Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Broadway debut of The Glass Menagerie, a production which would launch Tennessee Williams’ career and set him onto a trajectory wherein any discussion of the greatest American playwright would include his name.
The Harvard Theatre Collection has been acquiring significant holdings related to Williams’ productions since the 1940s, such as the promptbook for A Streetcar Named Desire. The largest acquisition came from Williams himself, who bequeathed his papers to the collection upon his death. These include compositions, journals, correspondence, financial papers and other sources vital for researching the playwright and his work.
The Theatre Collection has continued to acquire material to fill out our holdings, with two recent acquisitions highlighting the complicated textual history of The Glass Menagerie and the relation of the stage version to film.
The first is a 19 page film treatment, titled The Gentleman Caller, undated but certainly written before the debut of the play, and markedly different from it. Everything which is backstory in the staged version is proposed as exposition for the film. The first section focuses on Amanda’s youth, her many gentleman callers, and her courting by the man who would become the absentee father of the play. The second section focuses on the deteriorating family life leading to his departure. The entirety of what would become the stage play is confined to the third section. Perhaps most jarring, Williams includes two pages of alternate endings in order to “carry it further to a lighter and more cheerful conclusion” as desired by film producers. In one ending, the frail Laura becomes a figure of strength. In another, an army of gentleman callers come to court her. He even proposes that Tom the father or Tom the narrator might return to Amanda and Laura in a final scene.
This film treatment was luckily never picked up. But the phenomenal success of the stage version led to a 1950 screen adaptation starring Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence and Arthur Kennedy. The second recent acquisition is the script used for the creation of the Spanish language version of that film. It covers not just the film but the trailer too, and is a fascinating insight into film production.
And so, like Tom to Laura, the Theatre Collection remains faithful to Mr. Williams by steadily acquiring new material. Of course in our case the faithfulness is meant.