in the present script. In fact the possibilities of the device seem much larger to me than the instance of the play can possibly utilise.’ And this is precisely what director Eamon Flack and set designer Michael Hankin have done in this production of The Glass Menagerie. They have used modern technology to honour Williams’ original vision of this play. This production of The Glass Menagerie In this production, there are two large projection screens on either side of the stage, which make use of the surtitles suggested by Williams. Eamon Flack has also chosen to include some video footage of the actors, streamed live from several cameras placed onto the stage. Tom manipulates these cameras like ‘the stage magician Malvolio’ setting up specific shots that in turn, frame his own memories of events. This technique also assists the audience in experiencing the fluid nature of memory; encouraging us to consider how memories can be distorted, omitted, or exaggerated depending on whom they belong to. The titles on the screens are reminiscent of silent filmstyle title cards. The set depicts the Wingfields’ tiny, cramped apartment. Much of the action takes place in the small dining room, a space partially obscured by light curtains, whilst the rest is played out in the family room at the front of the stage. Exposed lighting and camera tripods help create the feel of a 1930’s Hollywood film set.
#theglassmenagerie #theglassmenagerie
Your reading of the play will have sparked a series of interpretative ideas as you consider its realization from page to stage. Having read the information about this production: 1. What insights does the description of this production offer with regard to the interpretation of the play? 2. What “theatre technologies” are suggested in the description? 3. What theatrical styles are suggested in the information provided about this production? Are these consistent with those suggested in the written playscript? 4. What do you think Williams means when he says the “imaginative use of staging can bring ‘a mobile, plastic [plasticity] quality to plays of a more or less static nature’”?
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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Eamon Flack
A note from director Eamon Flack on Tennessee Williams’ famous ‘memory play’ In 1943, the man obsessively writing and rewriting numerous versions of this play (half-drafts, short plays, short stories, a film) was a restless 32-year-old with a few minor theatrical successes and a wobbly stint as a screenwriter at MGM behind him. He was somewhere between the halfformed kid he’d been—Tom Williams of St Louis, Missouri, son of Edwina and Cornelius, brother of Rose and Dakin—and the man he thought he wanted to be—the poet and dramatist Tennessee Williams. In other words he was very much Tom Wingfield, the narrator of his unfinished play, raging eloquently in the shadow of his youth yet #theglassmenagerie
still seeking the clear light of his fate. Like Tom Wingfield, Tom Williams was a poet and a homosexual and, like Tom Wingfield, he had slipped the knot of a particularly interesting family situation in St Louis, leaving his troubled sister in the sole care of his troubled mother. But who would do for Tom Williams what Tom Williams was trying to do for Tom Wingfield? How to make something of the vividness, the madness, the lust and the pain which had characterised his adult life? Where was Tennessee Williams when you needed him? Sure, Tom Williams had called himself
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Season 2016
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Eamon Flack Tennessee for four years already, but the fact remains that in 1943 Tennessee Williams was really just an outsized moniker for a restless 32-year-old obsessively writing and rewriting versions of this play… Meanwhile, his elder sister Rose Williams was recovering from a lobotomy at the State Hospital in Farmington, Missouri. Except, of course, one doesn’t really recover from a lobotomy. Her fate, unlike her brother’s, had already been decided: the vividness, the madness, the lust and the pain which had characterised her adult life was to be kept in trim for the rest of her existence by institutional medical care. Unlike her brother, there seems no output from her long life. Except for this: the fate of Rose Williams is the organising principle of the play that came to be called The Glass Menagerie by the playwright now very much known as Tennessee Williams. Laura’s quietness in the play is loud with the absence of Rose’s voltage. In the legendary stakes young Tom Williams had set for himself when he left his sister to his mother and grandly took the name Tennessee, the poetic force of Rose’s lobotomy is dreadfully perfect: once there were two Williams siblings, so close and so alike, both so full of impulse and oddity, both so original and forceful, but now only one of them could still speak for himself. When 1943 rang its terrible bell for Tom/Tom/Tennessee, his play acquired a new purpose: not only must he rescue himself from the clumsy oblivion of ordinary life, he must also rescue his sister. The play he managed to write wants everything for itself: truth and illusion, penury and theatrical grandeur, delicacy and brutality, eternal life and utter momentary fragility. The multiplicity of details and ideas and forms is immense. Williams looked back into the shoebox of his years in St Louis with his sister and mother (he lobotomised his real-life father and brother from the stage) and created a tiny theatre in the theatre, a small private stage for the large drama they performed for each other. Out of the small mire of their daily lives there emerged, from time to time, glimpses of an enormous vision at work. It was a compound of many visions.
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There was a vision of munificence—a largeness of temperament, a beneficence, a sense of latter-day glory on earth—a very American vision, wonderful until it swells to the psychotic proportions of American megalomania, which it very often does. There was a vision of capitalism, at once effervescent and obtuse, characterised by roughness and sameness and mass-ness (mass-ness was such a theme last century; now, when the world is twice and three times as large, we seem to have forgotten it). There was a vision of human optimism, a weave of delusion and good faith. There was the lost glory of his mother’s 19th century Southern childhood, dropping its plum-line deep into the age-old schadenfreude of knowing for sure that one has lived through a golden age which no longer exists. There was a vision of non-compliance, a knowing refusal to accede to the claims of reality, neither domestic reality nor the reality of war and history. There was a Whitmanesque vision of poetry in the midst of squalor. There was a vision of love: both impossible and inescapable, ruined and pure, secret and undeniable. There was an unarticulated vision for something else, something different — perhaps not so much a vision as a queerness in the lens that altered all the other visions and had its own peculiar primacy…. Such a wonderful, deranged concoction of visions for such a small family. Williams put them all in the play and bound them in the tyrannical details of daily life—a dozen genies in one tight bottle. But still, he wanted more for his play (for his sister?) so he added a projection screen, titles, a narrator, a love story… He made a great contemporary tragedy in a little room. He wrote it like a dream, like a film, like a memory, like a wound, and he gave it a perfect dramatic arc. All this— the detail, the originality, the experimentation, the rawness—unfolds with dizzying exactitude on the page: forceful and gorgeous and a little bit euphoric. But the sad silence at its centre is perhaps the most eloquent thing about it. Tom Wingfield’s fate in the play is unknown because Tom Williams’ own fate wasn’t sealed until the play opened. When it did, in Chicago in 1944, the play became its own denouement: its greatness was recognised almost instantly,
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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Eamon Flack and both Toms entered the spheres of their own destiny. Tom Wingfield became trapped forever inside the infernal machine of the play, bound by his intimate, intractable acquaintance with vision and peculiarity. And Tom Williams finally filled out his oversized new name. The full-blown life of Tennessee Williams was now in motion—but that’s a whole other story…. As for Rose Williams, she never lived outside of a medical facility again. Tennessee paid for her care.When he died, she inherited his estate. She outlived her brother by thirteen years. In some secret way his greatest plays were all about Rose. This particular
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production is an attempt to do for this play what Tennessee Williams tried to do for his sister: to revive a peculiarity in the midst of crushing sameness; to come to know and hopefully never forget what it is to have a care for a queer, fragile, beautiful thing; to look past the obvious for the truth. Tennessee Williams is foolhardy— by which I mean heroic—to propose such an undertaking. The rough vitality of our society doesn’t care. It obliterates indiscriminately. What do we do about the gentle, the odd, the peculiar, the monstrous, the marvellous, the broken? But what are we without them?
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Season 2016
Activity // discuss the following DIRECTOR’S NOTE, Eamon Flack The notes penned by director, Eamon Flack, offer a musing of and theorising on Tennessee Williams as a man and as a playwright. Flack highlights the autobiographical nature of The Glass Menagerie, that Tom Wingfield is Tom “Tennessee” Williams, trying to “make something of the vividness, the madness, the lust and the pain which had characterised his adult life”. 1 // ‘[Williams] created a tiny theatre in the theatre, a small private stage for the large drama they performed for each other. Out of the small mire of their daily lives there emerged from time to time glimpses of an enormous vision at work’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Consider this comment by the director. Does this production create a sense of a tiny theatre in the theatre? How is this achieved? Is Williams’ play indeed a “large drama”? What might make it so? What evidence can you find in the playscript and the performance that supports your thinking?
2 // The director talks about the “visions” apparent in the play: ‘There was a vision of munificence [generosity]…There was a vision of capitalism…There was a vision of human optimism…There was a vision of love, both impossible and inescapable, ruined and pure, secret and undeniable’. 1. How are each of these visions captured in the play? 2. Is there a sense that particular characters embody these visions? 3. What evidence can you find from both the script and the performance that supports or enhances your thinking here?
3 // Eamon Flack states that Williams placed all these visions in the play and ‘bound them in the tyrannical details of daily life’ 1. What do you think the director means by this description? 2. How is this description evident in the playscript? 3. How might it be apparent in the production?
3 // ‘But the sad silence at its centre is perhaps the most eloquent thing about it’from Director’s Notes, Eamon Flack 1. Discuss this comment by the director 2. What is the sad silence that he talks about? 3. What is not spoken? Why is it not spoken? 4. How does this sad silence contribute to the tragedy of the play?
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#theglassmenagerie
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Season 2016
IN CONVERSATION WITH EAMON FLACK DIRECTOR OF THE GLASS MENAGERIE In addition to the Director’s Notes in the program, director Eamon also spoke with Brenna Hobson, Executive Director at Belvoir, Sydney, responding to questions that have more of a Theatre Studies focus. Eamon, why did you choose this particular play and what was your vision for the work? We needed a small play, as in cast, and we were looking for something for Pam. Luke Mullins (who plays Tom Wingfield) and I had been working on Angels in America together. Our conversations led us to The Glass Menagerie and in those conversations we felt that the play had much more to it than we initially thought. When I re-read it that became apparent. There is an extraordinary story within the play about having to live a hidden life and having to find your way as an adult when you’ve grown up hiding your life. In the first instance that was a personal story for me. In the re-reading, however, the play felt much bolder and theatrical than most productions of it ever are. Tennessee Williams was trying to write with a large vision of what theatre could be in the age of cinema and television. He wrote with that vision back in 1942 and that seemed like an amazing invitation to look at the text again for a contemporary time where theatre and the digital world are often in tension. Tennessee Williams says in the production notes to the play that, “an imaginative producer or director may invent many other uses for this device than those indicated in the present script”. Could you speak about your response to this and your decision to use the screen device and ‘legends’, as Williams called them, in your staging of the work? I was fascinated by what Williams was alluding to here and I spent a lot of time looking at his stage directions and production notes and thinking about why he included them so deliberately in the script. As far as I know most productions don’t recreate the screen ‘legends’. After a while I began to become very interested in the idea of using screens and incorporating live footage. As I thought about this I began to realise there was something significant about close ups, it was something about intimacy, something about trying to snatch moments back from the past and ——> pg 18
save them from oblivion, something about making memories eternal. That is certainly something that cinema did, especially in its golden age. After reading more broadly about The Glass Menagerie, I learnt that Williams wrote a screen play for the work when he was a writer at MGM. That led me to looking at a whole lot of black and white films from the 1940s and I began to realise that those black and white flickering images could be so beautiful, yet delicate and fragile. The notion of turning the squalor and struggle of that family’s life into an eternal black and white vision seemed to me what Williams was trying to do. To save something fragile from the ravages of time, and from the tragedy of time as he knew it in his own life. So the inclusion of the screen work developed from William’s own invitation in the script, then by peeling back what he was aiming to achieve for the work. In the end we did very little of precisely what he suggested, but we ran with the invitation. Did you cut or edit any of Williams’ text in this production? Further, would you discuss any examples of where you chose not to use Williams’ stage directions and what influenced that choice? None of the text is cut in this production. Every word is there. However, some of his screen directions included The image of a typewriter or The image of footsteps on a landing weren’t so effective or satisfying, however they did suggest that there were undercurrents at play. In the end we didn’t do most of the suggested ‘legends’. I think he was experimenting as he wrote. Sometimes they seem to be memories, sometimes they seem to be hopes, and at other times visions for the future. We decided all of ours should be ‘instant’ memories; things that are live in the show that get turned into memories on film then and there. So we generated a simple rule for ourselves in order to incorporate the idea.
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Activity // Discuss Some scholars consider Williams’ work to draw on expressionistic techniques. Williams himself considers expressionism a closer version of the truth than realism. How would you describe the theatrical styles in this production? I would say we treat the play more naturalistically than other productions might but that is because of the camera work and the framework that it creates. We find the play’s heightened nature through peering in on their world and how this super-naturalistic house appears in a TV-like studio on stage. I suspect our production is slower than other productions and we move from one scene to another in quite a different rhythm to what is written. I would describe the theatrical styles in a number of ways. There is some heightened naturalism, some poetic naturalism. I think Williams thought he was doing something quite Brechtian but he isn’t. More than anything he invents a new form – the memory play – which became influential on Arthur Miller and then later on, Tony Kushner. It is its own thing. The VCE students in Theatre Studies have to research the social, political, and cultural contexts in which the play was written. Williams wrote this work in 1942 so which contexts are the most important for you as a director? There are two that come to mind immediately. The first is living in a world where people’s sexuality was repressed. I don’t just mean the homosexuality but other characters’ sexuality. Amanda’s and Tom’s sexuality is severely repressed for different reasons. Laura’s sexuality is so repressed that it is difficult to even know what it is. I won’t tell you what decisions we made about Laura’s sexuality but we did make some decisions in the room. That is the first contextual information that I feel is important. The second thing is that it was a world of extreme economic insecurity, a world which we may be re-visiting. People were living off dreams and visions and hopes more than they were off actual material goods. Money was scarce. I guess the other thing floating around in the background is that the play occurs in the aftermath of the late 19th Century rather than in the full throes of the 20th Century. There are some hints that it looks forward to a technological future but actually the play is much more interested in human ideas than technical ideas. #theglassmenagerie #theglassmenagerie
After you have read this interview with Eamon Flack, the director of The Glass Menagerie, respond to the following: • How does the interview provide insight about the themes and ideas present in the play? • What additional informational does the interview provide with regard to context? • The director talks about naturalism as the key style explored. What are the conventions of naturalism? • What is the director intending by incorporating the camera and screen work into the production? • What do you think he means by “the play occurs in the aftermath of the late 19th Century rather than in the full throes of the 20th Century”? • How does this play speak to a 21st Century audience? What is its relevance to us?
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Photography / Pia Johnson
Season 2016
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ABOUT THE The actor PLAYING TOM WINGFIELD // Luke Mullins
Autobiography and Faithfulness: an editorial by Luke Mullins from Belvoir’s 2014 season Many writers—and for that matter all kinds of artists—plunder their own lives for material. If the artist is the filter through which we experience another perspective on the world, then the personal will always sit somewhere within this or beside it; buried or floating on the surface. We can become distracted by the desire to know what is true and what is fiction. When working from real life the advice often given is to tell the truth (really the truth), however painful, embarrassing, exposing and accidently hilarious. Alternatively, the artful disguising of the truth can create valuable friction between reality and invention. At the
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very beginning of The Glass Menagerie, Tom the ‘narrator of the play and also a character in it’ (and avatar for the playwright Tennessee Williams) tells the audience about a trick that is sometimes played on them. Tom/Tennessee says: ‘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.’ The Glass Menagerie is one of the two great American autobiographical plays, the other being Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. O’Neill transformed theatre in the early 20th century and writers such as
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Season 2016
ABOUT THE The actor PLAYING TOM WINGFIELD // Luke Mullins Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller emerged in his wake to write some of the great plays in the English language. Long Day’s Journey into Night is the story of O’Neill’s own family, written in 1941 (before The Glass Menagerie) but not performed until 1956, two years after O’Neill’s death and well over a decade after The Glass Menagerie had ‘lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history… [finding] perhaps for the first time an eloquence and amplitude of feeling.’ ¹ If O’Neill had had his way Long Day’s Journey into Night would not have even been published until 20 years after his death and, according to his wishes, never performed. His great autobiographical work was written at the end of his career and he felt so ashamed (guilty? mean? untruthful?) about the portrayal (betrayal?) of his family, he could not let it be seen in his lifetime. Williams’ great autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, written at the very beginning of his career, was his first big success and the work that made him. He writes about a different type of family—one headed by a woman of incredible strength and delusion, relying on the income of her son who is forced to deny every desire he has in life in order to deal with their common problem: a daughter and sister who has no tenable future. In order to escape this trap, Tom must act without pity. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill uses the real names of his family members, but changes his own to Edmund. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams changes everyone else’s but keeps his own. Having played Edmund for Sydney Theatre Company in 2010, I am fascinated by the prospect of now playing Tom and the differences between these two acts of autobiography. There is an adage that to get away with brutal autobiography, it is necessary to be hardest on yourself. In his play O’Neill gives himself the name of a brother who died as an infant. Williams uses his real name, Tom, not the ‘Tennessee’ he adopts as a persona for the rest of his writing life. When are they hiding and when are they telling the truth? Tom (and perhaps Tennessee) has trouble telling the truth in The Glass Menagerie. His mother gives him several opportunities to explain where he goes at night and what he does, and he can’t. He uses the excuse, the lie, of an escape to the ‘movies’. Tom and Tennessee’s desperate need
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for love, companionship and sex is unnameable, both to the people it is pulling him away from and on the American stage at the time the play was written. So it is hidden, coded and deniable. For me, as an artist examining the intersection of truth and fiction at the time of writing this, it is undeniable. To tell the truth about this, to not allow the deniability of who Tom and Tennessee are is very, very important. The Glass Menagerie is a classic queer text, as are all of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and this is essential to contemporary productions of his plays especially when set in their original time and location, as our production is. To not deliver this to our audience would be a betrayal; an act which autobiographical writers are often accused of. ‘Here is make-believe so real it tears your heart out.’ ² Does telling the truth, even when presented in the pleasant disguise of illusion, necessitate a betrayal? In autobiography—although you may be exposed, even humiliated—it is perhaps worse to escape unscathed, to be left out of the story, to be deemed not relevant to the forging of the myth. Was Tennessee Williams faithful to his family in telling their and his story? How can we be faithful to all of them in telling it again this year? Should we be? Is simply setting it in its original time and place being faithful to the play and the playwright? Who has the right to decide what is faithful to reality and what is fiction in an artists work? Or is faithfulness about a commitment to something bigger than that— something to do with truth. That which is really happening for the writer, for us on stage, and—most importantly—for the audience. When Tom talks about the stage magician at the start of the play—the person who gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth—he is talking about a lie: something that looks and sounds like reality but is not actually happening. It is not the truth. Let’s not be magicians; such tricks are a temporary escape and will only sustain you for the time it takes to see them disappear. Like Tennessee let us seek real magic, like the magic of falling in love that is being pushed so hard upon his sister but utterly denied to him. Arthur Miller, ‘Tennessee Williams’ legacy: “an eloquence of amplitude andfeeling.”’ TV Guide, 3 March 1984
1
Burton Rascoe reviewing the original 1944 production of The Glass Menagerie in The Pittsburgh Press, 8 Apr 1945
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Season 2016
Activity // discuss the following AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND FAITHFULNESS, Luke Mullins Actor Luke Mullins plays Tom Wingfield in this production of The Glass Menagerie. In his essay he speaks in detail about the attraction of the role. “Having played Edmund [in Long Day’s Journey into Night] for Sydney Theatre Company in 2010, I am fascinated by the prospect of now playing Tom and the differences between these two acts of autobiography”. Further, Mullins discusses the complex inter-relationship between Williams’ own life and that of Tom Wingfield. 1 // Mullins draws on the opening monologue as a way of considering his character. Tom is both ‘the narrator of the play and also a character in it’. In Tom’s own words he is ‘…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’. Luke goes on to say that ‘Tom (and perhaps Tennessee) has trouble telling the truth in The Glass Menagerie’. 1. Discuss how the style & language of the play enables the actor to play both the narrator and a character. 2. What conventions are referenced in the script? How are these made evident in the production? 3. Discuss the final statement about “truth”. Is this an accurate description of Tom?
2 // Mullins offers the following description of Williams’ approach to writing the play: ‘He writes about a different type of family [to O’Neill] – one headed by a woman of incredible strength and delusion, relying on the income of her son who is forced to deny every desire he has in life in order to deal with their common problem: a daughter and sister who has no tenable future’ 1. Discuss this description of Amanda Wingfield as a woman of “incredible strength and delusion”. Do you agree? 2. How does this description present the character of Laura?
3 // “In order to escape this trap [that of the circumstances of his family] Tom must act without pity”. 1. How do you respond to this statement? 2. Does Tom act without pity? Do his circumstances provide a rationale for leaving? 3. Where do your sympathies lie?
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Activity // discuss the following 4 // ‘By rejecting what some might view (erroneously) as a ‘happy ending’, Williams successfully delights in and insists upon the destabilisation of [certain] binaries’. 1. Do you agree that there is no happy ending in The Glass Menagerie? 2. What are the “binaries” that Mullins refers to?
5 // ‘The Glass Menagerie is a classic queer text, as are all of the Tennessee Williams’ plays, and this is essential to contemporary productions of his plays, especially when set in their original time and location as our production is’. 1. Discuss this description of the play 2. How is Tom’s sexuality either masked or made evident in the script and in the production?
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Season 2016
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Season 2016
ACTIVITY // MEET PAMELA RABE In this extensive interview, Pamela Rabe provides rich insight into a number of key aspects of this production of The Glass Menagerie. She discusses her character, Amanda Wingfield, the world of the play, and meeting the playwright himself.
WATCH this interview with Pamela Rabe
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Activity // discuss the following 1 // INSIGHTS INTO THE CHARACTER OF AMANDA WINGFIELD ‘They live in a time in America (in the middle of The Great Depression) where everyone struggles. The chasm between the haves and the have-nots is huge… To be a female breadwinner is not the norm…Amanda has had to learn the hard way to cleave an independent path for herself, as a woman, and as a mother.’ ‘[Amanda] sustains herself through the success of her children, and if that success is not always real she’ll make it up…and she sustains herself through the memories of her past – but it is a mythologised past, when everything seemed perfect…The contrast between the mythologised past of her memory and the reality of her present circumstances is so vast that it starts to drive her a little crazy sometimes.’ • How does Pamela Rabe’s description of Amanda equate with your own experience of the character on stage in this production? • Pamela describes the vast difference between Amanda’s mythologised past and the reality of her present moment. What are some examples in the play when this contrast is most evident? • Pamela explains the context of the 1930s Great Depression in America, where Amanda struggles to survive as a single mother and as a woman who had been raised to be dependent. Does this context help to shed light on Amanda’s behaviour? • How did Pamela Rabe’s portrayal of Amanda Wingfield compare with your initial reading of the character in the written playscript?
2 // THE COMPLEX NATURE OF AMANDA WINGFIELD ‘I certainly think that for the first half of the play that Amanda feels like she is the only pragmatic voice in that play.’ ‘The reality of that family is that they are all dreamers. It is the collision of their disparate dreams that creates a lot of the pain, drama and tragedy of the play.’ ‘When suddenly the Gentleman Caller appears on the horizon, that dream come true has a transformational effect upon Amanda…and finally Amanda is a woman desperately trying to hold onto and live inside her dream.’ • How do these very different sides of Amanda (as a woman who is capable of being both fiercely pragmatic, as well as clinging desperately to the past) add to the complexity of her as a character? • What are the moments where we see Amanda’s fierce pragmatism? • What are some of the moments when Amanda desperately clings to the past? • Do you agree with Pamela that one of the tragedies of this play is that each of the three Wingfields have disparate dreams that cannot be reconciled? • Does Pamela Rabe’s interpretation of the complex nature of Amanda Wingfield differ in any way from your reading of the written playscript?
#theglassmenagerie
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Season 2016
Activity // discuss the following 3 // THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AMANDA AND TOM WINGFIELD ‘It is pretty undeniable that Tennessee Williams had a complex relationship with his mother that is played out in this work…there are aspects of someone who appalled and infuriated him, but who was also very important to him.’ ‘There is one reading of The Glass Menagerie that Tennessee Williams was exorcising his past…that he needed to write the personal play first, to get it out of his system…to purge whatever guilt he may have felt for abandoning the family [as Tom Wingfield does at the end of the play].’ • Consider the significance of this play mirroring so closely the relationship that Tennessee (Tom) Williams had with his own mother Edwina and his sister Rose. • Do you think that the autobiographical nature of this work gives it a particular urgency and pathos? • Pamela Rabe describes the ‘blurry line’ that exists between love and hate in the relationship between Tom and Amanda. Where was this blurry line most evident in this production? • How did Luke Mullins’ portrayal of Tom match your own reading of the playscript? Was his interpretation of the character different to what you had expected? • What differences did you notice in Luke Mullins’ portrayal of Tom – between the Tom in the past in 1937, at home with his mother and sister, and Tom the narrator, in 1945? Were the differences consistent with Williams’ written playscript?
4 // HONOURING THE VISION OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ‘Our director Eamon is unique at the moment for being interested in the text – and honouring the integrity of the writer’s intention…He was particularly interested in honouring Tennessee Williams’ own desires in writing the script, especially in relation to his prologue.’ ‘Williams was not only interested in naturalism – but also in more theatrical elements – of the audience being pulled out of naturalism and then sucked back into it by what the actors were doing…and Eamon was intrigued by this.’ • Consider Pamela’s comments about the extent to which Eamon Flack as director wanted to honour Tennessee Williams’ original vision for The Glass Menagerie? Why do you believe that he chose to attend so closely to Williams’ original script and prologue? • It is highly recommended that you read the prologue that Williams wrote at the start of The Glass Menagerie. After doing so, consider the ways in which Flack’s production responds to Williams’ own vision for a ‘memory play’, including the use of the screen device, and the use of stagecraft including set, music and lighting. • Pamela Rabe refers to Williams’ desire for theatrical devices that might pull an audience away from naturalism. How did you experience the mix of what we are suggesting is heightened naturalism within the text and aspects of the acting alongside the more theatrical elements (the use of titles, screens and narrator?)
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Activity // discuss the following 5 // THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MEETING TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ‘We as actors have a responsibility to really explore as authentically as possible what the people in the play were really like: what were their preoccupations, what would they have sounded like, what would it feel like?’ ‘What are ‘Southern Manners?’ If all you know about ‘Southern Manners’ is what you saw in Gone With the Wind – what was it really like? And that’s where meeting Tennessee Williams was really fabulous. There was so much about him that was undeniably a Southern gentleman – his extraordinary generosity and protectiveness – and I was only nineteen.’ • Re-acquaint yourself with the contexts of the play – era, social, political, cultural. Consider Pamela’s comments about the work that each one of the cast did to represent their characters onstage “as authentically as possible”? Consider each of the actors’ portrayal of their characters as well as their use of expressive skills. How authentically did you feel that they portrayed these characters within the world of the play? • Pamela believes that meeting Tennessee Williams gave her insight into something ‘real and tangible’ to draw on for her interpretation of Amanda Wingfield – rather than a ‘flaky, flighty, crazy lady’. Do you believe that Pamela managed to make the character of Amanda seem real and authentic?
6 // THE SOCIAL, HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXTS OF THE PLAY Social context: Being a homosexual man in the 1930s and 1940s in America ‘There are so many elements of that time that inform the play. The very real one for Tennessee was what it was like to be a gay man at that time – both growing up, but also in 1944.’ • Consider the significance within the play, of the character of Tom having to pretend to ‘go to the movies’ each night – rather than admit that he is a gay man seeking company. Return to the text and explore where the script may offer clues. • As you watch the play, reflect upon this historical context – of the character of Tom, having to hide his true desires and of a mother who, as Pamela says, is ‘complicit but in denial’ about her son’s homosexuality. When you consider this context, does it give you a deeper understanding of the character of Tom – and why ultimately he had to leave his family home?
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Season 2016
Activity // discuss the following Historical context: World War II ‘By setting the play in 1938 we know that America was just about to go to the war. By the time the play was performed, they were in a war and they didn’t know when it would end. So there is a sense of danger – the importance of getting your life lived because it might end at any moment – this is a strong and palpable context for the play.’ • Consider the context of the play being performed during World War II and of the danger and uncertainty of that time. • Does this context help to give you an insight into Tom’s impatience to escape and live the life that he wants to be living?
Historical context: the changing nature of women’s role in the 1930s and 1940s in America • Consider Pamela’s further comments about women’s roles in society at the time that the play was written, of the expected norms in which Amanda was living out her life as well as her hope that Laura might do and be things that she could never have hoped for herself. • Does this context help to give you a better insight into the characters of Laura and Pamela?
Cultural context: popular movies and magazines of the 1930s and 1940s • Consider the cultural context for the play – and the references to the movies and magazine of the time. • Consider how these popular 1930’s movies and magazines might contribute to the dreams of the different characters in the play.
7 // THE THEATRICAL STYLES WITHIN THE PLAY ‘I think that we are much more comfortable now with mash-ups and mixed styles of expression within one work of art. At the time, [when it first opened], the play was huge, it was a roaring success and people felt that it was ushering in a whole new kind of theatre.’ ‘Director Eamon Flack and Set Designer Michael Hankin have done their best to interpret Tennessee Williams’ original idea [of having a screen device] and have found an expression of it that encourages a nostalgia for a world of projected images, using modern technology and they have done so in a way that honours the lyrical aspirations of this story.’ • Consider Tennessee Williams’ use of both non-naturalism and naturalism within this production. For contemporary audiences this mix of styles is something that we are very used to, but in 1945 this was a very new kind of theatre. How did you respond to the use of non-naturalistic conventions within a naturalistic play? • Consider the significance of a production in 2016 being able to finally realise an idea that Williams had for his play in 1945. How well do you feel the screens and film footage worked throughout the production? How well did this production realise Williams’ ideas for a screen device?
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Activity // discuss the following
8 // THE SIMULTANEOUS NARRATIVES WITHIN THIS WORK ‘The audience experiences this work as a multi-disciplinary piece of narrative, which is more dreamlike.’ • How did you as an audience member experience the two different narratives within this production – with Tom as a narrator, to the side of the stage, filming key moments of the play, while onstage a scene was being played out? • Consider how the use of film at key moments, helps to enhance Williams’ idea that the play is taking place in Tom’s mind – as a memory – and as Williams’ says at the start of the play, ‘Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated.’ • Did you think that the use of film helped to give the play a dreamlike and poetic quality, as Pamela Rabe suggests?
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Season 2016
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Season 2016
Activity // Stagecraft Read the following THREE excerpts from the written playscript and respond to the questions
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Activity // Stagecraft EXCERPT ONE - ACT II, Scene Six [The back door is pushed weakly open and LAURA comes in. She is obviously quite faint, her lips trembling her eyes wide and staring. She moves unsteadily toward the table. Legend: ‘TERROR’! Outside a summer storm is coming abruptly. The white curtains billow inward at the windows and there is a sorrowful murmur and deep blue dusk. LAURA suddenly stumbles – she catches at a chair with a faint moan]. TOM: Laura! AMANDA: Laura! [There is a clap of thunder. Legend ‘AH’!]. (Despairingly) Why, Laura, you are sick, darling! Tom, help your sister into the living-room, dear! Sit in the living-room, Laura – rest on the sofa. Well! [To the gentleman caller] Standing over the hot stove made her ill! I told her that was just too warm this evening, but – [TOM comes back in. LAURA is on the sofa]. Is Laura alright now? TOM: Yes. AMANDA: What is that? Rain? A nice cool rain has come up? [She gives the gentleman caller a frightened look]. I think we may – have grace – now… [Tom looks at her steadily]. Tom, honey – you say grace! TOM: Oh… ‘For these and all they mercies –’ [They bow their heads, AMANDA stealing a nervous glance at JIM. In the living-room, LAURA, stretched on the sofa, clenches her hand to her lips, to hold back a shuddering sob]. God’s Holy Name be praised… The scene dims out • How is this scene directed? Consider the detail within the stage directions and recall the actors’ actions, interactions and reactions. • What is suggested in the script with regard to how the actors use space, language, gesture and pause? How are these aspects realised in the performance? • How is status implied in the script/in the performance? • What are the stakes for each of the characters in this scene? Who stands to lose, who stands to gain? • How is the action within this scene reflected in the set design? For instance: the curtains, the livingroom, the sofa, the supper table?’ • What theatre technologies are suggested in the script? What technologies are employed in the performed scene? • What sound design choices have been made in this scene? What is diegetic? What is composed? • How are the characters dressed in this scene? How does their costume, make-up and hair contribute to the meaning of this scene, their roles in this scene? The contexts? • How is this scene lit? Does it accord with Williams’ directions that “the light upon LAURA should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or Madonnas?’ • Throughout the production does it seem apparent that the character of LAURA is lit quite distinctively?
EXCERPT TWO – ACT 1, Scene 4 #theglassmenagerie
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Season 2016
Activity // Stagecraft [TOM raises his cup in both hands to blow on it, his eyes staring over the rim of it at his mother for several moments. Then he slowly sets the cup down and awkwardly and hesitantly rises form the chair] TOM: [hoarsely] Mother. I – I apologize, Mother. [AMANDA draw a quick, shuddering breath. Her face works grotesquely. She breaks into childlike tears]. I’m sorry for what I said, for everything that I said; I didn’t mean it. AMANDA: [sobbingly]. My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children! TOM: No, you don’t. AMANDA: I worry so much, don’t sleep, it makes me nervous! TOM: [gently]. I understand that. AMANDA: I’ve had to put up a solitary battle all these years. But you’re my right-hand bower! Don’t fall down, don’t fail! TOM [gently]. I try, Mother. AMANDA: [with great enthusiasm]. Try and you will SUCCEED! [The motion makes her breathless]. Why, you – you’re just full of natural endowments! Both of my children – they’re unusual children! Don’t you think I know it? I’m so – proud! Happy and – feel I’ve – so much to be thankful for but – Promise me one thing, Son! TOM: What, Mother? AMANDA: Promise, Son, you’ll – never be a drunkard! TOM: [turns to her grinning]. I will never be a drunkard, Mother. • How is the scene directed? Consider the detail within the stage directions and recall the two actors’ actions, interactions and reactions. • What is suggested in the script with regard to how the actors use space, language, gesture and pause? How are these aspects realised in the performance? • What is the subtext of this scene? What is Amanda truly fearful of? Is Tom relieved by her question? • How would you describe the status of each of these characters? Does it shift? • What are the stakes for each of the characters in this scene? • How is the action within this scene reflected in the set design? For instance: the kitchen area, the breakfast table, the coffee cups and saucers? • What theatre technologies are suggested in the script? What technologies are employed in the performed scene? • What sound design choices have been made in this scene? What is diegetic? What is composed? • How are the characters dressed in this scene? How does their costume, make-up and hair contribute to the meaning of this scene, their roles in this scene? How does it contribute to understanding the contexts? • How is this scene lit? Does the lighting indicate time of day? Interior? Memory? What other qualities and textures are suggested? Is there practical lighting as part of the design?
EXCERPT THREE - ACT II, Scene 7 ——> pg 38
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Activity // Stagecraft JIM: [crossing to door]. I think it’s stopped raining. [opens fire-escape door]. Where does the music come from? LAURA: From the Paradise Dance hall across the alley. JIM: How about cutting the rug a little, Miss Wingfield? LAURA: Oh – JIM: Or is your programme filled up? Let me have a look at it [Grasps imaginary card]. Why, every dance is taken! I’ll just have to scratch some out. [WALTZ MUSIC: ‘LA GOLONDRINA’] Ahhh, a waltz! [He executes some sweeping turns by himself then holds his arms toward LAURA]. LAURA: [breathlessly]: I – can’t dance! JIM: There you go, that inferiority stuff! Come on, try! LAURA: Oh, but I’d step on you! JIM: I’m not made out of glass. LAURA: How – how – how do we start? JIM: Just leave it to me. You hold your arms out a little. LAURA: Like this? JIM: A little higher. Right. Now don’t tighten up, that’s the main thing about it – relax. LAURA: [laughing breathlessly]: It’s hard not to. I’m afraid you can’t budge me. JIM: What do you bet I can? [he swings her into motion] LAURA: Goodness, yes you can! JIM: Let yourself go, now Laura, just let yourself go. • How has this scene been directed? Consider the detail within the stage directions and recall the two actors’ actions, interactions and reactions. • What is suggested in the script with regard to how the actors use space, language, gesture and movement? How are these aspects realised in the performance? • What is the subtext of this scene? What is Laura afraid of? What are Jim’s motivations? • How would you describe the status of each of these characters? Does it shift? • What are the stakes for each of the characters in this scene? • How is the action within this scene reflected in the set design? For instance: the living room, the menagerie, the fire escape doorway? • What theatre technologies are suggested in the script? What technologies are employed in the performed scene? • How are the characters dressed in this scene? How does their costume, make-up and hair contribute to the meaning of this scene, their roles in this scene? How does it contribute to understanding the contexts? • How is this scene lit? Does the lighting indicate time of day? Interior? Memory? What other qualities and textures are suggested? Is there practical lighting as part of the design? Is Laura lit in a particular way?
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Season 2016
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Learn more about TENNESSEE WILLIAMS This link offers a quality overview of Williams’ life and writings Tennessee Williams: Wounded Genius – An American biography on his life and work WOMEN IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ WRITING This thesis explores three of Williams’ plays with a particular focus on how women are portrayed WILLIAMS’ ON FILM Katherine Hepburn stars as Amanda Wingfield in the 1973 film of The Glass Menagerie John Malkovich (very young!) stars as Tom Wingfield in this powerful 1987 film interpretation of the Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie REVIEWS OF THIS PRODUCTION The Daily Review Australian Stage
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Season 2016
Cast & Creative Bios
Harry Greenwood
Pamela Rabe
Rose Riley
Jim O’Connor
A ma n da W i n g f i e ld
L a u r a W i n g f i e ld
Harry graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2012. For Malthouse Theatre, he has performed in Love and Information (w/Sydney Theatre Company [STC]). Other theatre credits include Once in Royal David’s City (Belvoir) and Fury (STC). While at NIDA, Harry performed in Caligula, Punk Rock, Flutter Kick, Rookery Nook, Idiot, Richard III, The American Clock and Too Young for Ghosts. Harry’s film credits include Kokoda, 8, and Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge. His short film credits include Pacific, The Water Diary, The Gift, The Unlikely Maestro and Steve the Chameleon. For TV, he has appeared in Old School and Gallipoli.
Pamela makes her long-anticipated return to Malthouse Theatre since directing Porn.Cake in 2011 and staring in Woman-Bomb in 2005. For Belvoir, her credits include The Glass Menagerie, The Little Cherry Orchard, A Room of One’s Own, Gertrude Stein and a Companion, and Cho Cho San. Her other acting credits include over 40 productions for MTC, most recently The Cherry Orchard, Hamlet, His Girl Friday, Boston Marriage and God of Carnage. For STC, she has appeared in over 20 productions, most recently Les Liaison Dangereuses; and as a founding member of STC’s Actors Company, her credits include The War of the Roses, The Season at Sarsaparilla, The Lost Echo and Mother Courage and Her Children. Pamela’s directing credits include Solomon & Marion, Elling (MTC); In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, Elling, Serpent’s Teeth: Citizens (STC); and Jumpy (MTC/STC). She is currently appearing on television as Joan Ferguson in Wentworth. Pamela has won eight Melbourne Green Room Awards, a 2012 Helpmann Award for Best Female Actor in a Musical for Grey Gardens, a Mo Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Wizard of Oz, a Sydney Critics’ Circle Award for A Room of One’s Own, an AFI Best Actress Award for the feature film The Well and most recently an AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama for Wentworth.
Rose graduated from WAAPA in 2013. She has performed in The Glass Menagerie for Belvoir and Flood for Black Swan State Theatre Company. While at WAAPA, Rose’s roles included Ophelia in Hamlet and Mammy O’Dougal in The Cripple of Inishmaan. She also toured to Dublin with the Smock Gallery Theatre/WAAPA production of The Swell Party. Rose’s feature film roles include Truth and the upcoming The Death and Life of Otto Bloom. Last year, she starred in the television miniseries The Secret City. Her short films include Problem Play, Meat, Profile, and All That Matters.
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Cast & Creative Bios
Sean Bacon
Damien Cooper
Stefan Gregory
V i d e o D e s i g n C o n s u lta n t
Lighting Designer
Composer & Sound Designer
Sean studied video and visual arts, graduating with Honours in 1998. He has previously worked with Belvoir on Beautiful One Day (Belvoir/ILBIJERRI/version 1.0), Buried City (Belvoir/Urban Theatre Projects/Sydney Festival) and Measure for Measure, for which he won (with Ralph Myers) a Sydney Theatre Award for Stage Design. Sean has been a company artist for version 1.0 since 2005, and his work with them includes The Vehicle Failed to Stop, The Major Minor Party, seven kilometres north-east (including Sarajevo tour), The Table of Knowledge, The Bougainville Photoplay Project, This Kind of Ruckus, and deeply offensive and utterly untrue. Other theatre work includes Reflections of Gallipoli (Australian Chamber Orchestra), The Maids (STC, including New York tour), Pygmalion (STC), and Return of Ulysses (English National Opera/ Young Vic). For dance, his work includes Nobody Nevermind (Experience Harmaat/ Venice Biennial 2001). Other works include a solo show Collective (Cast Gallery, Hobart), a group show Brilliant Refraction (Cube 37, Melbourne), collaborative performance installation Sleeplessness (Performance Space 2003). In 2005, he was awarded a three-month residency at the Australia Council’s Green Street Studios in New York.
Damien has worked internationally across theatre, opera and dance. At Malthouse Theatre, his work has been seen on stage for Stories I Want to Tell You in Person (w/ Belvoir). His designs for Belvoir include The Great Fire, Elektra/Orestes, Blue Wizard, Radiance, Coranderrk, Miss Julie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, Private Lives, Conversation Piece, Strange Interlude, The Seagull, Keating!, and Exit the King (including the Broadway production with Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon). Other theatre credits include Suddenly Last Summer, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Effect, Children of the Sun, The Long Way Home, Storm Boy, The Splinter, Under Milk Wood, Pygmalion, Bloodland (STC); Macbeth (Bell Shakespeare); Doctor Zhivago (GFO); and Shane Warne the Musical (Token Productions). For opera, Damien’s designs include Der Ring des Nibelungen, Aida, Cosi, Alcina, The Magic Flute, Death in Venice (Opera Australia); Peter Grimes (Opera Australia/Canadian Opera Company/Houston Grand Opera); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chicago Lyric Opera/Houston Grand Opera/Canadian Opera Company); and Chorus! (Houston Grand Opera). His designs for dance include The Narrative of Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Firebird, The Silver Rose (Australian Ballet); The Director’s Cut, Grand, Some Rooms, Shades of Gray, Ellipse, Air and Other Invisible Forces, Body of Work, Mythologia (Sydney Dance Company); Tivoli (Australian Ballet/Sydney Dance Company); Of Earth and Sky, Mathinna (Bangarra Dance Theatre); and Multiverse, Be Your Self, Birdbrain (Australian Dance Theatre). Damien has won three Sydney Theatre Awards and three Green Room Awards.
Stefan’s composition and sound designs for Malthouse Theatre include The Government Inspector, The Wild Duck (w/Belvoir), Thyestes (w/Belvoir/THE HAYLOFT PROJECT/Sydney Festival), and Baal (w/STC). For Belvoir, his credits include Mother Courage and Her Children, Elektra/Orestes, A Christmas Carol, Hamlet, Forget Me Not (w/Liverpool Everyman/ Playhouse Theatres), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, Private Lives, Medea, Death of a Salesman, Old Man, Strange Interlude, As You Like It, The Seagull, Measure for Measure, and That Face. His other work includes Engel in Amerika (Theatre Basel); Medea (Toneelgroep Amsterdam); Rocco und Seine Brüder (Münchner Kammerspiel); The Cherry Orchard (Melbourne Theatre Company [MTC]); King Lear, The Present, Suddenly Last Summer, Face to Face, Money Shots, Dance Better at Parties, The War of the Roses (STC); King Lear, Hamlet, Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Puncture, Symphony (Sydney Festival/Legs on the Wall); L’Chaim! (Sydney Dance Company); and There Is Definitely a Prince Involved (Australian Ballet). Stefan was a band member of Faker until 2008 and was awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2014.
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Season 2016
Cast & Creative Bios
Katie Hankin
Michael Hankin
Isabella Kerdijk
A s s i s ta n t S tag e M a n ag e r
Set Designer
S tag e M a n ag e r
Katie graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2012 with a Bachelor of Dramatic Art (Production). As stage manager, Katie’s credits include Midsummer Madness (Bell Shakespeare) and Rough Draft: Wake in Fright (STC). As assistant stage manager, her credits include Persona (Belvoir); King Lear, Endgame, Mojo (STC); and Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Phèdre (Bell Shakespeare). Katie was also dresser on Cyrano de Bergerac (STC) and the national tour of The Secret River (STC/Sydney Festival).
Michael is a NIDA-trained set and costume designer for theatre and film. His credits for Malthouse Theatre include 247 Days (w/Chunky Move) and Ugly Mugs (w/Griffin Theatre). His other credits include The Great Fire, Jasper Jones, Ivanov, A Christmas Carol, Angels in America, The Dark Room (Belvoir); Jumpy (MTC/STC); The Aspirations of Daise Morrow (Brink Productions, Adelaide); Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Theatre Royal); Of Mice and Men (Sport for Jove); As You Like It (Bell Shakespeare); Truckstop (Q Theatre/Seymour Centre); Songs for the Fallen (Sydney Festival/New York Music Theatre Festival/Arts Centre Melbourne/ Brisbane Festival/TRS); Rust and Bone, The Ugly One (Griffin); Obscura (Force Majeure/Carriageworks); Fool for Love (Company B/Savage Productions); Miracle City (Hayes Theatre); The Boat People (TRS/The Hayloft project); Judith (TRS); The Lighthouse, In The Penal Colony, Through the Gates (Sydney Chamber Opera); Liberty Equality Fraternity, Great Falls (Ensemble Theatre); Deathtrap, Miss Julie, The Paris Letter, Macbeth (Darlinghurst Theatre); and Suddenly Last Summer, Women of Troy (Cell Block Theatre). His short films include Reason to Smile, Julian and The Amber Amulet (both winners of the Crystal Bear, Berlin International Film Festival). Michael has received Sydney Theatre Awards for Best Independent Stage Design for Of Mice and Men in 2015 and Truckstop in 2012. Michael is one of the Mike Walsh Fellows for 2016 and is currently Associate Lecturer of Design at NIDA.
Isabella graduated from the production course at NIDA in 2008. She has worked as stage manager and assistant stage manager on many shows including Stories I Want to Tell You in Person (w/Belvoir) and Ugly Mugs (w/Griffin) for Malthouse Theatre; Jasper Jones, Mother Courage and Her Children, Kill The Messenger, The Glass Menagerie, 20 Questions, Thyestes (European tour) for Belvoir; Replay, No More Shall We Part, This Years’ Ashes (Griffin); Rainman, The Ruby Sunrise (Ensemble Theatre); Empire (Spiegelworld); Cranked Up (Circus Oz); The Mousetrap (Australia/NZ tour); and Bubble (Legs on the Wall). As production coordinator, Isabella’s credits include Carmen (Opera Australia on Sydney Harbour). She has worked as production manager/ stage manager for Puppetry of the Penis (A-List Entertainment). Isabella has also worked on various festivals including The Garden of Unearthly Delights at Adelaide Festival, Sydney Festival and the Woodford Folk Festival.
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P r o m p t Pa c k
Cast & Creative Bios
Mel Page
Caitlin Porter
Costume Designer
A u d i o V i s u al O p e r a t o r
Mel is a costume and set designer for theatre and film, and is a graduate of VCA. For Malthouse Theatre, Mel has designed costumes for The Government Inspector (w/Belvoir), Pompeii L.A., Depth of Field (w/Chunky Move), and Baal (w/STC). For Belvoir, Mel has designed costumes for Jasper Jones, Ivanov, Seventeen, The Dog/The Cat, Elektra/Orestes, Kill the Messenger, A Christmas Carol, Nora, Once in Royal David’s City, Hamlet, Angels in America, Strange Interlude, As You Like It and The Promise; and has designed set and costumes for Small and Tired, Medea, and Old Man. Other costume credits include Engel in Amerika (Theater Basel); The Suicide, The Only Child, Spring Awakening (B Sharp/ The Hayloft Project); Macbeth, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pygmalion (STC); Complexity of Belonging (Chunky Move/MTC/ Melbourne Festival); Vs. Macbeth (STC/The Border Project); and The Nest (The Hayloft Project). She has also designed both set and costumes for Puncture (Legs on the Wall); Venus in Fur (Darlinghurst Theatre); night maybe (Theatre Works); and The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy (Stuck Pigs Squealing/MTC).
Caitlin is Belvoir’s Senior Technician. Her recent sound operating/programming credits for Belvoir include Death of a Salesman (including Theatre Royal and Geelong tours), Private Lives, Strange Interlude, Neighbourhood Watch, The Wild Duck (including Oslo, Vienna and Perth tours), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Miss Julie and The Government Inspector. A graduate of NIDA’s production course, Caitlin’s other sound design credits include Fool for Love (B Sharp/ Savage Productions); Romeo and Juliet (Bell Shakespeare); Hamlet (Sport for Jove); The Ugly One, The Brothers Size, Orestes 2.0 (Griffin); Titus Andronicus, Three Sisters, Julius Caesar (Cry Havoc); That Face, Orphans (Red Stitch); KIJE (Old Fitzroy); As Bees in Honey Drown (Darlinghurst Theatre); and Growing Up (National Youth Theatre Company).
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