ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Two-time Tony winner Judith Ivey takes on Amanda Wingfield, American drama’s most memorable matriarch.

The original setting for The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ modern classic which debuted on Broadway in 1945, is a Depression-era tenement apartment in St. Louis. Tom, who narrates the memory play, shares his shabby coffin-like abode with his mother Amanda and sister Laura. But director Gordon Edelstein’s innovative production — which begins performances March 5 and officially opens March 24 at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre — unfolds instead in a dingy hotel room in New Orleans. There, Tom, a stand-in for a young Tennessee Williams, wrestles with the ghosts of his past via his own troubled memories.
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Yet, no matter how inventive this new production of The Glass Menagerie may be, and critics raved about its first incarnation at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, like any production of the play, it still requires a formidable actress to play Amanda. Edelstein went with tradition here by casting Judith Ivey, one of the country’s most accomplished actresses as Tom’s domineering and charming mother. Ivey is the latest in a long line of illustrious women who have tackled the role, starting with Laurette Taylor, whose incomparable performance in the original is widely considered a defining moment for American acting. More recently, six-time Tony winner Julie Harris starred in Roundabout’s previous production in 1994.

For any actress, it’s the role of a lifetime. Suffocating and loving, Amanda wishes to free herself from the confinement of a poverty-stricken life. Unlike Tom, who takes off to be a sailor, Amanda escapes via memories of a vivacious, bygone youth, which she describes in long, lyrical monologues that resurrect every word and gesture of the signal events that defined her East Tennessee girlhood. Performing opposite Patch Darragh as Tom, Keira Keeley as Laura, and Michael Mosley as Jim O’Connor, Ivey returns to Roundabout after portraying Sally Durant Plummer in its 2001 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

Playing Southern belles, whether faded or in their prime, comes quite naturally to Ivey, a native Texan. Widely known for her work in film and TV, notably as the widow B.J. Poteet on Designing Women, she has been nominated three times for a Tony Award and won two: for David Rabe’s Hurlyburly (1985) and Nell Dunn’s Steaming (1983). Ivey is also an accomplished director; she recently helmed an Off-Broadway revival of Vanities; Kathleen Clark’s play Southern Comforts; and Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman comedy Bad Dates. “I love making a piece of literature come alive,” she told Front & Center, “whether I’m in it as an actor or as a director.”

FRONT & CENTER: How did this new production come about?

JUDITH IVEY: Gordon Edelstein called my agent with the offer. It made me giggle; the offer had a proviso saying, “Please tell her she is not old enough to play this part. But I want to stage the play with a younger Amanda.” I said yes immediately. The Glass Menagerie takes place in a 1930s tenement apartment in St. Louis. Gordon did a lot of research and read many books about Tennessee Williams, which he passed on to all of us. It was his concept to place The Glass Menagerie in a  run-down hotel room in New Orleans. We have the luxury of knowing a great deal about Tennessee Williams; for example, his real name is Thomas, and that Tom, the narrator, and other elements of the play are autobiographical. He wanted to embrace the concept that Williams was writing about his life. That’s why this production places the setting in his hotel room while he is struggling to write this play, instead of showing us a man who reflects on the past and talks about it to the audience. This Tom is a writer struggling to put together his story.

How does that shift in setting affect your own approach as an actor?

Gordon’s interpretation doesn’t really change my interpretation of Amanda, nor does it impact it emotionally. If we had done the play exactly as written, I would have approached her exactly the way I approached her in this revival. I have wanted to play this part since I was 18 years old. I read it in English class. The teacher — who happened to be my real mother — had everybody read Glass Menagerie out loud. I read the part of Amanda. I thought then that if I do become an actress — I had just started to act when I was 17 — I had to play this role one day. I have thought about how I would portray Amanda longer than I care to confess.

How do you explain the intensity of your feelings? What was it about Amanda that spoke to you?

I love Amanda because of her sense of joy, her devotion to her children, her passion. She’s very passionate about everything. She’s passionate about selling magazines, for example, mostly because they’re going to be the pennies that may make the difference in paying the light bills. There are productions where she’s played as a victim. I don’t see her as a victim at all. If she is a victim, she doesn’t know she’s a victim. There’s a kind of happiness about Amanda I like.

Amanda is frequently seen as the first of a long line of faded Southern belles, a signature character type that was Williams’s stock in trade. Such women were often viewed as fragile, genteel, dependent, alienated, and helpless. As an actress, how do you confront the history of a character coming from such a traditional upbringing?

I don’t think Southern belles have those weak qualities. I’m a Texan, and while there were no Southern belles in Texas there is a Southern society you grow up in. Southern belles take on those qualities in order to get what they want — they’re not real. These are strong, determined women — and passionate. They might use this fragility to make you give them something. They send the double message of “I can’t do it myself. I need it,” but indeed they could get up and do it by themselves. Florence King, a wonderful writer [the author of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen and Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady], has written extensively about what it is like to be a Southern man and a Southern woman; I have gone back to her and read her works, which have been very helpful, because in the end Amanda really is much more about strength than weakness. It’s fortunate that there is a long line of actresses that have played Amanda. I haven’t seen all of them, god knows, but the ones I’ve seen give you the advantage of learning from somebody else’s mistakes — or knowing exactly what you are going to steal from that performance, because it was such a brilliant choice. I am not intimidated by the history of this role — not at all. I see it as to my advantage that other people have gone before me.

Patch Darragh and Judith Ivey in The Glass Menagerie

How have you made the part of Amanda your own?

I keep going back to the joy of it. Amanda is always telling stories. She’s always got a monologue; she’s not a person who speaks in monosyllabic responses. She is poetic. She is funny. She makes jokes. She shows off. She wants to be the center of attention. To create Amanda, I drew from my grandmother and my own mother, Dorothy Lewis Ivey. My mother very much has that flavor of Amanda; she, too, loves to tell stories. I always used to say to her, “Take a breath, mom.” She’ll dazzle you with one long story, if you let her go with it. It’s part of that culture to tell stories, to entertain, and to make you feel comfortable. Part of making you feel comfortable is to never let there be a silence. The wonderful costume designer, Martin Pakledinaz, helped me use a lot of specifics — all the choices we made were influenced by the way my grandmother dressed.

Is Amanda a monster?

No, but she handles things monstrously. I don’t think she’s a monster at all. She is maybe overzealous. I think she lives in a state of fear that she could be out on the streets, without a home, very easily. The lights go out in the play, at one point, and it is not because of the thunderstorms. (Laughs.) Amanda has no perspective. If she had perspective and she behaves the way she behaves in the play, then she would be a monster. But she has none. She lives with that passion, the desire to help, and her will to survive. She cares deeply about her children. I have two children myself, and they are much younger than Laura and Tom at this time. I totally identify with the notion of living in fear that your children won’t be good citizens in the world and that they won’t be able to live without your constant presence. Hopefully, I don’t handle that [parental problem] monstrously; hopefully, I don’t panic. The Glass Menagerie is very complicated. It’s easy to make Amanda a monster, and if you do, you haven’t understood her.

The relationship between Tom and Amanda is well-traveled territory. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the mother-daughter dynamic in The Glass Menagerie.

What is most obvious in the play is that Amanda sees Laura as a failure. The second scene of the play involves Laura dropping out of business school and Amanda discovering it in a terrible and humiliating way. Being Amanda, she absolutely cannot believe Laura is not enrolled, and Amanda insists that the school is at fault. When she discovers that indeed Laura has not been going to classes and that all that money for school has been wasted (money they don’t have), all of Amanda’s dreams and her hopes for the future for some kind of protection dissolve. Laura was never going to be belle of the ball and have 17 gentlemen callers sitting around her on folding chairs. This horrible, horrible need to overcome this problem lifts Amanda up and raises her resolve to give Laura some positive thrust. The gentleman caller is the Second Coming in their lives.

Are there other roles in the Williams canon that you long to portray?

I would love to play Alexandra del Lago, the aging movie star in Sweet Bird of Youth. I would have liked to play Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Big Mama is all that’s left for me now. I have to say that I never understood Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. I think I’m just not crazy enough to tap into her; that one never attracted me. I always wanted to play Amanda — always, always, always. I’d say that I pull The Glass Menagerie down from the shelf three or four times a year and sit and read it.

If Tennessee Williams were alive today and you could ask him a question, what would it be?

Oh, gosh. Tennessee Williams’s directors often kicked him out of rehearsals because he laughed so much and often at odd intervals during actual performances. When I read that, I thought to myself, “This is why I am supposed to play Amanda: because I think she’s hilarious.” So I wish Tennessee could to come to rehearsals so I could ask him, “Where can I find more jokes in The Glass Menagerie?” (Laughs.)

Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, is the author of Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and other plays. He is the 2009 winner of the George Jean Nathan Award, the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States.