Word: tom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...that scene, the mother and son circle the stage, his blind tom-cat to her broken-winged sparrow, until Tom lowers his tail, breaks the silence in order to regain the peace of their barren thicket. A breakable pane hangs between them always, a horse-drawn past and jet-lured future caught in the same jam of traffic but still enveloped in the mist and mystery of dreams...
...TOM IS THE play's narrator and the 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...
Jamie Hanes portrays a strong, if unspectacular Tom. He delivers best in Tom's narrator role, reflecting over the poetry of his own sentences, speaking softly, a clear ribbon of regret winding through the words. But at tims, Hanes' voice rings too smoothly, Shakespearean in tone, stagy. Tom is a writer, not an actor, and the immense presence that Hanes gives his 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...
Laura loses her horn when Jim, a friend of Tom's conquers her 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...