Theater Review: The Glass Menagerie

Saturday, March 07, 2015

Thom Bassett, GoLocalProv Contributor

 

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While the New Testament admonishes us not to put new wine into old bottles, Trinity Rep’s latest production of The Glass Menagerie proves just how little that dictum applies to the canonical texts of American theater. This is a superbly staged, bravely inventive, and often brilliant rendering of Tennessee Williams’ classic play. It reveals compelling new facets of a familiar story while simultaneously honoring the core emotional truth of Williams’ heavily autobiographical remembrance of a mother and children both trapped by and clinging to one another.  

Any account of what makes this production so powerful has to highlight the set design and staging. In his production notes for the original 1944 staging of the play, Williams wrote that “because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part.” I am confident he would be struck by how adeptly designer Eugene Lee and director Brian Mertes have given embodiment to this idea. 

Whether they intentionally followed Williams’ directives is irrelevant. What matters is that together Lee and Mertes have created a space, and the movement of objects and characters within it, that gives physical presence to the vicissitudes and contradictions of Tom Wingfield’s memories. (I leave to those who haven’t yet seen the production the pleasure of discovering several small features of the set design that function as deeply intelligent metaphors of Tom’s consciousness.) Also, musician Phillip Roebuck’s performance of his original compositions is a marvelous complement to what we see. In sum, space, movement, and music together powerfully reinforce the play’s remarkable language. 

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This is not to say, though, that all the staging choices indisputably work. Anne Scurria’s Amanda Wingfield gamely climbs up onto a chair several times during the opening scenes. The play, of course, demands that we not expect realism, but in these moments the effect is just self-consciously artificial. Further, and more important, the maneuver undercuts the emotional impact at the play’s conclusion when her son Tom ascends the family’s dining room for his final monologue.

In addition, the cast’s performances will captivate and enlighten even those who have seen many productions of the play. Turning first to Scurria, we can best appreciate her interpretation of the frantically forceful Amanda by considering Williams’ own words about the character. “There is much to admire in Amanda,” he wrote, “and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at.” This is who Scurria gives us. 

As misguided and exasperating as much of Amanda’s efforts on behalf of her children are, we nonetheless see a woman who does her damnedest for the sake of their happiness. And as far as she’s fallen in life, as wounded as she is, Amanda insists on her own dignity, as little as her children—Tom in particular—understand or accept it.

Which is why I was puzzled, and then put off, by the reaction of much of the audience to Amanda. Judging from the loud explosions of laughter around me, a lot of people seemed to find her an uproariously funny clown. That’s exactly what she isn’t. What we see is Tom’s remembrance of his mother, and however his memories of her might be distorted (and whose isn’t, especially when it comes to those who mean the most to us), she isn’t a joke to him. Amanda might be ridiculous, she might even be pathetic at times, but she’s never hilarious. Not to her son. To him, and thus to us, she’s an aging, hurt, confused woman struggling to retain her sense of worth while also loving her children as well as she can. Which is to say, very, very imperfectly. Scurria captures the admirable, pained and paining humanity of this woman.

The very talented Mia Ellis gives us a Laura whose place in the narrative arc of this production will rightly spark debate. Here, the Wingfield daughter doesn’t overtly display the pathological vulnerability we often find in interpretations of the character. She seems instead simply disassociated from the world around her except for brief moments of connection with her brother or mother. The resulting emotional effects are comparatively muted, even in the aftermath of the disastrous intrusion of Dennis Kozee’s utterly convincing glib and facile Jim O’Connor into the Wingfields’ life.

But it’s what happens between Amanda and her son Tom, played by Brian McEleney, that makes this such a remarkable production. As funny as their barbed dialogue might be, they jointly also express the confusion and love and guilt in their relationship. Further, the always masterful McEleney has achieved something truly distinctive in his depiction of Tom. In the present time of the play, he’s an aging queen who wanders around his apartment on thin, not entirely steady legs. The bright red polish on his fingers and toes contrasts badly with his pale, blotched skin. When he dons pantyhose and sits down to apply drag makeup, the results are horrible: You very much want Tom not to go out in public looking like that.

And then you realize that Tom, in his garish, ridiculous get-ups and in his voice that keeps skidding into shrill, squawky registers, is so very much like his mother. And this interpretation challenges us to consider whether Tom as the play’s narrator entirely understands the story he’s telling. The play famously concludes with Tom bidding (a dramatically ironic) farewell to his sister Laura. But what about the silence concerning his mother, the mother whose best and worst traits Tom has come to possess and be possessed by? 

This question doesn’t require us to indulge the stupid cliché of an effeminate gay man made so by a domineering mother. It instead leads us to an inescapable truth about the Wingfields, and indeed, of all families: We never really say goodbye to anyone.

The Glass Menagerie runs through March 26. Trinity Repertory Company, 201 Washington Street. Box office: 401.351.4242; open Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00-8:00 p.m. Tickets $57.00-$71.00. 

 

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