THE WOOLGATHERER
The best-known, most vivid example is the improbable temporary match between Laura Wingfield and Jim O’Connor in The Glass Menagerie. This brief encounter between a glad-handing extrovert and a frightened rabbit works, even though Laura and Jim’s connection evaporates in the heat of reality. Throughout their candlelit scene, Tennessee Williams provides the one true recipe for all love scenes: show how the strengths of one lover fit the needs of the other, how what’s missing in one is, often unknowingly, offered by the other. It’s even more poignant when only one lover knows this and so is all the more desperate to press home that revelation to the other.
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In The Woolgatherer, William Mastrosimone puts the formula into dramatic overdrive. From their meeting at the candy counter where Rose works, Rose and Cliff seem too far apart to be good for each other. Rose is morbidly afraid of life, suffers from hives and hemophilia, and lives in a mildewed Chicago apartment–the setting for the entire play–that she’s furnished by scavenging. It comes complete with a symbolically shuttered window, a dead houseplant, and thin walls, on the other side of which lurks a nosy neighbor.
And Cliff learns from Rose–how not to give up on dreams before they have a chance to happen. He says he won’t lust for a better life, because that would make him hate the one he has, but Rose’s fantasies trigger in Cliff a taste for his own.
