Five minutes into John Dexter’s revival of The Glass Menagerie it had become apparent that something was wrong. The audience was laughing. Not laughing out of hostility or derision, but laughing the way people do when they think someone has just said something funny, before they realize that it isn’t meant to be funny at all.

Tom was talking to the audience, which always comes as a surprise in itself. For what one remembers about The Glass Menagerie are its characters (the forlorn sister and the impossibly domineering mother), the fiery exchanges between mother and son, the little glass animals that keep breaking at opportune moments, and a lot of fuss being made about a “gentleman caller.” One tends to forget that it is Tom who begins and ends the play and that the scenes we see enacted between Amanda, Tom, Laura, and the Gentleman Caller are presented as Tom’s memories of something that happened a long time ago in another city.

Tom’s opening monologue, and his closing piece, contain some of the best writing Williams ever did. And Williams at his best is quite good. But Williams at his best is also fairly rare, given his propensity for crude symbolism, his tendency to drift toward the precious and the self-indulgent, his seemingly endless capacity to be easily impressed with himself and with the hollow reverberations of his own deep-sounding pronouncements. For Williams, even stage directions, even instructions to the set designer, were pregnant with meaning. The