| re: Well... | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 01:39 am EDT 08/17/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Well... - ryhog 10:55 pm EDT 08/16/22 | |
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| In Scene Four, Amanda sends Laura to the grocery store on her own, to get some butter. Laura trips on the way out. She has been delaying leaving as she is trying to persuade Tom to apologize to Amanda. Finally, Laura leaves, “rushing out” as Amanda is getting annoyed with her for not having left yet. She leaves via the fire escape and she trips because she is rushing and perhaps because she is prone to tripping due to her disability. Amanda exclaims, “If anyone breaks a leg on those fire-escape steps, the landlord ought to be sued for every cent he possesses!” Every exit from and entrance to the apartment is via the fire escape. From the opening description of the set: “The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire escape is part of what we see—that is, the landing of it and the steps descending from it.” Some things are a bit puzzling. The script says that there are several steps up to the fire escape landing. The landing serves as a sort of porch for the family. So it’s not clear to me whether they live on the first floor of the building or they live on a higher floor and we are supposed to take those several steps—there were just two in the original production—as a matter of poetic stage convenience. Perhaps we are meant to imagine that there are a good many more steps. Some of this may indeed have to do with it being a memory play. So I may have been wrong when I wrote, “[T]he Wingfields do not live on the first floor. . . . [I]t is clear that it is not the first floor because they have a fire escape on which they sometimes go out to talk.” But I may not have been wrong. I’m not sure if we can know one way or the other. I don't know if first-floor apartments sometimes have fire escapes because a fire might make going out the front door of the building dangerous or impossible. But that wouldn't seem to be the explanation here as the fire escape is the way the Wingfields always go in and out of the apartment, as Williams indicates in his opening description. When Amanda enters from outside in Scene Two, she enters via the fire escape. How common was it ever anywhere for a first-floor apartment to have a fire escape? I don’t know. Is it all just a metaphor? Several years ago, I spent a good deal of time looking at photos of the original production, and so I had in my head some images of the scenes on the fire escape in the original production. But I had sort of forgotten how clear it is in a few of those photos that the fire escape was only two steps up. It looks like it was about 18 inches. I don’t know how literal it was supposed to be, and that was probably the intention. Clearly there is no elevator. And it seems to me that an elevator would be unlikely in the kind of low-rent building they live in. It was reported in the press that Williams made some adjustments to the script for the production with Susan Peters. She also toured in The Barretts of Wimpole Street that summer. Linking a Mielziner sketch. |
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| Link | Mielziner sketch for original production |
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