How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn Page B

have the unresolved complexity of real life rather than the symbolic power of dramatic and psychological archetype, it’s because the relationship between the domineering and manipulative Amanda Wingfield and her two wounded children—the crippled Laura, for whom the once-much-courted Amanda strives to find a “gentleman caller,” and the sensitive, rebellious would-be poet, Tom—bears more than a passing resemblance to that between Williams’s mother, Edwina, and the playwright and his unstable sister, Rose.
    Williams famously refers to Menagerie as a “memory play,” and he wrote at great length about the “unusual freedom of convention” with which it ought to be presented in order to bring out its dominant qualities of delicacy and fragility. He suggests the use of an onstage screen on which thematically significant “magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles” might be projected (“SCREEN LEGEND: ‘OÙ SONT LES NEIGES’”) and insists that the lighting not be realistic, either. (“A certain correspondence to light in religious paintings, such as El Greco’s…could be effectively used,” he goes on to say.) Music, as we know, also plays an important if impressionistic role, with that single, recurring, circus-like tune used “to give emotional emphasis to suitable passages.”
    Still, however impressionistic Williams wanted stagings of this play to be, it is clear from his further directions (to say nothing of the action of the play) that the design must convey the Wingfields’ economic situation, which is both precarious and soul-destroying:
    The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population…. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape…. At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement….
    And so forth.
    All this is important because everything that happens in the play—Amanda’s obsessive invocations of her more genteel past and her desperate attempts to find her crippled daughter first a job and then a husband; her son Tom’s furtive nocturnal escapades, a reaction to his dreary job at a shoe factory—is both fueled by, and made more poignant when considered against, the squalor in which the characters live. Tom’s eventual decision, alluded to in a flashback but never actually dramatized in the course of the play, to leave Amanda and Laura in order to find himself as a poet and a man is so dreadful precisely because of itsmaterial rather than merely emotional implications: without the sixty dollars a month that he earns at the shoe factory, the two women will be finally pushed over the line that separates genteel lower-middle-class hardship from true, dire poverty. If the audience does not feel this, the play goes slack—it loses its moral and emotional weight.
    So it is dismaying to see the Wingfields, in the ill-conceived and clumsy set design you get in David Leveaux’s new staging, inhabiting an airy, spacious, rather comfortable-looking apartment—something you might find in one of the postwar, white-brick buildings omnipresent on the Upper East Side, with a big, new sofa downstage center around which, alas, Leveaux tends to clump his actors. The fire escape that Williams calls for is dutifully represented, but it’s an empty gesture, since there’s no sense of the claustrophobia that makes this particular fire escape “a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth,” as Williams wrote—no sense of why Tom feels compelled to flee over that fire escape each night en route to the bars (or worse) that he frequents, no sense of what it is he’s fleeing from (“the implacable fires of human