Saturday, May 22, 2010

Theater Review: “The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, from the Roundabout Theatre Co.


As the progenitor of the “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie has influenced all kinds of subsequent playwrights, including Brian Friel (Dancing at Lughnasa) and Neil Simon (the Eugene Jerome trilogy). That, coupled with the fierce lyricism and lack of Gothic overtones that increasingly characterized the later works of Tennessee Williams, might make audiences rather blasé about a drama they think they know all too well.

In an acclaimed production at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater last fall, director Gordon Edelstein did much to dissipate the gauzy half-light in which this classic has been traditionally viewed.

Now, he has taken that production to New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co., using the intimate space of the Laura Pels Theater to expand our frame of reference for the show. I had seen several versions of this landmark 1945 drama—two movie versions, a regional production, and Katharine Hepburn’s 1973 TV adaptation—but this was the first to make me see the action in an entirely new light.

By a simple expedient—setting Tom Wingfield’s narration in a hotel room, while the main action occurs, as usual, in the cramped tenement he once shared with his overbearing mother and painfully shy sister—Edelstein heightens the autobiographical overtones of the play. Once Tom staggers in drunkenly, we are inevitably reminded of the playwright’s own death in a hotel room.

This emphasis on the play’s autobiographical elements makes more plausible a strongly implied aspect of this production: Tom’s homosexuality. A prior attempt at this interpretation—John Malkovich’s take in the 1987 Paul Newman film—fell apart because it was overly recessive and effeminate.

In contrast, Patch Darragh endows Tom with a palpable desperation that owes its urgency as much to secrets he can share with nobody close to him as much as to the crushing of his creative spirit in a soulless factory job. When Tom twirls around the family’s apartment with a scarf he was given by a male friend—and when he tells his mother Amanda that “There are so many things in my heart that I can’t describe to you”—the actions become charged with implications, without in any way altering a word in the text. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s “purloined letter,” Williams left the truth of his life out there for all to see—though few knew had to read the signs at the time he wrote the play.

Is this interpretation too confining in so strongly suggesting Williams’ life, dissolving any identification audiences might have with Tom (whose first name and initials, incidentally, match the playwright’s)?

Not at all. A character with the amorphous discontent of youth has now morphed into someone infinitely more complicated. Amanda may drive her son mad at points, but she’s not wrong to fear that Tom’s restlessness will make him, like his father, an unreliable drunk.

Far from a gauzy exercise in tender family nostalgia, it’s more readily apparent, The Glass Menagerie is something far tougher, as tortured and haunted as anything in the entire Williams canon. The poetry remains, but the family secrets, the illusions that help the characters cope with a dismal reality, and the guilt move this far closer toward Eugene O’Neill territory.

Above all, there is the enormous gap between their love for each other and what they cannot express.

In her key scene with the friend from the factory that Tom has invited to their apartment, Keira Keeley invests sister Laura Wingfield not just with the traditional emotional fragility but with a sense of tragic missed possibilities. She awaits Jim O’Connor’s kiss like a flower opening to sunlight—a strong image for a sexuality that, like Tom’s, she has been unable to experience in a way she had hoped and needed. In this same scene, Michael Mosley makes the most of his “Gentleman Caller” role, a young man whose natural friendliness leads him to make a mistake that will inadvertently harden the roles that each Wingfield desperately wants to escape.

But it is Judith Ivey who especially triumphs here, capturing Amanda as something more than a faded Southern belle or a harridan of a mother. The character emerges here in all of her intended and unintended humor (just one of her “rise and shine!” caterwaulings is enough to convey why Tom feels as crazed at home as at work). Yet this gifted actress also shows how Amanda’s constant hectoring springs as much from a powerful, desperate love for children that, she fears, she won’t be able to protect from the world or their weaknesses, as from her own failings.

The Glass Menagerie has been extended through June 13. It could—and really deserves to—run much longer. The Roundabout has staged its share of misconceived reworkings of classics over the last decade (e.g., Noel Coward’s Design for Living, with Alan Cumming), but this is not one of them. It’s revelatory in showing the myriad ways in which the infinitely gifted, troubled Williams could rend the heart.

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