Mahvellous, dahling

A cold and sleety weekend, with two interludes of theatrical lunacy.  On Saturday, negothick and I went to csecooney 's fabulous playwriting party, and scribbled like maniacs, giggling.  We all read our efforts aloud, and you never heard four such glorious rigamaroles.  I felt like Jo March at a picnic.

On Sunday, I came back to see The Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T., right in my backyard.

Zachary Quinto as Tom had a face like a frost-bitten parsnip, long and scarecrow-sharp and blackavised.  Excellent sardonic performance.  A furious refusal to grieve, bottling huge internal damage;  sparks glittering from cracks.  I was picking up little flashes of gay in his frustration--there was an instant in one of his "yes, the movies" rants when he became Garbo in a silvery sheath evening gown, merely through body language.

Their Amanda, the redoubtable Cherry Jones, had an awful cold, dampening her resonances--and very slightly, her rhythms--in the first act.  There were nano-flubs, as if her stuffed head had muffled her timing.  A great pity, as she rises to a thing of pity and terror in the second act, a Moloch of Motherness..  (I think she must have stuck her head in a samovar in the intermission.)  Not willowy, this faded belle:  she's like Margaret Dumont in mothballs.  Her flounces are appalling.

Celia Keenan-Bolger played Laura's frailty as stiffness, as if her soul were in an iron brace.  That dress her mother gussied her up in was a derision, drooping and fluttering from her rigid body like a bag blown onto an aerial.  When the Gentleman Caller pats the floor for her sit by him, she goes down like spaghetti into boiling water, minimally pliant.

Of course, the Gentleman Caller is something of a thankless part.  (Hi, I'm commonplace and cheerful and callow, and I'll have to shatter your unicorn.)  Brian J. Smith was what it says on the tin.  Mind you, a fine fresh brand of GC.  You'd hire him.

Watching this time, I felt that Tony Kushner must have studied hell out of this play:  that cross-hatch of lyricism and painful comedy.

Beautifully directed.

And a notably excellent set:  two hexagons of shabby apartment, large and small; a fire escape spiralling into infinity; a moon in water.

Nine