by William Walls
I know it’s timely to talk of inflation these days, so I’ll point out that one thing that hasn’t gone up much in Mendocino County is the price of seeing live theater.
By live theater, I mean live people, people my size, saying lines to people who don’t listen, who can’t listen, not anymore, hard as they try.
Live theater is not exactly like live life, but it’s close.
In live theater, or after live theater, when the show is over, you can walk out saying to yourself,
“That lady couldn’t help herself. She had to talk right through that son of hers, in order to say how much she wanted to help make him better. She had that intention.
Well, maybe so. Maybe she used those words…
But they fell far short of their mark, I will tell you that.”
Now back to inflation.
For 20 bucks last night and another 20 bucks for my date, I saw “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams in Willits, CA, with a cast that brought out Tennessee’s words to me on a silver platter.
I was maybe fifteen feet away from Kate Magruder as Amanda Wingfield, up there showing how much she cared about her two children. Not listening to them, or seeing them for who they really are, how limited their horizons, but caring about them all the same, all the while.
Amanda Wingfield had apparently been quite a belle down in the delta, before she fell to falling in love with her children’s father, a telephone company man, “who fell in live with long distance.” Anyway, Amanda liked to tell her children about those glory days, days and times she never quite grasped that her children didn’t delight in hearing about six days out of seven.
The play is set in the 1930’s, and America was changing, you see. And any parent will tell you it’s hard not to see and to keep seeing, that which your particular children never got to see even once. And never will.
Poor Amanda. Poor children, Tom and Laura.
The play kind of starts there.
Go see it, if you can. It’s 20 bucks. You might feel as I felt driving home last night: that’s the most I’ve gotten for 20 bucks in I don’t know how long.
The Glass Menageries runs through Sunday, April 28.
