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Exploring the differences between theater and film

A summary and transcript of the panel

"Tennessee Williams on Stage and Screen: ‘The Glass Menagerie,’" the final academic symposium during inauguration week, featured a screening of the 1950 film adaptation of the play "The Glass Menagerie" and a panel discussion with film and theater scholars (see transcript below).

The panelists included: John Orlock, who holds the prestigious Virginia C. and Samuel B. Knight Chair in Humanities at Case Western Reserve University where he served as head of the Theater Department for 10 years; Joseph Gomez, English professor and co-director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University; and Raymond Munro, visual and performing arts professor and director of the Theater Arts Program at Clark. Michael Spingler, a professor in Clark’s Foreign Languages and Literatures Department, moderated the panel.

The panelists discussed Williams’ masterful use of metaphor to help the audience transcend reality and experience an essential truth about life, as well as the many pitfalls of adapting theater to film. All four agreed that the film of "The Glass Menagerie" fell far short of Williams’ vision for the play. Gomez, like his fellow panelists, blamed the film’s shortcomings on director Irving Rapper’s literal interpretation of the play.

"I think that there’d have to be a kind of use of the camera that suggests breaking down conventional shots associated with the viewing of that period. Can it be done? Yes, I think it can. Did Irving Rapper do it? I don’t think in any way, shape or form," Gomez said.

"Tennessee Williams on Stage and Screen: 'The Glass Menagerie'"

Wednesday • March 28, 2001 • Jefferson Academic Center

Spingler: I’d like to pick up with a topic of discussion that Mr. Gomez introduced when he introduced the film, and that is three discreet experiences of the work. First the reading of the script. And that can be subdivided into first reading by general readers but also readings by actors, readings by directors, designers, with a view toward production. Then the other experience is the one that we’ve all had together this afternoon, which is seeing the script translated to the screen. And, of course, there is the one of seeing the play produced on stage.

I want to just bring up a couple of things about this to focus the discussion even more and talk about Williams’ idea for the play. He called it a memory play, which suggests for him a departure from realism. And I want to talk just directly from Williams himself because I think that would be better. He says, and this is in his production notes, he says, "A straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art, that truth, life or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest in essence only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance." And that kind of makes photography share the burden for the sins, whatever they may be, of realism. And photography and film are connected. Films were called photoplays and of course they were called moving pictures.

My first question is, how does film respond to Williams’ call for what he calls "a new plastic theater," which must take the place of the exhausted theater, or realistic theater? My second question will be, how in production on the stage can one achieve the poetic nonrealistic representation that Williams appears to be calling for? And I guess behind this is, in what medium will "Menagerie" work better, on the stage or on the screen?

So, I’d like to start first with Joe Gomez, and then to John Orlock, and afterward Ray Munro.

Joe Gomez: I do think that part of what Williams is talking about can be achieved in the medium of film. I don’t think that we saw it, and I don’t think that he saw it either. He talks about the ending. Maybe we can focus there for just a bit because he had, as I suggested to you before, some responsibility for that. And "The Glass Menagerie" grew out of a number of metamorphoses really: a short story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," a play script that was going to be a one-act play, and a manuscript for a three-act play, and then a screenplay.

He was working at this time at MGM trying to write a dialogue for Lana Turner and Margaret O’Brien…It was at that time that he wrote this screenplay and treatment for something called "The Gentleman Caller," and he wrestled with a lot of different endings. And in one of those endings, Laura tells Tom that she’s not disappointed with Jim and she’ll be O.K. with Tom’s departure. In another version, his mother tells him it’s all O.K., you can leave, and Tom goes. I bring this up because over the years Williams has talked about the endings of film versions of his plays and attacked them almost always, often saying censorship.

But, before he got on that, he talked about this particular film and he talked about the director, Irving Rapper. And he said the problem was that Rapper couldn’t capture the poetry of the play. And I think that what he’s talking about in terms of American theater–and my colleagues can address that–also, in a way, comes around to what’s going on in classical Hollywood cinema at this period. And, by and large, there’s a kind of realism, there’s a kind of attitude toward narrative that’s privileged. And it seems to me that if Rapper is going to capture in some way the poetry that Williams is talking about, he’s got to break away from the narrative, and that’s part of what this film ceases to do.

Those of you who know something about the play itself and the way in which the play was set up…Williams actually wrote in a kind of blank verse, I think trying to find a way of getting to this poetry. Some of the speeches are fairly long. But this film acts as if the screenwriter has been told…to make it realistic. Because you’ve got a director who said, "I will shoot everything that’s in the screenplay, I don’t change things." It’s a very prosaic approach. And if you look at some of just the dialogue of "Yes, mother. Yes, mother," there’s repetition so that it becomes even more realistic in terms of the dialogue. I think that there’d have to be a kind of use of the camera that suggests breaking down conventional shots associated with the viewing of that period. Can it be done? Yes, I think it can. Did Irving Rapper do it? I don’t think in any way, shape or form. And we can come back and talk about the way in which the film gets structured, which undercuts the poetry even more. But, let me turn things over to John.

John Orlock: I haven’t seen this film for a long time, and I had forgotten a lot of what was there. What I forgot, just as a sidebar, was what star quality Kirk Douglas has. I mean he comes onto that screen and–wow. And, as an actor, too. It is not just a charisma. I mean, he knows that character. There is something very familiar about it to him, and he just throws it off in a very easy, relaxed, and compelling way. I was searching, as I was watching him, how much of a jump was it from this to Spartacus?…A very different gentleman caller.

But getting back to the Williams piece–Joe had said in his opening remarks…there is poetry here and Williams is a man of theater. What we saw today was the film of ["The Glass Menagerie"]. But the play ["The Glass Menagerie"]–part of what theater does, as you all know, we are in the same room as Amanda. We are in the same room as the gentleman caller. We are there with them, we are watching them sweat. We are there in the moment as this stuff is going on, and very close to something that is ritualistic. We are coming at it from a very different kind of experience here [on film]. We are watching it, we are the observer. But, when we are in the dark in that room with those people, we are participating in a very different way. And Williams is a master at this.

In this ["The Glass Menagerie"] he is especially. It’s an early play, but already you see how this man manipulates the medium. It is not by accident that you have those candles come into that act, and you have a room lit by candles–wonderfully dramatic. And fire is alive also in a very different way. I mean, flame on stage is not the same flame here [on screen], and he knows that, and he knows the magic of that, and he brings that quality…He is a master of using the metaphor that is real, it is substantial. There are people who have those glass collections, but this is this person with this collection, and the metaphor, and Laura’s limp–I mean, all of those things are real. They are photographically real. But Williams takes them and he asks us to come into the context where we are going to transcend them, and they become metaphors for what he’s writing about. So that, in that sense, the poetry is maintained. But I would agree with Joe, that the director certainly did his best to have all of that flattened out and to make it too vapid…out of the poetic and into the literal.

Ray Munro: Well, to try and answer Michael’s questions, my remarks will only make sense if you will at least entertain the possibility that there is a difference between someone smiling and someone widening their oral aperture. Because I believe that it’s somewhere between the smile and the widened oral aperture that divides theater and film.

Truth, life and reality is an organic thing which the poetical imagination can represent or suggest in essence only through transformation, is what Michael read and what Williams wrote. But can we experience that organic thing? I might, if it’s possible not to experience that state or process or thing–and I say state or process because to transform, it must be more than just a thing. So, is it possible not to experience this process if we face the fact that we do not know with complete certainty what is going to happen in the next moment? Anything could happen, in your thinking life, your feeling life, even your physical being. The roof could crash in from a falling mirror or something…We don’t think about it much. In fact, much of what we think about is a way to avoid thinking about it, but it is the truth of our every unacknowledged moment.

In the acting process–and in the theater, it is all acting…playwriting is acting, directing is acting, the actor is acting. The acting is a process of remembering and forgetting. First, remembering–remembering your call, your costumes, your props, your blocking, your cues. Remembering your lines, remembering what’s behind each line, remembering what’s behind each thought. Then the process of forgetting–forgetting you are an actor, that you have a call, blocking and cues. Forgetting that your clothes are a costume, your belongings are props. Forgetting that you have lines, that you’ve thought and brooded over them and what is behind them. Forgetting what happens later in the third act. Forgetting what happens in the next moment. The actor is just there with nothing, nothing, no thing. But in that moment, which is called the performance moment, if the actor is brave enough to forget everything, to stand there naked, you have to watch him. You cannot not watch him. What is it that makes you watch one actor over another? We say that the actor has presence. Presence, to be present, to face the next moment with nothing, just like everyone out in the audience.

In our normal consciousness, we are only aware of thought after we’d had it. This means that our normal consciousness is a past consciousness…Past consciousness, over–over and done with, dead–dead in the sense that there is only that one possibility from the past. When actors are truly in the performance moment, in which there is a living thinking…they are improvising the lines they memorized two months before. They are up there, on stage, with all the potential of the future. Anything can happen because they are truly living up there. And because they are, so can we. Only the theater can do this.

But how often does the theater deliver this? Most of the time, true communion between actor and actor, and actor and audience, is squandered in the safe, the known and the technique-laden exchange. But we know from our own example that the only time we know anything with complete certainty is when we are dead. And that’s how we have to categorize these performances. Dead.

In the Vedic tradition, there is something called Satsang, I believe. Sitting with a guru. Anyway, the idea is just being in the teacher’s presence raises you up to a higher level of understanding, of being. I think this might be a metaphor for what happens every time we truly talk to each other. We enter into a shared space of communication or communion, where we think about different things certainly, but even think differently. A lot of times, we like other people because of how we are with them. It makes you feel good to be around certain people. And as good, and as rich, and as realized as Kirk Douglas’ performance is, it still is a recording of what in his living presence was much more. When the theater, through laziness or fear, gives up that moment-by-moment living, improvisatory thinking and acting, to the already thought and known, film beats it by a thousand yards. Film has movement, movement to other characters, other places and different times. The only place and time it can’t be is here and now. Only the theater can and only when in that performance moment, where we can move to that wordless word beyond all words…where, through our poetic imagination, we can touch truth, life, reality.

Spingler: O.K., thank you…I think we might have a second round for our speakers and then maybe entertain some questions from the audience. The speakers can respond to Ray’s remarks, which were really a poetic vision of acting. I was struck particularly by what Ray had said that if the acting on stage is dead then film beats it by a thousand yards. I was interested in John bringing up the problem of lighting, and Williams talks about lighting, and thought that we might want to get back to that. And what Joe promised us was that he would talk a little bit about how the film might have realized Williams’ vision for a poetic realism…John I guess, shall we talk a little bit perhaps about how theater realizes the vision? You did mention lighting…