There’s no place like home.
Playwrights, like fictional farmgirls blown to the wind, have learned and relied on that invaluable lesson.
Consider two high-profile play revivals on Broadway this fall, both born in the writers’ backyards — if not in cramped parlors and unhappy bedrooms.
Those are all good locales to search for details and dirt when you’re ready to write what you know.
In the case of “The Glass Menagerie,” an American masterwork of family dysfunction, Tennessee Williams actually wrote what he knew a few times.
His breakthrough drama debuted on Broadway in 1945. Two years earlier Williams published a short story about his painfully shy and fragile sister called “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.”
In it, he observed a delicate and possibly doomed young woman who “made no positive motion toward the world but stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move.”
That image informs Broadway’s first-rate new production that opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre. The play situates the troubled Wingfields — domineering mother Amanda, fragile daughter Laura and restless son Tom — at their apartment suspended at the edge of a black abyss. No one can move.
Fitting for the dark places to which the well-known classic leads. Everybody knows that.
Less familiar is Williams’ one-act play that came before “Menagerie”: "The Pretty Trap." The shorter work chronicled the same awkward dinner and a chatty gentleman caller. But there’s an upbeat, near-romantic conclusion.
One of the most striking things about “Glass Menagerie” is Williams’ willingness to portray himself in an unflattering light. The glare of this drama is so harsh that Blanche DuBois would have recoiled.
“I’m the bastard son of a bastard,” declares Williams’ stand-in. Escapes never come easy and always at a dear cost.
“The Glass Menagerie” stands and shimmers on its own as a work with tenderness, heartache and exciting drama. In actuality, Williams’ sister underwent a prefrontal lobotomy and was institutionalized until her death in 1986. Her brother died in ’83. The play’s roots in reality up the ante.
Current playwrights often tend to be more interested in exploring ideas, themes and constructs than telling their own story. Naturally bits and pieces of a writer show up in any work, but today many plays look outward more than inward.
On the other hand, Harold Pinter gazes inside and dissects a slice of his own history in “Betrayal,” a cerebral, chilly look at an extramarital affair.
Broadway’s red-hot-ticket production of the 1978 drama starts performances Tuesday at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with real-life spouses Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in the roles of husband and wife. Rafe Spall completes the cast.
Pinter didn’t have to go far for inspiration. He looked to his extramarital affair with BBC TV presenter Joan Bakewell during his stormy marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant; the liaison spanned seven years, from 1962 to 1969.
Tearing a page from his life, Pinter tells the story of a seven-year affair involving spouses Emma and Robert and Robert’s friend Jerry, who is also married.
Craig and Weisz met in London in 1994 as part of the cast of “Les Grandes Horizontales,” about French courtesans, and co-starred 17 years later in the flop horror film “Dream House.” The glamorous duo will have plenty to draw on from their own lives together — horizontal and otherwise.
The drama depicts treachery and damage in every direction — spouses betray each other, friends deceive friends, cheaters backstab each other.
To add theatricality, “Betrayal” unfolds in reverse. The marriage is kaput when the play begins. Why did it die? And when?
Reverse chronology helps amplify things. Moments resound with greater resonance as a result. Hindsight is 20-20 — that’s true of real life and for this play drawn from it.
jdziemianowicz@nydailynews.com
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