Word: likes
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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...
...about her lost life on the plantation, regaling the tressed-up, padded-bosom, stuck-smile days of her girlhood. Amanda lives in a cocoon of memories, deceiving herself about plans for the future, acting out an existence that is worse than old-fashioned--it is dead. She sparkles beautifully, like a jewelled kinetoscope, cascading through the same wistful images at the drop of a penny-word. Amanda mothers her children, Tom and Laura, with the artifice of a rebel Donatello creating paens to an obsolete god of refinement and good living. Deserted by her husband, "a telephone man who fell...
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...
...images materialize from his harrowing memories. He is Tennessee Williams--ne Thomas Lanier--in the shadow of the footlights. Williams had a long-distance father, moved from the deep South to St. Louis and spent three miserable years in a shoe warehouse, presumably writing poems on shoe boxes--just like his character Tom. But Tom is more than the stage presence of the author. He is a voice, a specter in his own dreams, giving "reality in the form of illusion" but always running to the illusionary happiness of movies and liquor until he breaks free, like his father, sacrificing...
...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...