Word: wingfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hedda has sprung is simply stated in the program notes by Ted van Griethuysen, who directed the play and is also the company's artistic director: "Hedda Gabler is a good person." The premise itself is highly debatable. Is Falstaff a good person? Are Ivanov and Amanda Wingfield good persons? As soon as a great playwright has performed an in-depth analysis and portrayal of a character, that character transcends the confining categories of good and evil. Such a character then becomes rich, opaque, fascinating, and strangely elusive of definition-in precisely the way that provocative and interesting people...
...word, no. But it reminds me of 1874. Imagine! W. E. Gladstone attacked papal infallibility in his pamphlet, The Vatican Decrees, Solomon introduced the pressure-cooking method for canning foods, Richard Wagner completed Götterddmmerung, and Wingfield invented lawn tennis. And, oh yes-civil marriage was made compulsory in Germany...
Williams wrote a play about people who inhabit the past and the present, and those who inhabit no time at all. There is Amanda Wingfield, a faded Mississippi belle stranded in the slums of St. Louis who is trying desperately to recapture the dead world of the Delta; Jim O'Connor, the gentleman caller, an engaging boor who represents the present Amanda is avoiding; Tom, Amanda's son, torn between love for his mother and sister and the desire to escape into the living world around him; and Laura, Amanda's daughter, a shy and delicately beautiful cripple...
...that best proves it is The Glass Menagerie. In it Williams held a mirror up to memory and caught upon it the breath of three lives: his mother's, his sister's and his own. In a lower-middle-class apartment in a Mid western city, Amanda Wingfield ("an exact portrait of my mother," says Williams) tries to cope with a peevish present by chattering of a fancied past. The son Tom (Williams) suffocates in a shoe factory and goes to movies to daydream of escape. The daughter Laura (Williams' sister Rose) has a mind...
...Mills introduced him to a one-foot shelf of influences: Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Chekhov, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, who became Williams' poetic idol. Tom introduced Mills to Rose. As Mills recalls it, Mrs. Williams "commanded Tom to bring home 'gentleman callers,' " as Tom Wingfield does in Menagerie; "Williams' poor sister was dressed in old-fashioned Southern costumes. She was very lovely. She never talked at all. Mrs. Williams never stopped talking-empty verbiage about their status in the South. The mother didn't give her a chance...