Word: amanda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Glass Menagerie has nearly no plot (first the Gentleman Caller is awaited, then he is there, then he is gone); it is all futility and grief in a shabby-genteel apartment, where Amanda, a woman uprooted from her way of life, her daughter Laura, who knows nearly no one and fears everyone she does not know, and Laura's restless brother Tom, try to escape their cul-de-sac, and help one another out of it, in every way they can. Uniquely, perhaps, among Tennessee Williams' major works, this one has no dominating masculine figure to bring...
...desperation. Moreover (much moreover), she is equal as an actress to the demands of the part--which is vastly more than can be said for anyone else I can think of in Cambridge. Her fluttery hand-gestures, her nods and becks and agonizingly wreathed smiles are brilliantly done. Her Amanda lacks a final dimension of bravery which might have made the pathos even deeper, but everything else is there...
...performance as Jim the Gentleman Caller presents something of a problem to the critic. Mr. Williams describes Jim as "a nice, ordinary young man," but he has written the part as a symbol of the expansive American spirit that has destroyed the world of gentility and graces in which Amanda Wingfield tries so desperately to live. If Jim occasionally comes across as crudely caricatured, like an American (like the American) in a British book or movie or play, it is largely because Mr. Williams has written him that way, and because Mr. Hancock has made him sprawl and slouch...
...carry him for more than a couple of miles? But at his best, Actor Arness manages to behave with a sort of unheroic, splatter-dabs-and-huckydummy homeliness that makes the customers imagine themselves in the West as it really was; and the illusion is further fostered by Heroine Amanda Blake as Kitty, who is "obviously not selling chocolate bars." Arness can shake hands with grandma (Colt .45) almost as fast as the next man, and he wears his pants so tight he can't bend over. Minneapolis-born, wounded at Anzio, he rode with the posse...
Ella Clark and Amanda Mackay-Smith rate notice for the size of their parts as the other two sisters, but not for their accomplishments. Miss Clark, particularly, shows nothing but the efforts of a young actress trying hard. Richard Smithies, in the part of a philosophic army officer, plays Richard Smithies. He does this very well by now, but the characterization is becoming tiresome. As for the other performers, except for Elizabeth Fox, who is just about nasty enough as a snobbish young wife, the kindest thing which can be said is that they would profit from further experience...