Word: glassed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TENNESSEE WILLIAMS did not call his memory play The Glass Zoo for good reason. "Menagerie" hints at the intimacy of three creatures with a fragility and warmth that is distinctly not zoo-like. All too human, The Glass Menagerie remembers the post-adolescent longing for freedom and adventure of a young poet caged in a fading, depressionistic tenement, but more, it characterizes the last generation that could daydream innocently. That era's dream machines were the phonograph and the movie projector, but they worked songs and pictures that opened romantic vistas so different from today's defined and redefined motion...
...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...
Though Maggie Topkis is fine in several scenes, particularly when relating the story of her first and last high-school love, she has none of the delicacy and fragility that link Laura to her glass animals. And her acting is annoyingly obvious at times, showing instead of feeling...
...Looking Glass...
...retribution. But there is no room for theology, or even for the supernatural, in the class struggle. Losey, after underplaying the hair-raising moment when the statue first speaks, dissipates its horrific arrival by treating it almost as a hallucination. Then, in one of his most bizarre touches, a glass blower's open furnace-first seen during the overture-materializes once again in the Don's house and engulfs him, in a sort of industrial accident. Don Giovanni does not exactly go to hell, but the scene does...