Theatre in Review: The Pretty Trap (Cause Célèbre/Theatre Row)

	Katharine Houghton Photo: Ben Hider

If you ask me, Tennessee Williams is having a pretty lousy centennial. Here he is, 100 years old, and plenty of people think of him as one of the greatest American playwrights -- so where are the major revivals? The seminars? The long profile in Vanity Fair?

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that Williams' masterpieces -- The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof -- have all been done to death in recent years. What's surprising, however, is that nobody seems to have much interest in such second-tier, but highly playable, works as The Rose Tattoo, Summer and Smoke, and The Night of the Iguana Even that putative revival of Sweet Bird of Youth, with Nicole Kidman and James Franco, has gotten awfully quiet lately. And is no one willing to take a second look at more obscure works, such as Orpheus Descending (or its predecessor, Battle of Angels), Period of Adjustment, and Slapstick Tragedy?

Yes, there was The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with Olympia Dukakis, earlier this year, but we'll draw a veil over that. And Austin Pendleton took a flyer on Small Craft Warnings Off Off Broadway, but it was essentially a no-budget staged reading of a piece that, production-wise, needs all the love it can get. If there is an afterlife for playwrights, poor Tennessee must be spitting with jealousy at the way his co-centenarian, Terrence Rattigan, is being celebrated in the UK, with starry revivals, newspaper tributes, etc.

It is, therefore, all the more pleasant that the people at Cause Célèbre have chosen to revive The Pretty Trap. An obscure title even to most Williams fans, it's an alternate one-act version of The Glass Menagerie. According to the Williams scholar Brian Parker, it was written more or less simultaneously with The Glass Menagerie, to allow the author to experiment with a different, and much happier, ending. (As is the case with all of Williams' plays, there are extant many drafts of The Glass Menagerie, which began life as a brief short story called "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and gradually became a play originally titled The Gentleman Caller; Williams apparently worked on it as a screenplay as well, which is one reason he toyed with a lighter approach.) Most of the author's plays exist in multiple drafts, but, according to Parker, this is especially true of Menagerie, evidence that he struggled to make his nakedly autobiographical material work.

To anyone familiar with The Glass Menagerie, much of The Pretty Trap will seem familiar. All three members of the Wingfield family are here: Amanda, the faded belle, who nags and cajoles her children to be sparkling, go-getting personalities; Laura, her painfully shy daughter; and Tom, her son, who aspires to be a poet. Much of the dialogue will ring a bell, including the characterization of the family's long-gone father as "that telephone man who fell in love with long distances." The brief, 50-minute piece focuses on the dinner arranged by Amanda, as happens in Act II of The Glass Menagerie, to match up Laura with Jim, Tom's co-worker in a shoe warehouse. But just as much of The Pretty Trap is very different. Amanda details the many jobs she has taken to keep the family together, including toiling "in bargain basements" and taking in sewing and cooking. Amanda isn't clubfooted, and there's a certain amount of steel in her spine; at one point, she exasperatedly informs her mother, "You look like a witch." Jim, the gentleman caller, isn't one of Laura's high school classmates; he's from Wyoming, and he's not engaged to a long-term girlfriend. And Tom, the role based on Williams, is so underwritten, he barely exists; the author leaves him on the sidelines, making the occasional feeble wisecrack.

Mostly importantly, the family in The Pretty Trap isn't riven with internal tensions, and, incredibly, the action ends on a distinctly hopeful note that suggests that Laura has a very nice future to look forward to.

As a brief dramatic sketch whose main interest is its relationship to another, far greater work, The Pretty Trap isn't really for the average theatergoer. But for scholars, lovers of theatre history, and Williams fans, it's an unmissable opportunity to get a sense of the young author at work. And, in Katharine Houghton, it offers an actress who would make a fine Amanda Wingfield in a revival of The Glass Menagerie.

Small of stature, but big of presence, Houghton is every inch the aging coquette of Williams' imagination, coasting on charm and her repertoire of honey-dipped conversational conceits This is a more relaxed, amused portrait of Amanda, and Houghton makes the most of if, turning a compliment to her daughter ("Laura, you are almost as pretty as I used to be"), into a startling bit of self-congratulation, dispensing thoroughly useless bits of advice ("Vivacity counts for so much"), and envisioning dire futures for her children if they don't heed her warnings. "I'm not only the practical member of the family, I'm the romantic one, too," she announces as she sets about the business of arranging Laura and Tom's lives. I was particularly taken with Houghton's laugh -- a little three-note caw of triumph -- that she employs whenever Amanda has made what she feel is an unassailable point.

If the rest of the cast in Antony Marsellis' production isn't on Houghton's level, they work honestly and well. Nisi Sturgis and Robert Eli deal adeptly with the rather different conceptions of Laura and the Gentleman Caller; Sturgis in particular manages to convey Laura's shyness while hinting at hidden reserves of strength. If Loren Dunn makes less of an impression as Tom, it's largely because the role is so thinly conceived that he has little or nothing to play.

Ray Klausen's set, depicting the living and dining rooms of the Wingfield apartment, looks like an old photograph, its colors faded to sepia. Every detail -- the lace tablecloth and curtains, the ancient Victrola, the flowered wallpaper --is suggestive of gentility retained only by sheer force of will in otherwise sordid circumstances. Bernie Dove's lighting sadly lacks nuance, although his sound effects are nicely done. David Toser's costumes -- including Amanda's out-of-date evening gown and the men's suits -- feel accurate to the characters and their circumstances.

"All pretty girls are traps, pretty traps, and men expect it," says Amanda, and it's a pleasure to hear such lines from Williams, that master of dialogue. The Pretty Trap isn't really a major event -- it's nothing more than a gloss on a masterpiece, though if you've seen The Glass Menagerie, the ending is pretty jarring --- but, if you have a deep interest in Williams, it has many fascinations to offer.--David Barbour