Director  Eddie Dowling had cast himself, at age 49, as the twenty-something would-be poet Tom Wingfield, and 60-year-old fading stage legend Laurette Taylor was stumbling through the role of Amanda Wingfield in an alcoholic stupor, so broadly defining the character and her accent that she made the play sound like, according to Williams, “The Aunt Jemima Pancake Hour.”  But on opening night, December 26, something magical happened.  Somehow, all the necessary elements came together and American Stage History was made.    

The show’s producers, unmindful of the magic and unable to see beyond the play’s anemic box office receipts, prepared a closing notice.  Two Chicago critics took note, however, and gave the play breathlessly glowing reviews and amazingly, returned almost nightly, monitoring the production’s progress and championing it daily in their respective newspapers.  Claudia Cassidy wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune,  

“It gripped players and audiences alike, and created one of those evenings in the theatre that make ‘stagestruck’ an honorable word.” 

The play subsequently opened on Broadway with such great success that on opening night the roaring crowd brought the cast back out onstage for an astonishing 25 curtain calls, and Tennessee Williams’ “memory play” about himself, his overbearing mother and his socially challenged sister, became a classic of American theater.  Claudia Cassidy further noted that the play  

“knows people and how they tick ....  If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out ... and you are caught in its spell.”  

In his production notes for the first published edition of The Glass Menagerie, Williams wrote that he hoped his work would anticipate “a new plastic theater” to replace “the exhausted theater of realistic conventions.” Director Caldwell promises that the Hippodrome production will honor Mr. Williams intent through James Morgan’s expressionistic scenic design and Robert P. Robins’ mood-enhancing lighting effects.   

The story of The Glass Menagerie intensely autobiographical.  The play’s narrator, Tom (Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams), steps in and out of the action of the play describing his memories of his family living in St. Louis, where Tennessee and his family had lived not many years before.  The characters include Amanda Wingfield, the energetic and manipulative southern belle matron, a dramatic portrait of Williams’ own mother, Edwina.  Tom’s sister Laura, physically impaired and terminally shy is at the heart of the story, and is a representation of Tennessee’s  beloved sister Rose, whom the family had lobotomized in an ill-fated attempt to cure her psychological problems.  Even the character of the gentleman caller Jim O’Connor, in whom Amanda Wingfield puts all her hopes for Laura’s happiness, existed in real life, according to Williams’ brother, Dakin.    

Ms. Caldwell has assembled a talented cast to undertake the daunting acting duties of the play, including performers familiar to Hippodrome audiences.  David Hopkins (Jim O’Connor) has appeared on the Hippodrome stage in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Indiscretions, A Christmas Carol and Three Tall Women.  Joy Schiebel (Laura) was recently seen in Three Tall Women and Dracula.  You may have seen Peter Giles (Tom) in Dracula, as he took over the role of Dr. Seward during the final week of the play’s run.  Hippodrome stalwart Sara Morsey (Amanda), of Three Tall Women, An Enchanted Land and The Lion in Winter, to name but a few, rounds out the accomplished cast.   

Playwright Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams contemporary and colleague, years after the play’s premiere said, 

“It is usually forgotten what a revolution his first great success meant to the New York theatre. ... In him  the American theater found, for perhaps the first time, an eloquence and an amplitude of feeling ... he wanted not to approve or disapprove but to touch the germ of life and to celebrate it with verbal beauty.”