"the glass menagerie"

“I saw the great Laurette Taylor in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. It was like the lodestar of my life – and always has been,” remembered Julie Harris. “There’s never been anyone who could touch her in that part! It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I felt like I had been struck by lightning. It was earth-shattering. It was just awesome. If this is what the theater can do, I want to do it.” 

In 1964, the pioneering and distinguished LP label Caedmon Records inaugurated a series of audio plays with a production of The Glass Menagerie. The cast included Jessica Tandy, Montgomery Clift, David Wayne, and Julie Harris as Laura. Thirty years later, Julie graduated to the role of Amanda, Laura’s mother. In discussing Amanda, Julie said “My heart went out to her. She isn’t some eccentric lady. I believe that love is at the center of everything she does.” 

“Harris brings to the part an affecting delicacy and a shrewd dramatic intelligence,” wrote John Lahr in his review in The New Yorker. “She doesn’t force herself on an audience. She lets the play speak quietly through the character. As filtered through Harris’s gentle and compassionate heart, Amanda is a decent woman whose confused vitality exhibits both resourcefulness and a kind of heroism in the face of terrible circumstances. Harris finds a sweetness in Amanda’s possessiveness.”

“I loved Julie and loved working with her,” remembered Željko Ivanek who played Tom in the 1994 production. “This is the very first thing that came to mind about our time on The Glass Menagerie:

“The Glass Menagerie has a long second act scene between Laura and the Gentleman Caller. While I usually retired to my dressing room for the duration, I discovered one night that Julie (I feel instinctively I should call her Miss Harris, but she would have frowned on that) spent the whole scene sitting in a chair just off stage, listening to the dialogue. Every night. It was as if once she entered the play, she was not going to leave it for a moment, even if she wasn’t in the scene.

“I also had the pleasure a few times of attending the theater with her. Every time, whether it was Broadway or some small theater out of town, she sat down in her seat like a little girl thrilled to be attending her first show. It was really touching.”

Other Amandas drawn by Hirschfeld: Katharine Hepburn, Maureen Stapleton and Jessica Tandy.