THE OTHER
Thoughts on the London Production of "The Glass Menagerie" and the New York Productions of "Paradise Square" and "A Strange Loop"
The summer I turned 15 in 1971 a novel titled The Other was published and became a national bestseller. Its first-time novelist was the actor, Thomas Tryon, who had starred in The Cardinal directed by Otto Preminger. That experience had been so awful - Preminger was so sadistic toward him that he fired him in front of his parents who were visiting him on the set and then rehired him once that humiliation had sunk in - that he retired from acting and turned to writing. Tryon was strikingly handsome so he made a great guest on the talk shows of the day based on his show biz narrative alone. That summer when I was grappling with my own otherness as a gay boy living on a country road in backwoods Mississippi was all about The Other to me. The title alone spoke to me, but I also was infatuated with Tryon and sensed that he too was gay. Although he had been married early in his acting career, he had two gay relationships later in life with actor and interior decorator, Clive Clerk, and porn star Cal Culver, AKA Casey Donavan. He died at the age of 65 from what was reported as stomach cancer. It was later reported as well that he had been HIV positive.
(Above: Thomas Tryon)
An actor who turns to writing … otherness … no wonder I responded so instinctively to Tryon and his book that summer. The novel was a horror story about identical twin boys in New England and what transpires when the good one begins to discover the depths to which the bad one is willing to go. There’s a dead daddy in the narrative too so there was another reason I was drawn to it. But it was mostly that title that intrigued me for it was in the summer of 1971 that I began to accept the definition of myself as “the other,” and based on who the definers were I was more than happy to be anything other than who they were, who they still are.
(Above: Amy Adams as Amanda in the London production of The Glass Menagerie. Photo by Johan Persson.)
I thought about that long ago summer when I recently saw the production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie on London’s West End at the Duke of York Theatre directed by Jeremy Herrin and starring Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield since Amanda hails from Mississippi where Tennessee was born. It is a play imbued with otherness. A southern belle replanted in the soilless, soulless St. Louis tenement where her husband has abandoned her and their two children, Amanda longs to be her other younger self before a kind of harried hope left her only harried, embittered, saddled with a physically challenged daughter and a son who inherited her harried form of hope and how the only way they each can feel emboldened is to first feel embittered. The fragile daughter Laura is the obvious other in the narrative but her brother Tom’s otherness - I just assume he’s gay - always strikes me as the bigger emotional burden because in order to embrace it he must also abandon his mother and his sister and set out on his own life.
Herrin has highlighted the theme of otherness by double-casting Tom as his older self who narrates the play and also as his younger, more angry version in the memory play; Tom, in his otherness, others himself. It is the part of the production that works best which has a lot to do with the actors cast as each other’s other. Paul Hilton, who was so moving in The Inheritance in the dual roles of Morgan and Walter, plays the older Tom and finds Williams’s own voice in the narration, a timbre that wells up with a willful, gallant woe. The younger Tom is portrayed by Tom Glynn-Carney whose anger hasn’t yet waded through itself to get to those deeper wells of woe. Laura is played by newcomer Lizzie Annis with a lovely gangly grace but the mini-skirt she wore for the Gentleman Caller scene was disconcerting and I couldn’t decipher why that choice was made by the costume designer Edward K. Gibbon since all the other clothes seemed to be of the period.
Victor Alli is the Gentleman Caller and his scenes with Annis have been mined for the pathos but not the sentimentality. Theirs a wonderful pairing. Alli is Black and the colorblind casting of the Gentleman Caller did make me wonder why Mississippi born-and-raised Amanda didn’t even register it when he arrived. I am all for colorblind casting but when done, I always think that more than one role should be cast in such a way so that the construct is set up better. When only one role is cast in a colorblind way then the actor has to work harder setting up the construct himself, as does the audience. Indeed, I thought that the Gentleman Caller being Black would work wonderfully if it were acknowledged that he was. It would have been an act of aggression on Tom’s part against his no-doubt bigoted mother as well as the act of kindness toward his sister which it usually is. And Amanda would have to work through her neediness regarding Laura being more important to her than her bigotry. It would add many new and interesting layers to the text - layers that Adams’s portrayal of Amanda could have used.
I wish I could report I liked Amy Adams more in the role. She’s okay - like the lady at the local Little Theatre whose competence makes her stand out in the amateur casts she often leads. There is nothing new or exciting or even finally engaging about her performance of the role. Indeed, I could picture this Amanda playing Amanda at a St. Louis Little Theatre production and showing herself in her best light. It is not exactly a mannered performance but it is a bit too well-mannered for my taste. Indeed, I’ve always wanted Amanda to have turned into a bit of a slattern, cadging a cigarette from Tom’s mouth after he lights one up and sharing a smoke with him, one of the few things they might still share - so that when she dons that old dress from her Mississippi youth and reminisces we get a real sense of how far she’s come since then and how she hates herself for knowing how ridiculous she appears but also how much she loved herself back then. There is a politeness to Adams's performance that keeps it rooted in that Mississippi upbringing when so much of what makes Amanda maddening is her having been uprooted and replanted in her soilless life where it is her soul that has wilted with a willfulness that matches her own, proving that souls too possess an otherness themselves which is what limns so much of Williams’s writing and gives it its poetry: that longing for our fugitive selves we sense have been captured inside us longing once more to escape, our own souls an otherness we keep imprisoned within.
(TO READ MY REVIEWS OF PARADISE SQUARE AND A STRANGE LOOP, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR.)