The Tennessee Williams Annual Review

 

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Here without Me: The Cross-Cultural Adaptation of The Glass Menagerie in Iranian Cinema

Naghmeh Rezaie

Tennessee Williams in cinema has by and large meant Tennessee Williams in United States cinema. The golden age of Williams adaptations in Hollywood is associated with legendary names including Elia Kazan, John Huston, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Katharine Hepburn, Anna Magnani, and Elizabeth Taylor. Kazan’s 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire and Richard Brooks’s 1958 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are perceived as classic and definitive adaptations of Williams’s plays, and a few other films, such as Sidney Lumet’s 1960 The Fugitive Kind and Huston’s 1964 The Night of the Iguana,are considered significant, even if not definitive, adaptations. Although Hollywood’s initial fascination with Williams was followed by a swift decline in interest, his theater’s thematic and stylistic appeal for US producers persists, if subtly.¹

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This essentially American profile—aptly described by R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray’s volume title Hollywood’s Tennessee—and the tendency to approach Williams as a US playwright whose works carry a heavy load of southern United States elements have left undervalued the multivocal echoes of his theater and confined the plays to geographical, cultural, and national interpretations. But as Bray emphasizes, “the venerable tradition of dramatizing family strife is by no means uniquely American” (ix). The twenty-first-century adaptations of The Glass Menagerie in India (Akale [2004], directed by Shyamaprasad) and Iran (Here without Me [2011], directed by Bahram Tavakoli),followed by the Iranian adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (The Stranger[2014], also directed by Tavakoli), demonstrate South Asia’s and the Middle East’s growing interest in adapting Williams for the screen. The Iranian film adaptations of two Williams plays in the span of a few years—and the critical and commercial success of the first in particular—suggest that for Iranian audiences, and one director at least, this US playwright’s work provides inviting ground for crossing the historico-political barriers between the two countries and engaging in cultural dialogue.

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Iranian cinema has frequently been theorized as a significant carrier of modernity in Iran’s history of clashes between the forces of tradition and change. Bahram Tavakoli’s adaptation of The Glass Menagerie expands the play’s tensions between past, present, and future to encompass Iranian cultural tensions between the pressures of tradition and modernity. In both versions, the characters find it impossible to take refuge on any one side and must strive instead to hold an intermediary ground. Comparison of the Iranian film with the play and its US film adaptations reveals that Here without Me takes The Glass Menagerie from stylistic plasticity into cultural plasticity, enabling the play to cross not only the generic boundaries between cinema and theater but also the national and sociocultural boundaries between a twentieth-century southern American family and a twenty-first-century Iranian family. This essay will argue that Here without Me draws on The Glass Menagerie’s formalist interplay—which shoves the characters into and outside the overlapping territories of illusion and reality—to thematically explore the push and pull of the private and public spheres in a Middle Eastern society stretched between tradition and modernity. In this adaptation, the formal hybridity of Williams’s work—his plastic theater, in which “the screenplay-turned-stage-script shows a number of elements more familiar, and perhaps more suited, to the cinema than to the theater” is key (Smith-Howard and Heintzelman 89).

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The Glass Menagerie is a hybrid text with both cinematic and dramatic intentions. Bray, in his 2009 introduction to the play, describes Williams as a “habitué of the movies since his childhood [who] was now experimenting with a more fluid dramatic structure that would to some extent emulate the cinematic technique of mise en scène” (viii). The playwright’s interest in cinema is reflected in Tom’s fondness for going to movie theaters to experience the adventure of life until finding himself tired of the movies and “about to move” (Williams 201). The storyline of the play went through two phases of text-to-text adaptation, or rewriting, even before entering text-to-screen adaptation. It was first written as a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, which itself originated in one of Williams’s earlier short stories, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.”A significant cinematic element in the play is the screen between the two rooms on which pictures and videos are projected, an uncommon theatrical device in Williams’s era although common in twenty-first-century performances. The screen was omitted in the first “acting version of the play,” as Williams observes in his production notes, but the playwright goes on to say that he decided to include it in the published manuscript to keep the idea recorded for future performances or adaptations (132). Palmer and Bray confirm that Williams had written the play with “both stage and screen production in mind,” and the screen device “shows how in his mind the boundary between the artistic forms of theater and film occasionally became productively blurred” (17). Although The Glass Menagerie is known to be a dramatic play written with plastic potential for being adapted to the cinema, its cinematic pre-engagement did not seem to have any significant impact on the films directed by Irving Rapper or Paul Newman, who either overlooked the play’s cinematic elements or did not find them of interest.

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In Rapper’s and Newman’s films, The Glass Menagerie’s cinematic theater turns into theatrical cinema, or filmed theater, rather than a radically cinematized adaptation. Rapper’s version is a noir film with exterior scenes that do not entirely break the spatial confinements of a stage play. The exterior scenes of Tom’s workplace, Laura’s typing class, and the club Laura goes to with Jim, all added in the screenplay, imply a limited theatrical space despite their cinematic gestures. (To be fair, Williams’s involvement in the adaptation process and his demand for fidelity may have played a role in the director’s choices.) The film does incorporate the play’s spatial plasticity in an enhanced game of shadow and light, which recasts the thematic core of Williams’s work through black and white images. Williams’s screen device is replaced by the walls and the interior angles of the apartment, where the candlelit night is used to its utmost visual potential to project the dark inner sides of the characters. Newman’s version foregoes any exterior scenes, simply transferring the stage limitation of space to the screen. The only distance exists in time, between past and present, rather than space, perhaps embodying Tom’s musing in his final monologue that “time is the longest distance between two places” (236). The narrator in the present and the narrative of the past coexist in one building, and lighting techniques are used in an expressionistic manner to mark the temporal distance that exists at the location. The walls and the windows project light, shadows, and colors throughout the narrator’s monotonic speech. The director’s approaches to visualizing the distance of time have not been completely successful with critics. Although the flashbacks are visually attractive, as when Tom plays with a magic handkerchief around Laura’s head, the interference of sudden zooms and rough shots are intrusive, as if the director were trying to recreate the artistic plasticity of Williams’s play without having a plan for it. Unsurprisingly, critics have called this version “a good picture but not a great one” (Quirk 287).

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The Glass Menagerie is a play of spatial specificity: characters struggle within and against the home and its various confinements. The play also uses space to complicate the conflicts between societal restrictions, family pressures, and individual desires. The constant clash between public and domestic spheres gets a new spin from the film’s association of the outer world with reality and the inner domains with illusion. Richard E. Kramer, who identifies the painter Hans Hofmann as having introduced Williams to the idea of plastic art, asserts that for both Williams and Hofmann “space is not inert but alive, and that unoccupied space is not just empty but as significant to the work as the occupied space” (par. 6). One might read the social and cultural roles played by family members as occupied spaces between which the empty spaces of inner desires and unfulfilled dreams exhibit an equally significant and determining presence. It is no surprise that such a configuration speaks to a Middle Eastern culture that has struggled for the past century with the conflicting pulls of modernity and tradition, private and public spheres, individual aspirations and family restrictions.

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In the opening lines of his introductory notes on The Glass Menagerie Williams not only emphasizes the adaptability and flexibility of plastic theater but also alludes to its evasiveness: “Being a ‘memory play,’ The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention” (131). Tom Wingfield narrates the play while standing on the fire escape of the home where he used to live with his mother, Amanda, and his crippled sister, Laura. He can enter the narrative by entering the flat and be engaged in his own memories once more throughout the play. He introduces himself as the “narrator” of a “memory play” and also as a character in it (145). He introduces all the other characters in the play the way a playwright does in the written script. The metafictional frame holds the audience, or the reader, in a suspension of illusions and realities. Tom Wingfield, in his double role as an observed character and an observing narrator, backed up by his reference to magic players at the beginning of the narrative, speaks through the fluidity of space and time in The Glass Menagerie, as the walls between present and past, personal memories and public awareness, fiction and facts are systematically broken down throughout the play.

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In all three cinematic versions of The Glass Menagerie (the US films of 1950 and 1987 and the 2011 Iranian film) a narrator stands between the audience and the story, resulting in various degrees of reality and illusion. InRapper’s 1950 version the audience first sees Tom as a ferryboat sailor who remembers his past in his lonesome hours of personal reflection. His voice-over narration of flashbacks does not get beyond the conventional frames of other voice-over narrations in Hollywood films. There is no ambiguity surrounding Tom’s narrative, as the memories are presented through flashbacks, which are clearly nested in the past and do not meddle with the present. Shots of the sea open and close the film, bracketing Tom’s flashback narrative with images from his present. Tom as narrator has been reduced to a kind of medium who performs the act of remembering without getting involved in the fluidity or dark side of memory. One wonders if the metafictional frame in Rapper’s film exists only because Williams participated in this adaptation and generally fought for fidelity to his text (though not always successfully).²

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Paul Newman, in his 1987 adaptation, offers a different cinematic approach to the narrative plasticity, though its success is arguable. The opening credits show Tom entering the ruins of his former home, where his narration begins with nostalgia. His recollections are periodically interrupted by fade-ins that separate the narration from the flashback sequences, interjecting the flashbacks into the present. Fade-ins undercut the rhythm of the film and do not carry any significant cinematic cachet beyond fidelity to the source text. Tom’s attendance in the deserted home implies that Amanda and Laura have already left, an implication that seems inconsistent with their fixed personalities and their inability to move, unless they have died. This interpretation diminishes the blow of Tom’s leaving them for good in the play. Newman’s version heavily relies on Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt—or alienation effect—to project a memory play that focuses on crossing boundaries between present and past, illusions and reality. The narrator, John Malkovich, speaks directly to the camera, but it is not clear who is supposed to be listening, the audience or Laura. According to Alycia Smith-Howard and Greta Heintzelman, the rhetorical devices of the play “constitute a sometimes disjointed sequence of tableaux (or scenes) rather than the more conventional three-act structure” (88–89). Although Newman has attempted to recreate the “sequence of tableaux” through disjointed sequences and Brechtian internarrations, the result does not easily justify the innovation. Malkovich’s direct speeches to the camera are delivered in a pretentious manner, as if the actor himself is experiencing the Brechtian alienation effect and cannot relate to his role. In Newman’s adaptation, cinema once again takes less advantage than it might of the cinematic potential of Williams’s plastic theater.

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Decades later, Tavakoli’s Iranian adaptation, Here without Me, drew attention to itself in several international film festivals even though its combination of estrangement and familiarity did not decisively reshape international academic discourse on Williams. Tavakoli’s adaptation diverges from the earlier films by discarding the spatial limitations of the stage play and recreating the drama’s plasticity inside the narrator’s mind.The film depicts the isolated life of a three-member family struggling with the tensions of social and family relations (fig. 1). (For the purposes of this essay, images are rendered in black and white; the original film is in color.)

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Ehsan, the narrator in the film (played by Saber Abar), works in a warehouse, where he chafes against his confinements and dreams of illegally leaving the country and becoming a writer. He drafts stories at work and spends a great deal of time watching and rewatching films at movie theaters and at home, to escape the pressure of the family responsibilities laid on his shoulders in the absence of a father. Through his friendship with the inspiring but more realistic Reza, Ehsan’s pipe dreams are constantly challenged. When Ehsan’s mother learns that Yalda, Ehsan’s sister, has a crush on Reza without ever having spoken with him, she asks her son to invite his friend over for dinner. Yalda’s only knowledge of Reza is a conversation she overheard in which he and Ehsan discussed literature and life in Ehsan’s room. She has kept the cassette recording Reza and Ehsan made of their conversation, and she listens over and over to Reza’s voice singing a traditional song.

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Yalda is an oversensitive young woman suffering partial paralysis. She is obsessed with her glass menagerie and rarely steps outside her home. Farideh, the mother—a working woman grappling not only with home challenges but also with the possibility of getting laid off—is charming and energetic. She struggles to provide her family with financial and spiritual support, though she is not completely successful, and the future she dreams of for her children seems impossible in their social context. She strongly opposes Ehsan’s interest in cinema and tries to keep him on the road of realities. Like many women of her generation—in Iran and throughout the world—she keeps the kitchen warm and dreams of her only daughter’s wedding, ignoring her own failure in marriage and her daughter’s intrusive disability (fig. 2). Despite financial problems, she is ambitious enough to buy a new sofa and cook a rich traditional dinner in order to create an appropriate setting for the supposed gentleman caller.

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To both Farideh’s and Ehsan’s surprise, Reza initiates a positive connection with Yalda on his second visit. However, after he shows his fiancée’s picture to Yalda, Yalda goes through a serious phase of isolation ending in a nervous breakdown, and tensions between mother and Ehsan reach a climax. Leaving his family behind, Ehsan gets on a bus to escape and set himself free from all domestic bonds. On the bus, he creates his first true story through reimagining and re-narrating the narration he has just left behind.

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The scholar and cultural studies critic Hamid Naficy describes Iran as a “multiethnic, multilingual, tribally based country [. . .] whose politics in the twentieth century underwent vast upheavals with national and international repercussions” (9) and Iranian cinema as one with “subnational, national, transnational, and international” resonances engaged in “a synchronic dialogue with peoples, cultures, and cinemas of the world [to] simultaneously constitute [. . .] an Iranian cinema and a cinema of the other” (25).The medium of cinema has challenged many conventions in Iran by being “both a component and an expression of modernity” (8). In adapting Williams, Iranian cinema steps into a double-mirroring condition with its American counterpart. The border-crossing journey of The Glass Menagerie to Iranian screens, decades after its first translation into Persian (in 1958 by Mehdi Forough), revitalizes a mid-twentieth-century American play that once stepped beyond the bounds of traditional family dramas of its own time. Ehsan re-projects Tom’s late-Depression, early–World War II–era frustration with social, personal, and family confinements as the frustration of early-twenty-first-century Iranian youth in post-revolutionary and postwar Tehran—a metropolitan capital city rife with the paradoxes of a century-long transition from tradition to modernity and from totalitarianism to democracy. Ehsan’s dream of leaving the bonds of both home and homeland points to the inextricability of the two: the interdependence makes for a family crushed between past and future in a society swinging between tradition and modernity, social barriers and individual desires. The exterior scenes of the film underline the role played by outside society on members of a single family inside their home. The scenes that depict Farideh struggling with and against her job (fig. 3) and the scene in which Ehsan stares through a café window at a street fight outside show some of the ways a tormented society is shaping the characters’ attachments and detachments as citizens and family members. Although the focal point of the family drama is inside the house, the area of concern—like the idea of home—is not limited to the house’s structural boundaries.

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The film begins on the bus on which Ehsan is escaping from his hometown and home life. A medium close-up shows him with closed eyes. He opens them at the same time a first-person voice-over narration begins. Close-ups and low-angle shots frame a slightly delirious Ehsan attempting to open the window to inhale fresh air. The voice-over continues as the opening shots dissolve into a view of the aisles of the warehouse where he once—or perhaps still—works:

Since I got on this bus, I’ve forgotten where I am, why I am sitting here, or where I am going to. The skin of my face is burning. My head’s vessels are aching in fever. I am sure, now that I’m writing this, that I’m not in that bus. Little by little I feel the space around me. Empty aisles with iron shelves are the only things surrounding me. I try to find out where I am truly at this moment. These are the aisles of where I work, where I always am.³

With this last sentence he opens his eyes in the warehouse. The boundaries between reality and illusion, a reliable narrator and a hallucinating one, past and present, are broken from the beginning. Ehsan is an unreliable narrator and, as the voice-over’s detail about his “writing this” makes clear, a creative one. The voice-over narration through his night journey—which, the audience learns later, is probably another dream—constitutes the first and last paragraphs of a short story, in which the narrator rewrites reality’s bitter ending. His dream of becoming a real writer is realized when he rewrites his sister’s destiny through his imagination, or at least tries to do so. The metafiction of Williams’s memory play is more overt in this cinematic adaptation, in which the narrator consciously rewrites and alters his memories. Eventually the film offers two endings to the same tale: following Williams’s text the first time, and then revolting against it.

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The first-person point of view of the opening narration is important, because that point of view will evolve. As the film nears its conclusion(s), Ehsan’s departure from his hometown and house (a farewell glance overlooking Tehran followed by a terminal scene intercut with shots of Yalda) is accompanied by a voice-over in which Ehsan narrates his own actions but now in the third person, treating himself as a character. The voice-over’s words foreshadow the events to come in the alternative ending, and its third-person point of view helps the audience navigate the perplexity of a film with two endings. In short, the voice-over is Ehsan telling a story written (or one day to be written) by him:

The young man was thinking how he resembled his father in those moments, as if he had inherited the habit of running away from him. He had an absurd feeling. He was not sure if he had truly exited the house in that night. Consequent incidents had taken place one after the other so simply and absurdly that he could no longer know which was real and which was crafted by his mind. He felt that something was missing in his surrounding space. He was sure of only one thing: there was no way for him to return to that house. There was no way for him to sit on that sofa in the middle of the living room, like every other day, and think about running away. That was the only thing that could help him know the boundary between dream and reality.

¶17

Eventually on the road, half asleep and in a delirious state, Ehsan receives a voice message from his mother in which she is crying and begging him to return home because Yalda is not feeling well. The nighttime bus scene cuts to a home scene in the morning, in which Ehsan is sitting on the sofa and thinking, “like every other day”: the very action the voice-over narration proscribed. Now the audience sees Ehsan staying with his family and taking care of Yalda, who has descended into absolute insanity. In a magical turnabout, Reza quits his fiancée and returns to propose to Yalda. Yalda recovers from her delusion and accepts his proposal. In the final sequence, we see Farideh, Yalda, and Reza enjoying a happy barbecue in the yard of a colorful, traditionally designed house, with a new member of the family: Yalda and Reza’s baby (fig. 4). This sequence exactly matches Farideh’s report of a dream she once had, in which Yalda had gotten married, had put her crutches away, and was hugging her chubby baby while walking her through the yard.

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In Ehsan’s version of Farideh’s dream, Ehsan stares at the family from a short distance, sitting on a chair by the garden, with a cup of tea in his hands and a growing smile. The chair can be taken as the seat of a film director, an accomplished writer, or an absent dreamer. The audience is not sure if Ehsan is actually there or not, although Yalda has been setting the table for four. In the final shot of the film, a medium close-up, the smile fades from Ehsan’s face, and he stares ahead with a worried expression. The closing shot parallels the film’s opening shot of Ehsan on the bus, in which his closed eyes opened at the moment the voice-over narration began.

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The film’s two dramatically divergent endings allow audiences to choose either one but oblige them to question which is illusion and which—if either—is real. In the penultimate sequence, we see Ehsan at the movie theater, his visage illuminated by the lights turned on after the film, which suggests new light has been projected on his circumstances (fig. 5). The cinema screen has inspired him to cross the boundaries of time and remembrance and rewrite the bitter ending of his family’s story as a happy one. At this point both Ehsan and Tavakoli are adapting, remediating, and remaking a story that has already been written and performed. The film’s final voice-over statement arguably exemplifies the director’s own stance in relation to Williams’s play and its earlier adaptations:

Those who watch the same film twice in a row sound peculiar. But this is a feeling one cannot explain to all. When the characters of a film are still alive and are breathing in your brain, you can stare at their eyes on the screen, you can talk to them, and change their destiny. Thus you can remake the real in the form of a dream or illusion. You should recline in the theater’s chair. The moment the lights turn off, the miracle happens, right at the moment you feel that there is no way left to escape. What matters is that you can carry on. Everything starts right from here.

¶20

This belief in the possibility of remaking the real, expressed and practiced by Ehsan, draws an ideological line between him and Williams’s Tom. They experience similar desires and frustrations, and they both take refuge in movie theaters. But their respective justifications for that habit point to the different worlds they dwell in. In a conversation with Amanda, Tom emphasizes that he looks for adventure in movie theaters: “I go to the movies because—I like adventure. Adventure is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies” (173). Later on, he reveals to Jim that he is reaching the limits of what cinema has to offer: “I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move” (201). In contrast, Ehsan explains that by seeing the same film twice he finds himself participating in characters’ destinies through rewriting the story in his imagination. To Tom, cinema is a window to the bigger world he feels he is missing, whereas to Ehsan the cinema is that bigger world itself. He seeks his dreams within the frames of cinema rather than outside it. When Tom sets off on his escape, Laura’s memory—the ending of her story—does not stop haunting him, whereas Ehsan begins to reimagine and rewrite the story of his family as though seeing a film for the second time and giving them the ending he wishes for them.

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The adaptation of Tom from a poet in Williams’s play into a prose writer who dreams of writing for cinema is significant in view of the roles New Poetry and cinema played in Iran’s path to modernity.⁴ In Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future, Hamid Dabashi, exploring the relations between the development of Iranian cinema and that of New Poetry in Iran, asserts:

Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has had a significance in the public culture matched only by the modernist Persian poetry of the 1950s through the 1970s. [. . .] As a quintessentially verbal culture, we exploded into a visuality that made our cinema a powerful art. [. . .] Partaking in the achievements of Persian poetry and fiction, this cinema became the focal point of an entirely new generation of hopes and anxieties, attracting an audience that, aware of the modernity of its condition, crowded the theaters [. . .]. (4)

Dabashi remembers how in early and mid-twentieth-century Iran “[g]oing to the cinema was an act of defiance” and claims that “[t]here was something exhilarating, transgressive, even dangerous, about cinema” (6). The idea of cinema’s revolutionary potential reveals a cultural link that connects Williams’s restless character, who seeks adventure in movie theaters, to his cross-national counterpart in Tehran, who takes refuge there. Tom could easily have been reculturalized as an Iranian poet, given the history of poetry in Iran, a land of innumerable novice poets who dream of becoming great ones, but Ehsan’s interest lies in writing for the cinema instead. Writing for cinema places him in the position of re-narrating his life by cinematizing it. In his world, cinematic narrative, not poetry, has the power to transgress domestic limitations, just as numerous Iranian films did in gaining international credibility despite local obstacles and censorship.⁵ A huge fan of American classics (e.g., Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, audible at a significant moment in Here without Me), Ehsan can be seen as a reimagined Tom, looking back at his own earlier incarnation in American art and looking forward to his creative possibilities in Iranian cinema.

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In twenty-first-century Iran, going to movie theaters is less an act of defiance than it was for Dabashi, at least for the majority of cinemagoers in the metropolitan and highly modernized Tehran. However, a considerable number of young individuals like Ehsan still look to movie theaters not only for shelter for their transgressive voices but also for a way to effect social and political change. Iranian cinema continues to be a messenger of modernity and a carrier of intellectual emancipation. Although art film cuts the highest profile in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, aesthetic priorities share the stage with the ideal of social commitment. Generation after generation, young and influential filmmakers energize Iranian cinema with challenges to restrictive social and political realities. Ehsan too looks to cinema to effect social improvement and intellectual change—and comparing his attitude with Tom’s reveals Ehsan’s as perhaps an updated and Easternized version, paradoxically both echoing and contrasting with Tom’s description of his era’s cinema. Tom laments, “People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses! [. . .] Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves” (201). Ehsan is not only an Iranianized version of Tom but also an Iranianized cinema fan who looks at cinema and Hollywood from a non-American point of view. American films speak to him in a different way than they speak to Tom. Ehsan envisions the possibility of change within and through those frames, through narrativity and imagination, instead of beyond it, and his dream of emigration is integrated with his dream of writing for the cinema.

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Ehsan emerges as Tom not only through his role in the plot but also through his tone and speech. It can be argued that Ehsan is consciously playing an adapted Tom, as if he is familiar with The Glass Menagerie,when, in response to his mother’s protest against his going to movie theaters, he repeats almost verbatim the play’s dialogue, with an exaggerated, dramatic tone:

آره دارم دروغ می گم. دارم می رم شیره کش خونه. معتاد شدم می خوام برم جرم و جنایت کنم. مگه نمی دونی مامان؟ من لای مجله فیلم هام یک مسلسل قایم می کردم، باهاش آدم می کشتم تا صبح، بعد دم صبح دوباره برمی گشتم شیره کش خونه . بعد برای اینکه کسی نشناستم سبیل مصنوعی می ذاشتم. ا ، مامان ، سیبیل مصنوعی من کوش؟ حالا دیدی؟ فهمیدی چرا شب ها هذیون می گم؟ برای اینکه یک گروه مافیایی افتادن دنبالم . می خوان خونه مون رو با دینامیت بفرستن هوا. عوضش وقتی مردیم، برای اینکه حوصله هامون سرنره، از بیست تا خواستگارت بگو هر کدومشون چقدر برا زناشون ارث گذاشتن تو اون دهات های کردستان. یک چیزی بهت بگم مامان ، آدم بمیره بهتر از اینه که خل بشه ولی فکر کنه سالمه.

Yes, I’m lying. I’m going to an opium den! I’m an addict. I want to go out to commit crimes. Don’t you know that, Mom? I had hidden a tommy gun among my film magazines, and I used to kill people with it until morning. Then in the morning I would return to the opium den, and to hide myself I wore a false mustache, Mom! Oh, Mom, where is my false mustache? You see? Now you know why I sleep talk at night? Because a mafia gang is looking for me. They want to explode our house with dynamite. In return, after we die, to keep us amused, tell us about your twenty suitors and what each one has left to his wife, in those villages of Kurdistan. Let me tell you something, Mom, dying is better than going crazy while feeling sane!

Williams’s original text:

I’m going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired assassin, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! [. . .] They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield[. . . .] I wear a patch over one eye and a false mustache[. . . .] Oh, I could tell you many things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They’re going to blow us all sky-high some night! I’ll be glad, very happy, and so will you! You’ll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! (164)

This directly borrowed speech opens up the possibility that Ehsan knows Williams’s play and is consciously imagining himself as another Tom, in another country, under comparable pressures. The actor Abar’s delivery of Ehsan’s lines is noticeably influenced by the tone used by famous Iranian dubbers when rendering American classics in Persian, as if Ehsan were quoting movies instead of speaking his own mind. Iranian audiences familiar with Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof can recognize the dubbed version of it in a scene that shows Ehsan sitting alone in a movie theater with a smile on his face and enthusiasm in his eyes, implying a history of intimacy between him and the film he is watching. The audience does not see the screen Ehsan is watching but hears the dialogue. The scene he is watching so ardently, Brick’s heart-to-heart conversation and face-to-face fight with Big Daddy, also alludes to the absence of Ehsan’s own father and the conversation Ehsan can never have except in his mind. This referential homage to another Williams screen adaptation enhances the possibility of Ehsan’s imagining himself as a Williamsian character, sketching the scope of Williams’s influence over decades, across cultures, and through different media.

¶24

Tavakoli redomesticizes the spatially specific St. Louis play in the sociocultural sphere of twenty-first-century Tehran, in an old building occupied by a lower-middle-class family that is isolated from the surrounding world. Like its US counterpart, which houses members of a “fundamentally enslaved section of [. . .] society to avoid fluidity and differentiation,” the Tehran structure also points to social imbalances, although its being a house differentiates it from Williams’s “hive-like” apartment building. But while the house is more individual and isolated than Williams’s “huge buildings,” it too is “always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation” (Williams 143).

¶25

The importance of spatial rhetoric to the film, signaled by the word here in its title, is augmented immediately by the opening credits: a sequence of shots depicting the interiors and exteriors of the family’s house and various household objects, each shot representing the empty space belonging to one character. Three brief precredit scenes show Ehsan and his mother in their social zones outside the home and Yalda inside the domestic shelter of the home. The opening credits first appear superimposed on a shot of Yalda’s glass menagerie (fig. 6), and they continue as the film dissolves into shots focusing on other interior objects: Farideh’s sewing machine (fig. 7), the bed on the balcony where Ehsan has a few solitary moments (fig. 8), Yalda’s single bed in her small room, the rest of the glass menagerie on the shelf beside photo frames, and an old, empty wooden chair with a masculine impression of the absent father (fig. 9). Together, they all contextualize the title: Here without Me. Throughout the film, a sofa—an old one at first, but soon replaced by a new one—is the focal point in the interior space. Farideh’s insistence on acquiring a new sofa before Reza’s arrival, despite the family’s financial problems, exemplifies the modesty of her dreams, which prove ambitious and troublesome nonetheless. The small kitchen, an extra room built on the corner of the balcony, is also charged with spatial subjectivity: it carries strong Middle Eastern connotations as a central domestic zone for feminine creativity (and captivity) through centuries, the products of which constantly connect family members. It is in this kitchen that Reza, in the film’s alternative ending, asks for Yalda’s hand in marriage, provoking the hesitant Farideh, mindful of Yalda’s nervous breakdown, to serve Iranian-style tea with traditional sweets. The kitchen scenes complement sequences shot in the food-processing factory where Farideh works, showing her in domestic and public zones, preparing food or food ingredients for a nonprotective urban society in both (fig. 10).

¶26

The adaptability of Amanda Wingfield from a faded Southern belle into a struggling Middle Eastern working woman fighting for her family and her dreams offers the filmmaker the opportunity to explore some universal challenges and some culturally specific ones. Farideh not only confronts the frustrating realities of a family life that features a missing husband, a disabled daughter, and a dreamy son but also faces the harsh realities of an imbalanced urban society that constantly tramples her rights as a citizen and a female worker. The scenes that show a female coworker lending Farideh money in exchange for Farideh’s covering the coworker’s shifts (fig. 11) connect the adapted Amanda with struggling lower-middle-class women throughout Iran and beyond—arguably more so than the original Amanda, who engages in social activities through her DAR membership and tries to earn money selling magazine subscriptions but basically observes her surrounding world through the lens of her memories. Her Iranian counterpart, whose hijab might at first visually estrange her from non-Iranian viewers, turns out to be much more actively engaged in fighting the sociocultural constructs of her surrounding world and perhaps much more like those viewers. Nevertheless, Farideh remains Amanda-like in her dreaminess and her fancies, which range from the idea of selling makeup over the phone to the hope of finding a suitor for her daughter. Cristina Della Coletta, who approaches cross-cultural adaptations through hermeneutical readings, indicates that “a valuable portion of the hermeneutical significance of adaptation [. . .] resides in the estranging process that representational forms undergo through their mutual encounters” (17). Re-dressed by the defamiliarizing setting of post-revolutionary Iran and reimagined through the cultural familiarity of a single mother obsessed with her children’s happiness, the 2011 version of Amanda not only shatters the stereotyped image of a Middle Eastern woman but also revisits the stereotyped image of a Southern belle.

¶27

The Iranian adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, like the play itself,sharply contrasts Amanda’s embeddedness in her culture with Laura’s sociocultural eccentricity. Both characters are resented by Ehsan-Tom, who eventually attempts to take command of his family’s reality-versus-dream struggle by reimagining and rewriting the last chapter of their drama. The film places its four characters and their interactions on an illusion-reality spectrum, with Yalda and Reza (Laura and the gentleman caller) standing at opposite ends: one immersed in an imaginary glass world, and the other one walking on the firm ground of reason. Ehsan and his mother are somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum, each accusing the other of being unable to face reality. In a radical reaction against his mother’s troublesome acts, Ehsan at one point proposes collective suicide as the only possible solution to their family’s never-ending predicaments. Later on, after Yalda’s nervous breakdown, Farideh asks Ehsan whether he was serious in his suggestion, as if she were ready to act on it. Taking a step back, Ehsan denies having been serious.

¶28

The gentleman caller, Reza, played by Parsa Pirouzfar, is an ideally ordinary man who smoothly steps into the family’s routine reality-versus-dream game and just as abruptly exits, leaving the other three characters devastated and irreversibly changed (fig. 12). He is a seize-the-day type of person with a great deal of sympathy for and understanding of others. While not an ex-classmate of Yalda-Laura (a change from Glass Menagerie’s Jim), he is able to see through her anxiety in brief encounters, and he encourages her to believe herself a special and valuable young woman. In this version, he is not only “the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality,” as Tom introduces Jim at the beginning of Williams’s play (145), he is also the most idealized. Reza, in his mature and considerate presence, opposes the void that surrounds the other three characters. He is the emblem of the vitality and hope otherwise absent. The screenplay, in its reimagined ending, transforms Jim’s static unattainability into possibility by creating a space for Reza’s quitting his arranged marriage and proposing instead to Yalda. Interestingly, Ehsan’s first step in following his dream of becoming a writer is to revive his mother and sister’s pipe dream as his own: his first story has his sister betrothed to Reza, whose reality once shattered the glass house of his family’s illusions.

¶29

Tavakoli’s reworking of Williams’s play realizes the playwright’s introductory urge for an “unusual freedom of convention” by reperforming the plot within and beyond the play’s narrative frames (131). Ehsan presents a significantly cinematized Tom compared with his two Hollywood counterparts. The “Brechtian alienation” of Williams’s play, as Smith-Howard and Heintzelman call it, which distances a character from the audience trying to identify with him or her, has been replaced by the cinematic character’s detachment from the surrounding world. Ehsan neither reflects about the past while smoking a cigarette and staring at the sea, as Tom does in Rapper’s film, nor speaks directly to the camera in an artificial manner, as does Tom in Newman’s version. He stares at his own life with detached eyes instead. (Throughout the film, Ehsan is also suffering from a cold, which not only aggravates his emotional distance and physical intolerance but also functions as a visual marker of them. The cold serves as a rhetorical device that cinematizes Tom’s detachment.)

¶30

Unlike Amanda and Tom, Laura has been subjected to no grand cross-cultural revisionin Here without Me. Her character has received a peculiar adaptation that places her beyond any deeply integrated localization. Yalda, unlike her very much Easternized mother, is not an Iranianized young woman. The film’s other characters confirm that Yalda is not similar to many, or even any, girls in their observable society. Yalda is the only character never shown outside the home except in the dreamlike final scene, in which we see her walking in the yard in slow motion. Only once does she leave the house, to buy some cheese for breakfast, and then the camera does not accompany her. Her confinement to interior spaces suggests a character who does not fit anywhere in external society. She has been adapted for Iranian cinema not through cultural changes but through maintaining her character’s essential alienation from her setting. The audience encounters Yalda’s peculiarity first through a precredit scene that shows her washing her miniature animals, chatting with them, and struggling to take them back to their shelves. Unlike the Laura of Williams’s play, she does not speak much about her glass menagerie. She is simply there, in her fragile asocial world, beyond normative classifications. The Iranian actor Negar Javaherian, with her staring eyes, conveys the fragility and transparency of the character and her relation to the world she inhabits. She blinks less than other people and gazes at her surroundings with a wide-eyed, dreamy expression (fig. 13). Variety’s review in 2011 describes the film as an “unlikely adaptation” of Williams’s play, in which “of all the play’s characters, only the timid crippled daughter, here named Yalda [. . .], whose disability has driven her to take refuge in her collection of glass animals, remains essentially unchanged” (Scheib). It might be argued that the adaptation focuses on revisualizing rather than relocalizing Laura, who in her ethereal presence does not belong to any specific time or location. In her transformation to a transnational cinema, she does not undergo transcultural digestion. As Williams puts it, “Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”—and, by extension, too exquisitely peculiar to move from The Glass Menagerie (129).

¶31

Tavakoli’s departure from the play’s conclusion by creating a dual ending for his film might not be welcome to audiences who prioritize faithfulness to the original, but it is in keeping with the playwright’s professed interest in unconventionality. (For those invested in the film’s profit margin, it also has the benefit of making the bitter ending, on which Williams insisted, more palatable for many cinemagoers [Palmer and Bray 41].) The first offered ending follows the general shape of Williams’s story; the second is presented by the adapted narrator through his readapting imagination. This final move, positioning the film as a realistic one with an abrupt nonrealistic turn, is disconcerting, but it lets the audience accept either ending as the believable one and obliges viewers to acknowledge and take part in the psychological game necessitated by the plasticity of memory. As Williams’s stage directions observe, “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart” (143).

¶32

The cinematic adaptation of The Glass Menagerie was received warmly in Iran and accepted at several international film venues. Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, who plays Farideh, the mother, won the Best Actress award at the Montreal Film Festival in 2011, at which Tavakoli was also nominated for the Grand Prix des Amériques. The special issue of Film Magazine on Iranian cinema and the world’s cinema, published in 2012, invited sixty-five film critics, directors, and writers to make a list of the best Iranian cross-cultural adaptations. Here without Me was listed as the fifth-best adaptation, with thirty-eight votes (Akbari 176). In a critical review published in the same issue, the film critic Behzad Eshghi points to the balance and harmony achieved by the Iranian director’s cross-cultural and transnational encounter with Williams’s work:

Williams’s works are very American and thus difficult to restructure elsewhere. Nevertheless, Bahram Tavakoli in Here without Me has been able to smoothly overcome such a trouble and register one of the best dramatic adaptations produced in Iran. If he had insisted on totally Iranianizing the play, he would definitely have taken a wrong way by damaging its main structure, as the text is affected by cultural conditions of its own time to a great extent. Also, if he had tried to remain absolutely faithful to the primary text, he would have created a strange film without any harmonies to the local air, as a result of which the audience would be incapable of believing in the characters and their interactions. The director has stayed on the middle ground by creating a work that swings back and forth between illusion and reality, storytelling and documentation, local and a-local atmosphere. (191)

¶33

Despite the overall success of the film, some of Iran’s ardent Williams fans criticize it as a distorting adaptation, pointing at fundamental changes such as the exclusion of the hot, humid weather that plays an essential role in the southern United States playwright’s works. The nature of the criticism reveals a resistance to delocalizing and relocalizing Williams, even on the part of his non-American audiences and fans who might have been expected to embrace the cultural ownership a national adaptation offers (Fazeli). In 2014, Tavakoli adapted Williams once more by directing The Stranger, a free adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire whose casual structure and critical and popular failure framed his effective adaptation of The Glass Menagerie as potentially a one-time achievement. One needs to approach Here without Me in the context of other Williams adaptations—and in the context of Iranian cinema’s many successful adaptations of foreign literary texts that speak back to and even outplay their global counterparts—to evaluate its contributions to a history and a trend (Rezaie).⁶

¶34

In the foreword to Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, Thomas Keith highlights 2011 as, “internationally speaking, what could now be considered a typical year for Williams in many ways” given the performances and translation of his plays in Athens, Moscow, Caracas, and Indonesia. “More newsworthy, however, is that 2011 also yielded the first film version of a play by Williams in Persian. [It was f]ilmed in Tehran with an Iranian cast and crew,” he adds (xx). Keith’s referring to the Persian screen adaptation as more important than other international appearances is additional evidence that cinematic adaptations are revitalizing the playwright’s work and global profile. Also worthy of study is the relation between increased international interest in adapting Williams for film and the evolution of the practice and study of adaptation. In 2005 Robert Stam called for a dialogical approach to adaptation that releases it from the exhausted ideal of fidelity in order to make room for intertextual interplay, which in “[e]very text, and every adaptation, ‘points’ in many directions, back, forward, and sideways” (27). In 2008, a middle point between Stam’s theoretical proposal in adaptation studies and the production of Tennessee Williams’s adaptation in Iran, Thomas Leitch announced that “after years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the move,” as new intertextual approaches “have stirred the pot, provoking a welcome outburst of diverse work on adaptation” (63).

¶35

At the crossroads Leitch speaks of, adaptation theory, literary studies, and past and future adaptations encounter each other, with revisionary implications for all. Williams’s twentieth-century theater and twenty-first-century Iranian cinema have met at that crossroads. The encounter invites application of Linda Hutcheon’s fundamental questions in A Theory of Adaptation: exploring the how-ness and why-ness of Williams’s reemergence on cinematic screens far from the United States landscapes he explored can provide a new insight into the screens and the landscapes of both the adaptor and the adapted, as well as the how-ness and why-ness of adaptation studies itself—and why Williams’s hybrid, plastic texts prove such fertile ground for exploring them all.

Works Cited

 

Akale. Directed by Shyamaprasad, performance by Prithviraj Sukumaran and Sheela, Kolath Films, 2004.

Akbari, Mina, editor. “The Best Adaptations of the World’s Literature in Iranian Cinema.” The 22nd Annual Book of Iranian Cinema: Iranian Cinema and the World’s Literature, Film Magazine, 2013, pp. 172–76.

Blue Jasmine. Directed by Woody Allen, performance by Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin, Sony Pictures Classics, 2014.

Bray, (William) Robert. Introduction. The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, edited by Bray, Penguin Books, 2009, pp. vii–xiii.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Directed by Richard Brooks, performance by Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1958.

Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. Verso, 2001.

Della Coletta, Cristina. When Stories Travel: Cross-Cultural Encounters between Fiction and Film. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.

Eshghi, Behzad. رویا آفرینی ایرانی ورویا آفرینی ایرانی و فرهنگ ملی آمریکا [“Iranian Dream Making and American National Culture”]. The 22nd Annual Book of Iranian Cinema: Iranian Cinema and the World’s Literature, Film Magazine, 2013, pp. 190–91.

Fazeli, GholamAbbas. Personal interview. 15 July 2015.

Forough, Mehdi, translator. باغ وحش شیشه ای [The Glass Menagerie]. By Tennessee Williams, Kanoon Marefat, 1958.

The Fugitive Kind. Directed by Sidney Lumet, performance by Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, United Artists, 1960.

The Glass Menagerie. Directed by Irving Rapper, performance by Jane Wyman and Kirk Douglas, Warner Bros., 1950.

The Glass Menagerie. Directed by Paul Newman, performance by Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich, Cineplex Odeon Films, 1987.

Here without Me. Directed by Bahram Tavakoli, performance by Saber Abar, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, and Negar Javaherian, Fadak Film, 2011.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.

Keith, Thomas. “Foreword.” Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, edited by John S. Bak, 2014, pp. xvii–xxii.

Kramer, Richard E. “The Sculptural Drama: Tennessee Williams’ Plastic Theatre.” Tennessee Williams Annual Review 5 (2002), www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/journal/work.php?ID=45.

Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads.” Adaptation, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 63–77.

Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Vol. 1, Duke UP, 2011.

The Night of the Iguana. Directed by John Huston, performance by Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1964.

Palmer, R. Barton, and William Robert Bray. Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America. U of Texas P, 2009.

Quirk, Lawrence J. Paul Newman: A Life. Taylor Trade Publishing, 2009.

Rezaie, Naghmeh. Cross Cultural Adaptations. 2016–18, www.crossculturaladaptations.com/.

Scheib, Ronnie. “Review: Here without Me.” Variety, 5 Sept. 2011, variety.com/2011/film/reviews/here-without-me-1117945976/.

Smith-Howard, Alycia, and Greta Heintzelman. Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts on File, 2005.

Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, edited by Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 1–52.

The Stranger. Directed by Bahram Tavakoli, performance by Mahnaz Afshar and Pantea Bahram, Nasim Saba, 2014.

A Streetcar Named Desire. Directed by Elia Kazan, performance by Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, Warner Bros., 1951.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1, New Directions, 1971, pp. 123–237.