The Call Is Places 2019–2020 SUBSCRIBER NEWSLETTER The Glass Menagerie Sept 14 – Oct 27 Wurtele Thrust Stage WELCOME From Artistic Director Joseph Haj SEASON 2019–2020 2019–2020 The Glass Menagerie Sept 14 – Oct 27, 2019 Dear Friends, Wurtele Thrust Stage Welcome to the Guthrie’s 2019–2020 Season! After months of planning Steel Magnolias and discussion, I’m deeply proud of the plays and creative teams we’ve Oct 26 – Dec 15, 2019 assembled. Curating an ambitious slate of classics and new works that McGuire Proscenium Stage explore the rites of passage and inescapable realities of the human experience has been a great pleasure, and I am thrilled to share the A Christmas Carol season with you. Nov 12 – Dec 29, 2019 Wurtele Thrust Stage Tennessee Williams, inarguably one of the greatest American playwrights, wrote a masterful portrayal of family in The Glass Menagerie — his first Noura major success — and mapped the great, unknowable distances between Jan 11 – Feb 16, 2020 McGuire Proscenium Stage people, especially those we love most and should know best. His semiautobiographical drama coined the term “memory play” and moved Twelfth Night American theater into bold, uncharted territory. The story hovers inside Feb 8 – March 22, 2020 Tom Wingfield’s fragmented memory as he wrestles with the ghosts of Wurtele Thrust Stage his past, allowing Williams to examine the very notion of memory: What do we choose to remember? What, despite our best efforts, do we find The Bacchae impossible to forget? Can our memories be trusted? And do they harm, Feb 29 – April 5, 2020 help or heal us? McGuire Proscenium Stage The Glass Menagerie’s themes are the forever themes: love, family, Emma loneliness, guilt, forgiveness. The Wingfield family and their gentleman April 11 – May 31, 2020 caller encounter and grapple with them in such visceral ways that you will Wurtele Thrust Stage undoubtedly recognize bits and pieces of yourself in each character — a telltale sign of Williams’ mastery. I am honored to helm this production Destiny of Desire with a cast and creative team who have demonstrated an astounding May 30 – July 11, 2020 ability to bring the play’s words and ideas to vivid, poetic and brilliant life. McGuire Proscenium Stage Thank you for joining us at the top of our new season, and I hope you’ll Cabaret return to the Guthrie for more stories, old and new, that illuminate our June 20 – Aug 23, 2020 Wurtele Thrust Stage common humanity. Sweat Yours, July 25 – Aug 29, 2020 McGuire Proscenium Stage Visit guthrietheater.org for additional productions and play descriptions. 2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTO: T CHARLES ERICKSON The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams The Guthrie gratefully recognizes Mary W. Vaughan as Leading Producer Cast and Louise W. Otten and Peter & in alphabetical order Patricia Kitchak as Producers. TOM WINGFIELD Remy Auberjonois* Setting LAURA WINGFIELD Carey Cox* An apartment and alley in St. Louis. The near and distant past. JIM O’CONNOR Grayson DeJesus* AMANDA WINGFIELD Jennifer Van Dyck* Run Time Approximately 2 hours, 25 minutes (including intermission) Understudies Kate Berg (Laura Wingfield), John Catron* (Tom Wingfield/ Creative Team Jim O’Connor), Michelle O’Neill* (Amanda Wingfield) DIRECTOR Joseph Haj Understudies never substitute for performers unless announced prior to the performance. SCENIC DESIGNER Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams COSTUME DESIGNER Raquel Barreto Acknowledgments The Glass Menagerie is presented LIGHTING DESIGNER Christopher Akerlind by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc., a Concord Theatricals SOUND DESIGNER Darron L West Company. On behalf of The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. COMPOSER Jack Herrick MOVEMENT DIRECTOR Maija García DRAMATURG Carla Steen RESIDENT VOICE COACH Jill Walmsley Zager STAGE MANAGER Timothy Markus* ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER Kathryn Sam Houkom* ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Tracey Maloney NYC CASTING CONSULTANT McCorkle Casting, Ltd. DESIGN ASSISTANTS Ryan Connealy (lighting) Lisa Jones (costumes) Reid Rejsa (sound) *Member of Actors’ Equity Association 3 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY Synopsis Tom Wingfield conjures from “Glass breaks so easily. memory his family’s life in their No matter how careful you are.” St. Louis tenement apartment during the depths of the – Laura to Jim in The Glass Menagerie Depression. He holds a dead- end job at a shoe warehouse CHARACTERS (as described by Tennessee Williams) while nursing dreams of being a writer. His older sister Amanda Wingfield, the mother Laura has retreated from A woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another life’s harsher realities to live time and place. Her characterization must be carefully created, not in a world of old records and copied from type. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is glass figurines. Their mother much to admire in Amanda and as much to love and pity as there is to Amanda retains hope that her laugh at. Certainly she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though children will thrive in a world her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness that doesn’t appear to have in her slight person. a place for them. Tension in the tiny apartment mounts as Laura Wingfield, her daughter Tom grows restless and chafes Amanda, having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live under Amanda’s vigilant vitally in her illusions, but Laura’s situation is even graver. A childhood attention. The arrival of Jim, illness has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other and a gentleman caller for Laura, held in a brace. This defect need not be more than suggested on the could be a door opening for stage. Stemming from this, Laura’s separation increases until she is all of them or a disturbance like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move that finally shatters their from the shelf. fragile home. Tom Wingfield, her son SETTING The narrator of the play and a poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature An apartment and alley is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap, he has to act without pity. in St. Louis. The near and distant past. Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller A nice, ordinary young man. 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTOS: REMY AUBERJONOIS AND JENNIFER VAN DYCK; GRAYSON DeJESUS AND CAREY COX; JOSEPH HAJ (DAN NORMAN) THE PLAYWRIGHT Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier (“Tennessee”) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was born in Ohio and imagined herself to be a Southern belle. His father, Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams, was a rough man with a fine Southern pedigree. The family included his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin. C.C. was absent for long periods throughout their childhood and moved the family from town to town. Williams was a sickly child and Edwina insisted that he focus on Shakespeare rather than sports, which fostered his interest in literature and, eventually, writing. The family moved from Clarksdale, of verse in a Greenwich Village later work. Menagerie shows his Mississippi, to St. Louis, Missouri, nightclub. While working these odd sympathetic insight into female in 1918. Although Williams wanted jobs, Williams was writing furiously, psychology, which is distinctive of to be a writer, his father forced him mostly for the stage. Williams’ dramas. to quit the University of Missouri and work in a shoe factory. He Williams’ work is best approached He won a Pulitzer Prize for finally received his B.A. in 1938 through his three most successful Streetcar, in which Blanche from the University of Iowa. After plays: The Glass Menagerie DuBois is driven mad by her brutal graduation, he worked as a bellhop (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, in New Orleans, a handyman in a (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof whom Williams modeled after a co- shoe warehouse, a teletypist with a (1955). The first has a lyrical, sad worker from his shoe factory days. corps of engineers in Jacksonville, gentleness that separates it from The heroine is more ambivalently Florida, and a writer and reciter the savage cruelty of much of his presented as partly the architect 5 \ GUTHRIE THEATER “We get people home; we let them know that we’re here for them. This is what art can do. Art should be the arm and the shoulder and the kind eyes — all of which let others know you deserve to live and to be loved.” – Tennessee Williams, on what he hoped his writing would accomplish of her own destruction. Living After Cat, which earned Williams writing about gay people.” As dangerously near the edge of his second Pulitzer Prize, he is often the case with Williams, sanity and dependent on “the concentrated more on loners his statement is both true and kindness of strangers,” Blanche than family, and the Southern untrue — his great midcareer plays is the first in a line of characters decadence that earned Streetcar focus on relationships rather than who protected themselves its initial notoriety became more politics, but the figure of the gay by “mendacity.” sensationally sinister. Sexual and male appears in his characters other forms of perversity were both explicitly (Charlus in Camino Before the success of Cat came prominent, including cannibalism Real) and implicitly (Brick in Cat) three less successful works. in Suddenly Last Summer (1958) throughout his works. Summer and Smoke (1947) has and castration in Sweet Bird of problems engaging a complete Youth (1959). What Williams once In 1943, Williams’ mother sympathy for, and comprehension identified as “the passion for authorized a frontal lobotomy of, its small-town misfits. The declivity” in human nature became on his sister, Rose, and Williams Rose Tattoo (1951), a turbulently paramount.