Exploring the Line between Creation and Creator in Mabou Mines’s Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play

Abstract

During the last ten years of his life, Lee Breuer, who passed away in 2021, had been interested in framing Tennessee Williams’s canon, particularly the late plays, through the perspective of the grotesque and the Grand Guignol. Mabou Mines’s Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play (2017), directed by Breuer and conceived by Breuer and Maude Mitchell, views Williams’s work alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in order to expose the grotesque truth of the messy and complex creative process. On one level, Glass Guignol is a multilayered exploration of the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose, whose story of courage in facing the mental and emotional challenges that culminated in an eventual lobotomy in 1943 was the inspiration for several of the female characters in both his canonical early plays and his less familiar later works. Developed through various workshops and staged scenes since 2011, the finalized version of Glass Guignol interweaves the story of Rose herself with Williams’s various fictional creations of women who reflect her spirit, if not necessarily her actual experiences: Laura in The Glass Menagerie (1945), Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Clare in The Two-Character Play (revised between 1967 and 1976), and Nance in A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976). While a symbiotic brother-sister love is at the center of The Two-Character Play, which serves as the primary framework of Breuer’s piece, it was also a common preoccupation for Romantic poets. Glass Guignol uses this relationship to delve into broader territory, asking questions about the relationship between creator and creation, and taking Frankenstein as yet another framework for the complexities and contradictions of this partnership. With its nineteenth-century asylum staging, the play foregrounds the grotesque and the Grand Guignol, both sensibilities that embrace contradiction, instability, and a lack of boundaries. Ultimately, Breuer explores how the artist sews together bits and pieces of identity, emotion, and experience in the pursuit of that seamless and perfect illusion of reality.