Sally Field embraces Broadway role in unconventional 'Glass Menagerie'

As with virtually everything else about the brazenly unconventional new "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway, the first glimpse an audience gets of Sally Field is her Amanda Wingfield doing something wholly unexpected. Amanda's reclusive daughter, Laura, is played by an actress who has muscular dystrophy and requires a wheelchair. To jolt us into an understanding of how wearingly devoted this Amanda is, the director, Sam Gold, arranges for Field to enter, painstakingly dragging the wheelchair up several steps at the front of the stage.

Clump, clang, clump, clang. It looks arduous for the grimacing Field, who at 70 has the petite countenance of an anxious sparrow. She is not, however, one to whine. This, she explains, is an unorthodox "Menagerie" that has come into being by mutual consent.

"He doesn't say, 'This is what I want,'" the actress explains, sitting in a tiny room in the Belasco Theatre. "That's not how Sam does. He offers an environment, and everybody sort of blends in - everybody evolves into it on their own."

How apt that in her first real starring role on Broadway - she replaced Mercedes Ruehl 15 years ago during the run of Edward Albee's "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" - Field has ongoing evolution in the job description. If ever there was a major American actress who has had to metamorphose, it's Sally Field.

Evolution has long been her trademark, all the way back to the mid-1960s when, at the age of 17, she was cast as Gidget in the sitcom of that title and then went on to star in "The Flying Nun," a show with a premise so ludicrous "I was just about to chew my arm off," she says. The evolving - aided by years of study with acting guru Lee Strasberg - set in motion a steady progression of career leaps that continued to reveal her dramatic range, first in her Emmy-winning portrayal of a woman with a multipersonality disorder in the 1976 "Sybil," and then onto Oscar-awarded performances as a rabble-rousing textile worker in "Norma Rae" (1979) and a struggling widow in 1984's "Places in the Heart."

Yes, we really, really have admired her for a long time: "Murphy's Romance" followed, and "Steel Magnolias" and "Soapdish" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Forrest Gump." Her staying power is remarkable. In 2006, she began a five-year run on ABC's drama "Brothers and Sisters," and in 2013 she was nominated for yet another Oscar as the taciturn Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln."

So it's hard to see the pressing need for a widely embraced actress to assert her range again, especially when the latest chapter in her evolution calls for schlepping 40-pound wheelchairs up flights of stairs. Except that for Field, standing in the Belasco and reciting the words of Tennessee Williams was always the evolutionary stage on which she had her sights.

"I wanted to be working onstage for years and years - forever," she says. "But I couldn't, because I was raising children on the West Coast, and I started so young, and I was trapped. I was trapped in my apartment in St. Louis," she adds with a laugh - a reference to Amanda's geography and her predicament.

Field has played Amanda before, in a lavishly praised production of Tennessee Williams's play at the Kennedy Center in 2004. Her brief encounter with the role stirred something heartbreaking. The stifling mixture of anxiety and vanity and forced gentility that the actress conjured made the St. Louis apartment Amanda shared with her grown children the truly suffocating cage that Williams described.

Despite many fruitful years in Hollywood, Field has encountered much the same juicy-role drought that has bedeviled generations of female film stars. She doesn't find that same dearth in theater, and certainly, not in the opportunity to return to "Menagerie." The work has been exhausting, but this second swing at one of 20th-century drama's richest female roles has whetted her appetite for more.

Some of the stage parts she's longed to try, she's too old for now.

"The sad news is, I'll never get to do 'A Doll's House' and so many roles that I wanted to explore, but that's OK," the actress says. "There are other roles. I'll find them. And maybe they haven't even been written yet."