From left: Matt de Rogatis plays Tom, Ginger Grace is Amanda, and Alexandra Rose is Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the Wild Project.
Tennessee Williams’s 1945 breakout play, The Glass Menagerie, takes place in “memory,” as the brooding narrator/protagonist Tom announces at the start. In Austin Pendleton and Peter Bloch’s production at the Wild Project, Tom’s memories not only haunt the character but literally haunt the entire production with an array of spooky stage effects, which lay a chill on the evening that only the playwright’s poetry can defrost.
Amanda Wingfield is a faded Southern belle living in a cramped, working-class St. Louis apartment with her two grown children. Her husband abandoned the family years earlier, leaving her son, Tom, to support them with his salary from a warehouse job, while her daughter, Laura, enrolls at business school. Amanda is a genteel yet domineering homemaker with vivid and exaggerated memories of her glorious youth. Laura is physically handicapped and painfully shy. Tom writes poetry in the bathroom at work and escapes to the movies every night after work. The plot centers around Amanda’s desire for Laura to find a husband via a Gentleman Caller.
“Whether one takes to Pendleton and Bloch’s eerie production is a matter of taste. Dramatically, it enhances one specific aspect of the play—Laura’s awkwardness and the family’s isolation because of it. ”
Steve Wolf’s lighting casts a ghostly aura over Jessie Bonaventure’s spare set. The stage is mostly dark and nondescript, save for a baroque sofa and chair. A black scrim hangs as a backdrop with a black-and-white photo of the absent father’s smiling face projected onto it. Laura wears a high-collared dress like a spinster-in-training, and on several occasions, she stands lit behind the transparent scrim, turning from a metaphorical wallflower into a spooky antique portrait on the wall. When Amanda brings out a candelabra to put on the dinner table, it looks less like bygone elegance and more like it was borrowed from Dracula’s house next door.
Ginger Grace gallantly portrays Amanda as frantic and almost comically deluded, but without maternal warmth. Her Amanda buzzes around, nervous yet efficient, laughing and sometimes snorting in her excitement as she entertains Jim (Spencer Scott), the gentleman caller whom she has coerced Tom to invite to dinner. When she tells Jim, “Laura is, thank heavens, not only pretty but also very domestic,” there is desperation in her manipulation.
Alexandra Rose makes for a lovely and somewhat opaque Laura, although she looks much younger than Tom (the character is supposed to be two years older). Matt de Rogatis as Tom is an animated narrator who takes chances with the cadences of his soliloquies, circling around the character without inhabiting the core. Scott’s Jim comes across as affable and a bit dorky, like the straight man in a horror movie, but the “golden boy” never arrives. The performances appear to still be maturing toward a more nuanced realization (perhaps not entirely possible in such a short run). There are some problems with diction and motivation early on, but as the play progresses, the actors are swept up in the language and psychological insight of the writing.
Rose (left) as Laura listens to the dreams of Grace as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie.
Whether one takes to Pendleton and Bloch’s eerie production is a matter of taste. Dramatically, it enhances one specific aspect of the play—Laura’s awkwardness and the family’s isolation because of it. This is particularly apparent in the heartbreaking scene when Jim comes to visit. Instead of rain in the background as indicated by the stage directions, it starts to thunder. Laura, wearing a white dress, looks as if she’s going to be married or buried alive. As her scene alone with Jim plays out in candlelight next to the delicate, glowing glass menagerie on the table, the collision of her fragility with his earnest unavailability is literally shattering.
The actors seem to glow under Wolf’s lighting, turning misty and thus intensifying the memory aspect. Sean Hagerty’s music via a synthesized harmonium and Jesse Meckl’s sound design add to the chilling effects. In spite of the creepy production, the core of the play remains soft, tender, vulnerable and poetic.
The years have been kind to The Glass Menagerie. While it is explicitly set during the Great Depression, its themes of loss and isolation, as well as the tormented dynamics of the single-parent family in a time of economic insecurity, are still painfully contemporary and relevant. Throw in the modern understanding of homosexuality, disability and mental illness, as well as our own fascination with the “greatest generation,” and the play shines even more brightly. Like Laura’s delicate glass collection sitting on the table illuminated by stage light and moonbeams, the play refracts and reflects our hopes and repressed desires, and every now and then when the crystal glare hits our eyes, we squint in pain at the crushing past that is better left buried.
The Glass Menagerie runs through Oct. 20 at The Wild Project (195 E. 3rd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and at 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit theglassmenagerieplay.com.
