“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 the parade gone by, and “The Glass Menagerie” as staged here is no exception. I mentioned in a caption that I wrote a couple of weeks back that when the play was over I didn’t want to stand up and applaud I wanted to put my head down and weep. Why was I moved? These fine actors, and also Ben McKenzie as Jim O’Connor (“the gentleman caller”), slip seamlessly into the skins of the characters as poignantly drawn by the playwright. It’s easy to see why Laura, with her limp and her almost pathological shyness, is socially handicapped, but both her brother and her mother are conflicted as well. Maybe we’re empathetic because there’s a part of each of these characters in ourselves. And while families are often imagined as cohesive units, it’s the rare family that doesn’t have tensions pulling at it from within.
In “The Glass Menagerie,” the pivotal point is missing – the patriarch of the family took off long ago, even though his portrait, as glowing as a Russian icon, hangs prominently on the wall (physically present, or collectively in the minds of those he abandoned, can be debated). But even when they’re living in the moment, the Wingfield clan repeatedly finds refuge elsewhere – Laura in her luminous glass figurines, Tom in movies and drink, and Amanda in memories of her youth in Blue Mountain. One Sunday afternoon, she tells her son, she entertained 17 gentleman callers. And meanwhile, her timid daughter has entertained nary a one.
When Tom is finally coerced to bring a fellow worker home to meet Laura, it turns out to be the young man whom she had a big crush on in high school, six years earlier. The arc that develops between them, its rise and crushing collapse, is splendidly and heartbreakingly conveyed. I tell myself that Jim’s sincere praise should boost Laura’s self-confidence and that maybe now she’ll venture more boldly into the real world. But of course she won’t, because we already know what’s in store, and it’s the bitter in the bittersweet memory already alluded to.
Even the most tragic plays are often leavened, here and there, by touches of gentle humor, and “The Glass Menagerie” is no exception. There are certainly places where one smiles or chuckles, but one colleague of mine mentioned later that he walked out because some audience members were treating the performance like a sitcom – a laugh at the end of every sentence. Fortunately, this reviewer was simply too riveted by the wonderful acting and the craftsmanship of the dialogue to allow for that to interfere with his enjoyment of the show. I really do consider this is an exceptional bit of theater.
The Glass Menagerie is onstage at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles in the Music Center. Performances, Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Exceptions: No evening performances Oct. 5-8 (student matinees only). Tickets, $20 to $65. Closes Oct. 17. Call (213) 628-2772 or go to CenterTheatreGroup.org. ER