The Glass Menagerie

I didn't think it was possible to be surprised by a Tennessee Williams play at this late date - but it is, and I need to remind myself in the future that with art of even middling ambition, it is always possible to be surprised.

We were laughing and it was cruel. So many ways to look at it: we as an audience managed to reach the proper detachment Nietzsche suggested for readers of Don Quixote - with nothing but derision for the hero: no admiration, no identification, no resonance. Of course, somehow I can't imagine good Nietzsche was imagining the well-fed crowd American at a typical Kennedy Center production, but perhaps that was his own myopia - perhaps you don't need to transit all that great Goat's Song searching to become an Ubermesch. Maybe Donald Trump really is the Blond Beast.

I think I was sandbagged by having seen it only in a television production, which - since it brought us in its typical close-up manner face-to-face with the protagonists and wasn't callous/bold enough to use a laugh track - inevitably stressed the pathos of it all, of the poor crippled girl, her longing and her blank future. Because the play is funny, and that leaves the final monologue oddly suspended - how do we connect back in through the humor, back to the odd quality of emptiness.

And maybe I'm thinking about it now. Laura, with her unicorn and music, has a new life - and Tom too, still "Shakespeare,: still unpublished - or maybe, humorously, "e-published", still scribbling. Despite her poverty and shyness, she's a blogger, and a chatter, and a surfer. Her life is simultaneously more exposed - an exemplar of these netizens, with their fibro and geekiness and financial challenges - her world is richer, and not nearly so lonely. But that tenement apartment has a big window now, through which the Paradise patrons can watch what goes on around the Glass Menagerie, in the unlikely event they are so inclined.

Derision? Pathos? Indifference? Where am I on this?