Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...beauty of this moment may belong essentially to Kathryn Humphreys, who plays the young girl--her whole performance, the best in an excellent production, is compellingly pathetic yet radiant--but the whole evening is full of similar small epiphanies, finely executed by the company. The play's success depends entirely on an unbroken series of these momentary beauties; on the present occasion this success is never in doubt...
...every way they can. Uniquely, perhaps, among Tennessee Williams' major works, this one has no dominating masculine figure to bring it to an explosion of melodrama. "Because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material," the author says of it, "atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part." John Hancock, who directed the current production, has worked scrupulously and to beautiful effect with everyone concerned...
...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 and lean. When Mr. Gesell is allowed to be nice and ordinary, as in most of his achingly poignant scene with Miss Humphreys, he too does fine work...
...Williams practices on the emotions of his audience with consummate skill, successfully using various theatrical devices to intensify the atmosphere. "The play is memory," says Tom Wingfield, who functions as narrator. "Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music."--and the music threads in and out of the action with a perfectly calibrated degree of obtrusiveness...
...Schroeder's lighting sometimes brings strongly to mind the image of someone in the back throwing switches at an unwontedly rapid rate; but frequently he achieves stunning effects without loss of visibility, as when Tom appears to open the play, illuminated for a moment only by his cigarette lighter...