DVD/150: BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE (Rick McKay, 2003)

Ex-actor Rick McKay took six years to film his oral history of the personalities who witnessed Broadway's golden age - roughly 1945 to 1967 - but his tenacity paid off as his illustrious cast look back at the creative period they all lived through.

His documentary is funny, tender, and tinged with a wistful sadness on the ghosts who haunt his cast's memories.  As there are now 25 of the 87 interviewed still living, this increases the poignancy.

The cast reminisce on their first experience of New York, how they lived and auditioned while waiting for the big break, where they hung out and how New York and the theatre world changed around them.

In particular, his stars remember three actors whose performances still burn bright: Marlon Brando, Kim Stanley and Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfied in THE GLASS MENAGERIE.

Sadly, McKay didn't live to see his film sequel fully completed.

Shelf or charity shop? One for the shelf because, as well as his wonderful cast, McKay also has a dazzling treasure trove of archive material including an astonishing 1938 screen test that Laurette Taylor did for David Selznick; her natural line-readings would put Streep to shame but she wasn't employed as they felt she wasn't 'acting' as they thought it was.  Standouts include Sondheim, Chita Rivera and Carol Lawrence on WEST SIDE STORY, Shirley Maclaine and Hal Prince on how she lived the cliché "understudy becoming a star" in THE PYJAMA GAME and memorable memories from Beatrice Arthur, Angela Lansbury, Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands, Maureen Stapleton, Uta Hagen, Frank Langella, Elaine Stritch, Kim Hunter, Julie Harris, Eva Marie Saint, Tommy Tune, Gwen Verdon, Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, and Barbara Cook among many others.

 

THE GLASS MENAGERIE at the Duke of Yorks - truth through illusion...

By a lovely coincidence one of my favourite plays is currently on in London, just in time for my birthday!  I had been quietly - and not-so-quietly - looking forward to seeing this Broadway import and I am happy to say I wasn't disappointed!

With it's 1945 Broadway premiere, THE GLASS MENAGERIE catapulted Tennessee Williams into the forefront of American playwrights which was confirmed with his second play A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE - his remarkable style of autobiographical poetic realism hitting an unknown chord at the time which has resounded down the years.  They remain his most revived plays and for good reason, they have become plays that actors want to test themselves against.  Personally I find them both incredibly moving plays to experience.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE is a four-hander and each role is wonderfully mined by Williams to give any actor who plays them so many opportunities.  The play's premiere delivered a seismic shock across the theatre world and not only just for Tennessee's writing, as Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda has echoed down the years - anyone who saw it said her naturalness in playing burned itself onto their memories and her death in 1946 aged only 63 surely robbed us of it being immortalized on screen, in the 1950 film version the British musical star Gertrude Lawrence played Amanda, a decision that Williams called "a dismal error".

What is interesting is that Taylor's performance was acclaimed because of the naturalness of her acting - Martin Landau said it was like an ordinary woman had wandered through the stage door and was moving around the stage - however it is usually the tendency for Amanda to be played in a barnstorming diva-style manner but in John Tiffany's excellent revival Cherry Jones is certainly barn-storming but totally within the world of the production; Tom, the narrator, tells us at the start that what we will see is what plays in his memory and his mother Amanda simply swamps his memory of life at home.

Tom Wingfield is a man haunted by memories of when he lived with his southern belle mother Amanda and his shy, withdrawn sister Laura in a cramped apartment in St Louis during the 1930s.  Mr Wingfield left 16 years before - "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances" as Amanda bitterly says - and since then she has managed to raise her children but her overbearing love drives them to distraction.  Tom longs to be a writer but has to work as a clerk in a shoe factory which he loathes and stays out at night to visit local cinemas and bars.  This piece of autobiographical writing is given resonance when we read that Williams' regular trips to his local cinema were, in part, to have sex with men in the dark.

Laura's lack of self-confidence due to a crippled leg and pathological shyness have led her to pretend to go to a business school which drives Amanda to despair when she finds out.  Amanda decides that Laura's only option is to find a man like the "gentleman callers" she remembers from her youth. Tom invites his only friend at work for dinner much to Amanda's delight but Jim O'Connor's appearance sets off a chain of events that will change the Wingfields forever.  Tom tells Jim he has used the electricity bill money to register for the navy and when the lights cut out, Amanda encourages Jim to sit with Laura by candlelight but we know this is exquisite torture for her as she used to silently adore Jim at high school.

This scene is beautifully written - Williams taking the time to set the characters up so the scene plays almost like a thriller as we hang on their every words: Jim trying to build up Laura's confidence, Laura's hesitant introducing Jim to her beloved glass menagerie and, above all, the realization that Jim would be the perfect boyfriend for Laura; her hopes smashed - like her favourite glass unicorn figurine that Jim knocks against - when he reveals that he is already engaged, the sadness becoming unbearable when she gives Jim the broken unicorn as a parting gift to remember her by.  Amanda's rage at Tom's ignorance of at his friend's engagement drives him from the flat for the last time and now his mother and sister haunt his peripatetic life.

As with most of Williams' plays it was arrived at through different permutations: it first appeared as a 1943 short story "Portrait of a Girl In Glass" and one of the interesting diversions from the play is when after The Gentleman Caller leaves, Laura enigmatically suggests that maybe she wasn't the only Wingfield child who was in love with Jim....  Williams also tried out the idea as a film script in the early 1940s when he had a six-month contract with MGM.  Luckily it all came together as a play.

John Tiffany's production was beautifully realized; Bob Crowley's stripped-down set seemingly hanging in darkness and - unseen by us from the back of the stalls - surrounded by inky-black water.  There was a surprising theatre moment when Michael Esper's Tom literally pulled Kate O'Flynn's timid Laura from the depths of the living room couch only to have her disappear within it at the end - this was a production which constantly reminded us through the use of Steven Hoggett's choreographed movement and Nico Muhly's tinking score that we were watching a non-realistic representation of Tom's memories.

In all the productions I have seen before, there was an imbalance in the level of performance but here John Tiffany elicited strong performances from all four: Cherry Jones and Brian J. Smith had played their characters in Boston and New York but they have still meshed well with the UK additions of Michael Esper (straight from the Bowie musical LAZARUS) and the English actress Kate O'Flynn so they feel like a real ensemble.

Esper was fine as Tom, wanting a life denied to him by his dead-end job and unhappy home life but you still felt his inner struggle with leaving the family home while Brian J. Smith was very good as Jim The Gentleman Caller who enters the home unaware of the weight of expectations awaiting him; he also added a larger-than-life quality to Jim giving him an air of the outside world that is missing from the crepuscular Wingfield home.

Kate O'Flynn gave an unsentimental performance as Laura, her shyness even with her mother and brother shown by her swallowing every word she spoke but she also rose to the challenge of slowly flowering into happiness when finally alone with her adored Jim; her slow withdrawal back into her interior world at the news of Jim's engagement was heartbreaking to watch.  In other productions on both stage and screen Laura's crippled leg has been played up but here it is hardly noticeable; John Tiffany's take seems to be that Laura has convinced herself that she is a helpless cripple despite Amanda, Tom and Jim's protestations to the contrary. 

I had seen Cherry Jones on Broadway in 2005 as Sister Aloysius in DOUBT and now she is making her much-anticipated London debut in a dazzling star performance. Her Amanda Wingfield is a woman whose life has not measured up to what she expected; brought up to expect a life of pampered marital leisure but who has had to raise her children alone, with no work experience to fall back on, in the challenging decades of the 1920s and 1930s.  Amanda's tragedy is that she sacrifices everything for her children's future without seemingly asking what they want their future to be.  Cherry Jones was funny, formidable, affecting, terrifying and, primarily, all-too-human.

John Tiffany has since had much acclaim with his direction of the Harry Potter plays but with THE GLASS MENAGERIE he lived up to Tom's opening speech - unlike the stage magician who "gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth, I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion".

This play continues to haunt you long after it ends, just as Tom is haunted by his memories of Laura and in reality Williams was haunted by the fate of his sister Rose who was given a frontal lobotomy on the agreement of their mother Edwina while Tennessee was away, working at MGM.  Their initial closeness had given way under the pressure of Rose's mental condition and he turned against her when she revealed his homosexuality to their mother.  But his lingering guilt at her treatment made him ensure that she was kept in the best rest homes and that she would be well cared for after his death.  But the guilt remained... as it does for Tom:

Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!  I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning!  Blow out your candles, Laura - and so good-bye.

 

A few weeks ago I was given a great dvd called BROADWAY:THE GOLDEN AGE which is one man's attempt to interview as many actors, composers and directors from the Golden Age of Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s.

He is surprised when he asks his interviewees what was the single greatest performance they saw on stage expecting it to be either Marlon Brando, Ethel Merman or Mary Martin - no, more often than not they replied "Laurette Taylor in THE GLASS MENAGERIE".All of them remember vividly the naturalness she brought to the stage, Martin Landau indeed said she gave you the impression that someone had wandered in off the street through the stage door and was making up the lines as she went along.

The same cannot be said of Deborah Findlay in the Joe Hill-Gibbins' Young Vic production as the whole enterprise is pitched at a highly theatrical level but that only adds to the power of this revelatory production.THE GLASS MENAGERIE was Tennessee Williams' breakthrough hit in 1944 when it opened first in Chicago then on Broadway the following year. The highly autobiographical play transcends it's inspiration and hits a universal chord of longing and loss which has ensured it's enduring popularity down the years.

Tennessee's narrator and theatrical incarnation is Tom Wingfield, in his early twenties in the late 1930s and sharing the genteel poverty that his family have been reduced to following the disappearance of his father some years previously. He shares the apartment with his overbearing mother Amanda, forever harking back to her Antebellum youth, and his sister Laura, made chronically shy due to her self-consciousness at school from having a brace on her crippled leg.

Tom - as did Tennessee - works in a dead-end job in a shoe factory and longs to make a career as a writer but is burdened with the guilt of being his family's only means of support with his pay-cheque. When Amanda reveals she knows he has made overtures to the US Navy she pressures him to find a man for his sister so she will be provided for in the future. For once Tom complies with his mother's demands and invites a work colleague to dinner. The Gentleman Caller is Jim O'Connor who Tom vaguely knew in High School when Jim was the hero of the sports field but what he doesn't know is that Jim was the boy that Laura had an unrequited love for. Jim's visit will have a life-changing effect on the Wingfields....Jeremy Herbert's design takes over most of the open auditorium - a right-angled stage with metal walkways surrounding it with the dining table on a riser surrounded by the bric-a-brac of the house including Laura's beloved collection of glass figurines, her glass menagerie. The acts are ushered in by a curtain that stretches around the playing area and that can be raised above or below the stage level.

The stage is also dominated by the WWI photo of the absent Mr Wingfield, castigated at by Amanda but a potent symbol of escape to Tom. Although wide and empty the space also feels claustrophobic as soon as mother and son start their eternal bickering. It actually works remarkably well aided by James Farncombe's lighting.As I said, Joe Hill-Gibbins' has directed the play in a slightly larger-than-life way but he also shows remarkably well how there are no villains in the piece - although Tom's actions can seem heartless and while Amanda can seem to be smothering her children with her vaunted dreams for them they are not villains, just people who find themselves trapped by circumstances somewhere other than where they want to be.

Leo Bill as Tom was the one I felt least able to transcend the shoutiness of his character. He certainly plays the fact that Tom is on course for a nervous breakdown - Tennessee suffered a nervous collapse while working at the shoe factory - but only occasionally let the character have three dimensions. I did like the way he changed his style in his scenes with Jim, suggesting that maybe Laura wasn't the only one under his All-American spell at High School.Being Tennessee Williams the roles for the two actresses are the most defined and the production is graced with two memorable performances from Deborah Findlay as Amanda and Sinéad Matthews as Laura.

Sinéad was quite heartbreaking as the pathologically shy Laura, one truly can imagine how she would haunt the dreams of her brother. In the magnificent duologue between Laura and Jim, with only the smallest of calibrations she charted a course from mortified terror at being confronted with the boy of her dreams to her blossoming under the warmth of his kindness to all her hopes being as broken as her favorite figurine. I saw her play a similarly devastating role as Hedwig in Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK a few years back at the Donmar and she really is an actress of rare subtlety.Deborah Findlay has an absolute field day as Amanda, not for her the fluttery relic of the South but a woman resolutely hanging on to life in reduced circumstances. She certainly didn't attempt to play the character for sympathy and one can truly understand the exasperation of Tom at her relentlessness but she certainly came into her own in the second act, first with the beautiful speech where she tells Laura of her magical summer of Jonquils and meeting her future husband and then with her flirtatiously gracious welcoming of the all-important Gentleman Caller, her crushed hopes on hearing of Jim's status was beautifully pitched. After seeing Findlay play a couple of dowdy, starchy roles recently it was a joy to see her rip it up as Amanda.

I also liked Kyle Soller as Jim O'Connor. Along with Jim's breezy good humour he also suggested the inner life of the former Boy-Most-Likely-To whose life has not turned out so rosy and for all his attendance of night classes you know his life when married will turn out to be as equally mundane.As familiar as I am with the play I still got caught up in the emotional pull of the story and was quite an emotional wreck by the end - proof positive that the production worked.

The play stands as a testament to Tennessee and to his guilt over his older sister Rose who did not have the physical affliction of Laura but was mentally unstable for most of her life. The intention behind the play is fully realised when one knows that, unknown to Tennessee, his mother consented to Rose having a lobotomy which went wrong leaving her irretrievably brain-damaged.

Tennessee's guilt was that he had grown distant from her in the years leading up to this, in part due to Rose informing their mother of his homosexuality. He couldn't save her but the following year he wrote THE GLASS MENAGERIE and the success of this and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE a few years later ensured he had enough money to keep Rose in private nursing care for the rest of her life. She outlived him by 13 years.

In a year that has seen some excellent revivals, THE GLASS MENAGERIE is one of the very best. It's run at the Young Vic has been extended until January 15th - rush to see it!