Word: laura
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Each of the four players is equally important in supporting, pillar-like, a corner of the drama: The Mother, Amanda Wingfield (Margaret J. Barker '98); her son, Tom, the narrator (Brett Egan '99); his sister, Laura, who is slightly crippled (Dana Gotlieb '97); and Jim O'Connor, the Gentleman Caller whose visit marks the central Event of the play (Padriac O'Reilly...
There is a curious symmetry in the distribution of weight given to each of the four characters throughout the course of the play. Though Tom's narration frames the overall story, he and his mother dominate the first half (Preparation for a gentleman caller) to give way to Laura and Jim, who come to the forefront in the second (The Gentleman calls). For awhile, Amanda Wingfield really seems to take over as the central figure--the former Southern belle whose husband went AWOL long ago, and who is forced to inhabit a world of straightened means and two children...
...really the other two actors who took the drama to its emotional climax. Gotlieb as Laura communicated primarily through eloquent looks before the arrival of the Gentleman Caller; but opened up with marvelous expressiveness in the tete-a-tete with her former high school "crush." In face, voice, and gesture, she touchingly evoked the painful shyness and self-consciousness of the disabled girl who is given one brief chance to bloom. Yet she also possessed an air of unexpected (and deeply affecting) grace and dignity in the most heartbreaking moment of the play...
However, it was O'Reilly's performance as Jim O'Connor, the outsider, the "emissary of reality," that packed a real surprise. Right from his first entrance he exuded a breezy normality that contrasted sharply with Tom's poetic restleness, Amanda's strenuous spirits, and Laura's recessiveness. Yet Jim's own history is tinged with a different kind of pathos--that of the high school hero who simply "slowed down" after graduating. O'Reilly deftly depicted the character's undaunted narcissism (which ends up huring Laura badly), yet also made one feel the something inherently likeable and charming that...
...happy to finally see someone who can support Madeleine Albright outright, but I was disappointed that she was not the most influential person of the year. She's changing the world. LAURA HAYDEN Columbia, Illinois