The Pretty Trap By Tennessee Williams • A Cause Celebre Production, Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row, NYC • Through August 21, 2011
If he were still alive, Tennessee Williams would be celebrating his hundredth birthday this year.
He is, sadly, no longer with us, but he has done the next best thing: coming up with a "new" play, or, rather, an undiscoved version of of one of his genuine masterpieces, "The Glass Menagerie." The play catapulted him to fame in l944.
The facts attending the new work, The Pretty Trap, are vague, but it appears to have been written in or around 1942. He referred to as "the second act" of a play he was writing, a work he intended to call "The Gentleman Caller."
"The Pretty Trap," clearly an unfinished play, not intended to be thought of as a completed venture, is currently receiving its debut staging at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row, with Katharine Houghton starring as Amanda Wingfield, a role played by her late aunt, Katharine Hepburn.
The characters in "The Pretty Trap" are the same four individuals who appear in "The Glass Menagerie," but their attitudes are different and the tone of the brief play itself is much brighter and more optimistic than anything in the completed play as we know it.
If scholars and other interested parties search around the detritus surrounding any of Williams' plays, particularly the major ones, they are likely to encounter sketches, scenes and even complete brief plays the playwright wrote along the road leading to both his major works and his less significant plays.
The title is a phrase Williams applied to women in general, and certainly provides a solid clue to his attitude toward members of the opposite sex. Overall, Williams' women are more significant creations than most of the men who came to life though his typewriter.
The first really great female portrait Williams ever created, more striking than Maggie in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," more moving than Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire," was Amanda, a character the playwright based on his mother, whom most people knew as "Miss Edwina."
Amanda Wingfield made her first appearance in "The Pretty Trap" two full years before the completed version of "The Glass Menagerie" faced its first audience in Chicago in 1944, with Laurette Taylor giving an immortal performance as the faded southern belle Williams had created.
"The Pretty Trap" was very probably known to the keepers of Williams' archives at the University of Texas at Austin, but it remained largely unknown until Cause Celebre's tireless Artistic Director, Susan Charlotte, found it and sent it to actress Katharine Houghton with a possible production in mind.
In 1967, Houghton had appeared with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's hit film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."
Since then, she has played Laura Wingfield, but director Antony Marsellis' clear-headed production of "The Pretty Trap" is the first occasion on which she has approached the role of Amanda.
The Cause Celebre Amanda harbors no specific dreams of her vanished romantic past. and the Gentleman Caller appears not to have a girlfriend to get in the way of a relationship with Laura, whose brother, Tom, has brought him home for dinner.
"The Pretty Trap" lacks the punch and power of "The Glass Menagerie," but it offers a rare opportunity to observe a major playwright struggling his way toward greatness.
