I think my leisure reading pattern is becoming more and more peculiar these days.
I was going to borrow Tennessee Williams' 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (coz Gillian Anderson is going to appear in the Young Vic production this summer), but ended up with 'The Glass menagerie' in my hand. Well, that book size is light and easy to carry, and it caught my attention, since I learned that Zachary Quinto, aka Spook in Star Trek movies, participates in the Broadway production in New York now. (Don't really know how and when, but I gradually grow a strange attachment to him recently. OK, maybe because he is kinda cute?) Anyhow, I certainly enjoying it more than 'Sweet Bird of Youth' and the unfinished reading one, 'The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore', and would love to see Quinto's monologue performance.
'The Glass Menagerie' is a semi-biographical play of Williams' recollection of his early family life. Denoting hinself as Tom Wingfield, a warehouse worker who desires adventures and has a writer's heart, but at the same time is trapped in a small flat, Williams states in the beginning to set the tone of this play:
"The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details: others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic."
I must admit: I adore this production instruction. Love the way that Williams describes the atmosphere and the core nature of the play; and his uses of words exhibit artistic elegance and sophistication! That is how I want to write, and yet to success! Also, owing to this short paragraph, I began to change my impression of his works. I was not amazed by the other two plays of his that I had read, if truth to be told. But 'the Glass Menagerie', similar to Harold Pinter's short collections, electrifies me pure and straight!
To underline the image of a memory play, the story begins and ends with Tom's monologues.
Tom: "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
It is a recollection of a period that is way back, years ago, at home, where he was living with mother Amanda, who has great expectations for her children, and the crippled young sister Laura, who is extremely shy and overshadowed by the sociable mother, and a photo of the father, who had abandoned the whole family for the world outside. Facing the tormenting desertion of her husband, Amanda devotes her full attention to protect the kids, to make sure Tom won't turn into his vanished father and Laura will get married before becomes an old maid. But her over-protection and parental pressure only pushes both of them further away from her: Tom was lingering in cinemas every night and dreaming about travelling to faraway lands, while Laura was shying away from the public and obsessed with her glass menagerie collection. After several failed attempts to get Laura to socialize with other people, Amanda demands Tom to bring someone from his work place back home, with a wishful thought that that gentleman caller could become a regular visitor of the household. Tom subsequently brought back Jim O'Connor, who used to be a bright young star back at high school with Tom, but hurtfully ended up working in a warehouse.
Nonetheless, Mr. O'Connor is yet to be defeated by the reality and has a grand plan for his future. As he declares to Laura: "Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged."
With such forward-looking and positive attitude, Jim's appearance did light up the distraught atmosphere of the house. Laura also had a dreamy moment of realizing a high school fantasy with Jim, for he was the charming prince who secretly existed in her heart for a long time. But the seemingly brightening-up tone takes a drastic turn shortly after their accidental intimacy, with Jim's confession of his serious relationship with a girl call Betty. Accompanied with Mother's desperate accusations and Sister's lonely image by the side of candlelights, Tom finishes the ending scene by pronouncing:
"I didn't go to the moon, I went much farther - for time is the longest distance between two places -- ...... I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. ...... Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes... Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! ...... - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura - and so good-bye..."
The sentimental language cries out the forever melancholy of the author, while demonstrating his tendered heart when reliving the family memory. He knows that he must carry on, with life, with the progress of the world, but he cannot simply breaks away with his past, for it will always come back to haunt him. Therefore, all he can do is to hold onto those soft emotions and gentle things that he can, or choose to, remember, in order to make the unbearable guilt of abandonment more endurable, less painful.
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