Stage
Local legend Blase full of fire when playing 'Menagerie' role By Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Express-News
Web Posted : 04/07/2002 12:00 AM
I had a pretty good idea what first-class acting was like. I'd seen Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in the glory years of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, in the late '60s. I'd seen a lot of theater in Chicago, at the time the nation's hottest stage cauldron, when I worked there in the '70s.
But then, during a vacation visit back home in the spring of 1976, a column by Glenn Tucker in the San Antonio Light induced me to go to the Harlequin Dinner Theater to see Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."
That production sticks in my memory to this day. I can still hear the slightly quavering voice of the son, Tom, in the prologue — he was played by Richard Jones, who would go on to have a distinguished run in San Antonio theater. I can still see the Gentleman Caller, Jim, played by Tom Parker, who would become a major figure in Austin theater.
Above all, I still feel a thrill recalling the Amanda of Marianna Blase. One little phrase from Amanda's monologue — "Malaria fever and jonquils," a line that Blase infused with worlds of nostalgia and regret — remains one of the most prized objects in my own mental menagerie of revelatory encounters in the arts.
That 1976 production was her second "Glass Menagerie" for Harlequin. Later, she revisited the role for a San Antonio Little Theater production directed by Wayne Elkins, a superb actor and director who died too young, and for a company in Austin. I saw her Amanda again in the 1980s, in Jerry Pilato's storefront theater on Main Avenue, where the intimacy of the space redoubled the intensity of the experience.
Blase had a wide range, but she owned the role of Amanda like Guy Lombardo owned New Year's Eve. There will be other Amandas, and wonderful Amandas, but Marianna Blase was the reference standard. Her Amanda wasn't just a character; it was a whole person, a life.
"It was all acting," her husband, Bob Blase, said of the role that had seemed so real.
"She said she modeled it after my grandmother, who was an old Southern lady, an old Southern widow."
Bob and Marianna had met in Dallas before she, freshly graduated from the University of Texas, went off to New York to study with Martha Graham and others. She clearly had the talent to make a career in New York, but "she finally made the decision she could act anywhere, and we got married in Dallas in 1955."
Four years later they moved to San Antonio, where Bob became director of Goodwill Industries. Marianna became a staple, and eventually a legend, on local community stages while maintaining her professional standing with appearances in Equity theaters across Texas and Louisiana.
Her dual career wasn't entirely kosher. As a member of Actors Equity, she was forbidden to appear in nonunion theaters, and no San Antonio company paid actors enough — if anything at all — to qualify. (The lack of an Equity theater remains a shameful blot on San Antonio's cultural landscape.)
"She wrote to Actors Equity, and they very obliquely told her not to use her real name," Bob recalled.
So it wasn't a typo when her name appeared as "Blaze" on local cast lists.
A blaze indeed, still burning after her death on March 14, at age 72.
A memorial celebration of Marianna Blase's life is to be held at 5 this afternoon in the San Pedro Playhouse.
mgreenberg @ express-news.net
04/07/2002
