Back in the mid 1980s, when Andrew McCarthy was cutting his teeth on such teen-cult films as Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, Elizabeth Ashley was already a belle of Tennessee — Williams, that is. Ashley had not only burned up the stage, she’d also befriended the playwright in 1974, when she starred as Maggie the Cat in a landmark American Shakespeare Theatre revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As for McCarthy, he had no idea his early films “would haunt me for the rest of my life.” Now the two actors, one a Williams virgin, the other a vet, are sharing the stage in the exquisite Hartford Stage mounting of The Glass Menagerie that the American Repertory Theatre brings to town June 19 through July 11.

According to the inimitably rasping Ashley, “I got to know Tennessee a thousand years ago, maybe a million, when I was young.” Ashley, the one-time Carpetbaggers sexpot, is now 61. “That was the time in Tennessee’s career when they were after him like sharks in a feeding frenzy — if they mentioned him at all. We became friends. And Tennessee, in my mother’s presence, extracted this promise from me that, whatever else I did before I died, there were four of his plays that I would do. One was The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore; another was The Red Devil Battery Sign; the others were Sweet Bird of Youth and The Glass Menagerie.” With her husky, lusty, lyrical, and even humorous portrayal of that ante-bellum bulldozer of Blue Mountain, Amanda Wingfield, the actress, who had already done the other three plays, is off the hook.

Williams, of course, based the inescapable Southern mom of his 1945 “memory play” on his own. The Baton Rouge–bred Ashley did the same. “Tennessee was crazy about my mother, who was this really interesting and remarkable Southern woman, way before her time, who everybody called ‘Miss Lucille.’ Tennessee would spend an enormous amount of time with her, and then he’d come to me and say, ‘She’s just Amanda Wingfield, she’s Amanda Wingfield!’ And when I would think about this play, especially after my mother died, I would think, ‘God, yes, she was Amanda Wingfield in so many ways.’

“So that’s where I went to find my Amanda. My mother had been an adolescent during the Depression. She got the first divorce ever gotten in this old, old Southern family and got a job as a typist to support her and me. And that’s before those things were done. Yet she kept all those Old World Southern Victorian values at the same time. So there’s this woman who was born and bred to be fragile and decorative and charming, and then it’s like a terrible war hits her life. We sort of like to cast our parents in our minds, but when you have to go back and really uncover and explore and investigate what happened to them, very subjectively, it’s a gutsier deal than you counted on.”

For his part, McCarthy, having left the theater division of New York University’s Tisch School at 19 to be burned in the crucible of St. Elmo’s Fire, found himself drawn back to the stage. In particular, he wanted to play Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie before he got “too old” (he’s now 38). When he learned, several seasons back, that Hartford Stage had scheduled the O’Neill play, he auditioned and got the part, which he played opposite Ellen Burstyn’s Mary Tyrone. The production was directed by Hartford Stage artistic director (and Williams fanatic) Michael Wilson, who is also at the helm of this tender, perceptive, acerb Glass Menagerie.

Observes Ashley, “This is a play that everybody has to read in school and, right there, anything you have to do in school sort of takes the blush off the rose of what it actually is. Often the play seems to be presented as kind of a solemn brown valentine. And it really isn’t. It’s quite ferocious and quite funny and terribly sad.” It was the funny part that surprised McCarthy. “That was so interesting. We never talked about it in rehearsal. So when it sort of emerged, we were shocked — and delighted.”

One of the things the cast (a fine quartet rounded out by Anne Dudek and Willis Sparks) did discuss in rehearsal was the playwright’s sexuality, which was doubtless more under wraps in 1930s St. Louis than it was in later life. And McCarthy’s Tom, albeit worldly and pent-up, is very delicate. “I think it’s in the stew,” the actor says. “We know so much more about Tennessee Williams now than when the play was first done. And his sexuality is sort of like the pink elephant in the room; they’re avoiding talking about it.”

The Glass Menagerie is at the Loeb Drama Center June 19 through July 11. Tickets are $20 to $45; call (617) 547-8300.

Issue Date: June 7-14, 2001