Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
Tenesse Williams, El Zoo De
Cristal
“Una
de las piezas clave del teatro contemporáneo”
Directed by Agustín
Alezzo
The actors:
Luís Tosar as
“Tom”
Cristina Rota as “Amanda”
María Botto as “Laura”
Juan Carlos Vellido as
“Jim”
Teatre
Principal, Domingo 18 de Diciembre de 2005
This play has only four
characters: Tom, Amanda, Laura and Jim, and their actors made an excellent
interpretation. The first one, Tom, is the principal character, he has a
double
interpretation: as the character into the play, and as the narrator of
the things
which not appear in the play or are going to be occurred; Tom is a serious
young man who is tired of his actual life, a life where he is working
hard to
sustain his mother and his sister, and with the only support of alcohol;
Amanda
is Tom’s mother, she is a very strong and formal woman; she is a nostalgic
ghost of the “Old South”, a woman who was abandoned by her husband,
leaving her
with the responsibility of her child; Laura is Tom’s sister, she is a
shy young
girl who has been all her life closed in her own cristal world, she is
like a
child who suffered important social poblems in her infancy because her
shyness
and her lameness; she is inlove with Jim since she was a child and she
enjoys
listening her music everyday and playing with her “Crystal Zoo”; and Jim
O’Conor is a handsome young man who is a very decided person, he works
in the
same shop than Tom (they are friends) and he went to the same institut
as Tom
and Laura.
While
the play is going on, we can enjoy the aesthetics of a little house with
some
old furniture in a stage that is always the same, it does not change: the
decoration is not very complex or strange, there is an old sofa, a
telephone, a
tape recorder, crystal table with crystal figures on it, a typewriter, a
wooden
table with chairs around it, a picture of Tom and Laura’s father on the
wall, a
door on the left and another one on the right with metallic stairs, etc. The
characters are dressed with clothes from the style of the first half of the
twentieth century, but in the second part of the play, this is when the
dinner
with Jim, the characters of Amanda and Laura are well-dressed with wide
skirt
dresses and Jim wears a nice light smoking, bright shoes and a
hat.
The
play is divided in two scenes that are divided around an intermission.
We can
appreciate some excellent dialogues like the discussions between Tom and
Amanda
(when Amanda asked Tom where he went all the evenings at late hours and Tom
aswered always that he went to the cinema, the public laughed with
discreteness), the scenes when Amanda told the anecdotes of her famous
“marriage candidates” (a very interesant point of the “Old South”
society), or
the affective dialogue between Jim and Laura (whose Laura’s sound “ticks”
caused another time a funny reaction with the public), etc. We can
appreciate
some important aesthetic details like the ambient Jazz music that sometimes
sound, and the visual importance of ilumination in a often light
scenario that
makes strongly dark when Tom’s character becomes the narrator and there
is only
one focus light iluminating him. And the title of the play: “El Zoo de
Cristal”
refers evidently to Laura’s “Crystal Game”, the translucent reflex of her
childish soul. I can say that I really enjoyed this play.