70 years ago this month, The Glass Menagerie got its pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago. It opened the day after Christmas in 1944 for a 10-week run at the Civic Theatre. The famously delicate play almost didn’t make it back to New York.
This scene is dramatically painted in the first chapter of John Lahr’s acclaimed new biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. (Watch his interview with Eddie Arruza on Chicago Tonight.)
The company of The Glass Menagerie left by train from New York less than two weeks prior to the Chicago opening. The night before, the novice producer of the show broke down and blabbed that his doubters were right: “They all told me what a silly ass I was to put up all this money. I don’t want to go to Chicago.”
The unproven playwright didn’t want to make the trip either but decided to go, writing “It’s in the lap of the gods.” Tennessee Williams wasn’t sure his fragile, lyrical drama would travel. “It is really a glass menagerie that we are taking on the road and God only knows how much of it will survive the journey.”
After a rehearsal, Williams wrote in his diary, “Well, it looks bad, baby.” He was appalled by leading actress Laurette Taylor's "corny" performance. She thought he was obstinate and “an ungrateful little squirt.”
When leading man Eddie Dowling pushed for rewrites, Tennessee drawled: “I can’t find the tranquility in Chicago to write.” Williams further irritated his cast and producers when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Herald-American complaining of “distortions that have taken place since businessmen and gamblers discovered that theater could be made part of their empire.”
Reviews were strong. Claudia Cassidy of the Chicago Tribune loved the “tough little play.” Other critics also embraced it, but good notices didn’t translate into sales and the show nearly closed.
In March, The Glass Menagerie beat the odds and made it to Broadway. The actress Laurette Taylor was drunk on opening night but somehow kept the audience spellbound with her other-worldly performance. The cast took 24 curtain calls. The audience didn’t want to leave. One actor said, “It was like after a World Series game when they come down out of the stands.” The show would run for 563 performances.
There are many more stories like this in John Lahr’s book, a gift to any student of theater or literature. It’s a generous biography about a tormented genius who lived a big life.
(NOTE: John Lahr was the longtime theater critic at The New Yorker. His father was the actor Bert Lahr, star of stage and screen who played the Cowardly Lion in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz and starred in the U.S. premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Also, John Lahr is married to Connie Booth, who co-wrote and starred in Fawlty Towers with her then-husband John Cleese. It's hard not to digress with a history like that.)
