“The Glass Menagerie”
The play’s the thing, someone or other said, but then so is the production. This one, at the Mark Taper Forum through Oct. 17, being innovatively imagined and directed by Gordon Edelstein, comes courtesy of The Long Wharf Theatre and it features three of the original four cast members – Judith Ivey as Amanda Wingfield, Patch Darragh as her son Tom, and Keira Keeley as daughter Laura. The story is set in the past, but it’s a layered past. Tom Wingfield usually double-duties as narrator and participant, the former from a hotel room in New Orleans a few years later, with the bulk of the tale set during the Depression years in a tenement in St. Louis. What Edelstein has done is to shape the older Tom into Tennessee Williams himself, which is not without merit because there are numerous parallels between the Wingfields and Williams’ own family. For example, the playwright’s own sister, Rose, diagnosed early as a schizophrenic, endured a prefrontal lobotomy. Knowing that, the viewer will note the tenderness that Tom feels for his sister Laura in the play, an aspect easily skimmed over in other productions. Memory plays are usually bittersweet in that they glance over their shoulders at…
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