Word: amanda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MARRIED. Amanda Burden, 36, fashion-plate daughter of the late society queen Barbara ("Babe") Paley; and Steven Ross, 52, acquisition-minded chairman of Warner Communications; both for the second time; in East Hampton...
...Amanda's mood swings precariously from the incomprehension of the distraught mother to the glee of the spooning debutante and Ames swings with her. Frustration and her anger singe the air as she peels her gloves commando-like, strutting lost in her own home, crying "Deception" at her daughter Laura, who has dropped out of secretarial school without posting notice. And her shivering silence after a bitter fight with her dreamer son, Tom, is wonderfully moving...
...character is oddly wrong, too smug, too fulsomely gesturing, too much exterior acting. It is a terrific role, at once subtle and obvious, but the actor's energetic anger, bitterness and sense of adventure must come from deep within. In the scenes that call for dynamic confrontation with Amanda, Hanes is very good, but at other times he is too pompous, too unselfconscious. Lines like "it don't take too much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin" and "how lucky dead people are" lack a profound fear and pain that are essential to Tom's nature...
...last of the menagerie's precious trio is the glass animal herself, the crippled--"not crippled, you have a defect," says Amanda--Laura. Laura evokes only sympathy, smothered in abuse and pain, hopelessly shy, wandering alone in her own world of phonograph music, long winter walks and dear glass creatures. Williams is at pain to show that she most resembles her favorite glass friend, a tiny unicorn--"aren't they extinct in the modern world?" who is "crippled" by his horn but loses it in an accident, suddenly, like all the other glass horses, less freakish...
...shyness by whirling her on the dance floor and warming her to a slow kiss. Jim's visit is the play's climax, the culmination of a search for a "gentleman caller" for Laura, a visitor from the outside who might show her another--married--life. And to Amanda, he is a mythically important guest, for he reflects the ultimate in preparing for the future, just as she once planned for the future by entertaining 17 gentleman callers in one afternoon. Like Amanda, who chose wrong from among her suitors by opting for the charming but elusive Wingfield, Laura fails...