Word: wingfield
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...Ames, as the mother, Amanda Wingfield, bursts as gloriously as the jonquils that send her into raptures. Amanda is a withered Southern belle, ever unquiet about her lost life on the plantation, regaling the tressed-up, padded-bosom, stuck-smile days of her girlhood. Amanda lives in a cocoon of memories, deceiving herself about plans for the future, acting out an existence that is worse than old-fashioned--it is dead. She sparkles beautifully, like a jewelled kinetoscope, cascading through the same wistful images at the drop of a penny-word. Amanda mothers her children, Tom and Laura, with...
...Goddess," in Robert Graves' term, who inspired him to write. She, of course, is the crippled Laura of The Glass Menagerie. But his mother, whom he calls "Miss Edwina," has been the love-hate pivot of his life. Quite apart from supplying the model for the memorable Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie, this formidable lady, now in her 90th year, stamped certain irreversible traits on Tennessee's attitudes, character and dramatic style. Valiant in coping with her stingy shoe-salesman husband Cornelius' early desertion of the family, self-willed and prone to fits of delusive grandeur...
...painful this shattering turns out to be--how much impact The Glass Menagerie retains as a drama--depends on the audience's simultaneous identification with the Wingfield's aspirations and its acceptance of the tragic perspective provided by the narrator. The current Loeb Ex production, despite its flaws, ultimately succeeds in eliciting this subtly balanced reaction...
...final member of the Wingfield clan is the timid, waif-like Laura, whose face is often blank, but whose eyes are as innocent and easily frightened as a deer's. In the first act, Muffie Meyers acts a Laura too withdrawn to be more than pitiful as she caresses her glass animals, but as the play wears on she wins our fuller sympathy...
...other characters make brief appearances. Mr. Wingfield grins eternally from a portrait which is inexplicably being used to prop open the Victrola; I can't imagine Williams' Amanda tolerating such treatment of a picture of the man she chose over seventeen more promising gentlemen callers. Ken Bartels saunters into the Wingfields' home as Jim, the man who comes to dinner as Laura's first gentleman caller and the focus of all Amanda's hopes for her child. His pocket full of gum wrappers, Bartels's Jim is appropriately more whimsical, but just as ebullient as the high school hero Laura...