Today [The Glass Menagerie] seems to stand as squarely in [an exhausted] realistic tradition as if it were a small-town Beaux Arts bank building. Although it is often praised for its lyricism and delicate fragility, Menagerie now looks glued together with self-pity, soft at the core, less a tragedy than an overexquisite lace-doily melodrama.
What has kept Menagerie being produced year after year—aside from its people-pleasing sentimentality and safely low-key lyricism—are its well-turned-out roles for actors. (p. 92)
Roderick Mason Faber, "Brittle Chutzpah" (reprinted by permission of The Village Voice and the author; copyright © News Group Publications, Inc., 1980), in The Village Voice, Vol. XXV, No. 46, November 12-18, 1980, pp. 92-3.
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