The Tennessee Williams Annual Review

 

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Theatre Review:

Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play

Annette J. Saddik

Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play. Conceived by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell, directed by Lee Breuer. Mabou Mines Theater, New York, 2017.

The Mabou Mines theater collective’s 2017 work Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play is, on one level, a multilayered exploration of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and his sister, Rose, whose story of courage in facing the mental and emotional challenges that culminated in an eventual lobotomy in 1943 inspired female characters in both his canonical early plays and the less familiar later works. Developed through various workshops and staged scenes since 2011, this completed incarnation of Glass Guignol frames its central action through the brother-sister duo in The Two-Character Play, played by Maude Mitchell and Greg Mehrten, and interweaves Rose’s story with Williams’s various literary characters who reflect her spirit, if not necessarily her actual experiences: Laura in The Glass Menagerie (1945), Catharine in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Clare in The Two-Character Play (revised between 1967 and 1976), and Nance in A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976).

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Yet Glass Guignol is not simply a story of Rose’s journey, nor does it focus solely on the relationship between Williams and his sister. It delves into broader territory, asking questions about the relationship between creator and creation, and taking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as yet another framework for the complexities and contradictions of this partnership. The play begins with humorous yet eerie text-message exchanges between puppets representing Lord Byron and Mary Shelley (created by Basil Twist and Hanne Tierney, respectively), communicating on their cell phones. These exchanges, projected onto screens, succeed in setting up the action and context for the audience before the Brother and Sister characters enter to begin “the play.” Breuer and Mitchell know the Williams canon well, and while Glass Guignol yields particular insights for those equally familiar with the playwright, it is still accessible to those with little knowledge of Williams or his biography.

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Both The Two-Character Play and Frankenstein deal with the ubiquitous themes of fear and creation, and the brother-sister love at the center of the Williams play was also a common preoccupation for the Romantic poets. Lord Byron, in fact, was famously in love with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Striking that delicate balance between dramatic spectacle and tender meditation for which Williams himself was known, the cast moves the audience through a psychotic theatrical fantasy. The play’s nineteenth-century asylum staging foregrounds the Grand Guignol and the grotesque, both sensibilities that embrace contradiction, instability, and a lack of boundaries. The plays that defined the Grand Guignol took their name from Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol (“Guignol” being a character name now synonymous with “puppet” in French), which flourished in the Pigalle section of Paris from 1897 to 1962. They were short pieces, most popular in early twentieth-century French cabarets, that focused on the horrifying or macabre, and they are often set in mental asylums. These plays tend to depict graphic murder, rape, mutilation, insanity, and betrayal by the institutions we rely on for safety and security. Several of Williams’s later plays (e.g., The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde and The Chalky White Substance) embrace this dark sensibility as well. In a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, he announces his plan for what he calls “Williams’ Guignol,” three evenings in repertoire of late plays in this tradition.

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Not unrelated to the Guignol and the grotesque, there is also a strong sense of the uncanny to Glass Guignol—something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, comforting yet threatening, leading to a sense of cognitive dissonance. Part of this comes from the recognizable Williams material reframed in strange territory. The theater company’s website explains, “The Brother and Sister Playpretends there are such things as ‘Literary Readymades’. For example, iconic passages of Williams’ dialogue reframed in an unfamiliar context tell a hidden story of his sister Rose. Fear, creativity—and monsters, within and without. . . .”¹ Yet the uncanniness emerges not only from that reframing of the iconic but also from the relationship between creator and creation that is uncovered in this play. Both Ernst Jentsch’s essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) and Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) cite E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” (1816), a bizarre love story that imbues a doll (or puppet) with emotions and a soul, as an exemplary tale of the uncanny. The final scene of Glass Guignol, revealing Williams’s beloved yet monstrous Rose as his ultimate opus, also raises the question of whether love and intimacy are merely the empty reflection of the creator-lover’s own desires.

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One of the most thrilling moments in the play occurs during a particular sequence of Mitchell’s fluid and layered transformations, when the audience realizes that Laura has turned herself into the glass unicorn that is about to be clumsily broken, then watches as the horn atop her head—the symbol of her difference and destruction—becomes the lobotomist’s tool that threatens to destroy Catharine in Suddenly Last Summer and finally succeeds in doing so as Catharine morphs into Rose. The ending of the play completes this dizzying scene, as we watch the lobotomized Rose transform into Frankenstein’s monster (housed in a breathtaking gargantuan puppet created by Twist) in a horror-show metamorphosis that slides effortlessly into an awkward, but touching, fantasy dance sequence with her brother-creator, resulting in a strange and beautiful parody-pastiche (the line is blurred here) of a 1940s-era Hollywood romance. The mise-en-scène is then completed, as a spotlight shines on the two and they embrace with a kiss, while tender music plays on in the background.

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The beautiful monster that emerges as a metaphor for the contradictions of artistic creation is at the center of this piece. Ultimately, Glass Guignol exposes the grotesque truth of the messy and complex creative process, exploring how the artist sews together bits and pieces of identity, emotion, and experience in the endless pursuit of that seamless and perfect illusion of reality.