THEATER REVIEW: 'The Glass Menagerie'

Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” offers a weird, refracted glimpse of loss and tough decisions. His menagerie is now on view at the Players Theatre in a Two Chairs Theatre Company production.

The story behind it is straightforward. The time is 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor; the place, a shabby flat in St. Louis, where a young man named Tom (Dylan Jones) lives with his mother and sister. His mother, Amanda (Lynne Doyle), is a domineering, nonstop talker who fills every inch of psychological space. His sister, Laura (Lauren Ward), is damaged goods. She has a slight limp and a crippling shyness — today, we’d call it social anxiety disorder. To keep a roof over their heads, Tom sacrifices his dreams of being a writer and works at a soul-crushing factory job. The stasis changes when Tom brings Jim (Joshua Brin), a “gentleman caller,” home from the factory. Jim and Laura make a brief connection — and then he informs her that he’s engaged. Laura loses hope. Amanda turns on Tom — and confirms his resolution to join the Merchant Marines. Like his father before him, he walks away from his family.

Around this simple story, Williams weaves a complex contrapuntal fugue of dialogue, implied thought, imagery and reaction. Tom functions as his own Greek chorus, periodically stepping out on the fire escape and commenting on the action.

Williams called “The Glass Menagerie” a “memory play.” It obliquely spoke of his own painful memories. His sister, Rose, was a schizophrenic who endured a botched lobotomy during a time that he’d left his family. (“Botched lobotomy.” Quite a phrase, isn’t it?) Tom stands on his own, but he’s also a stand-in for Williams.
The play reflects the mind’s never perfect remembrances of things past.

Director Elliott Raines captures the play’s indeterminate essence and gives us naturalistic performances in a limbo setting of tenuous physicality. (Communicated nicely by Martha Kesler’s bare-bones sets and Kaylene MacCaw’s evocative period costumes.) To further illustrate this iffy world, the glass animals and other objects are sometimes physically present; sometimes mimed. This nicely conveys the sense of an imperfectly remembered scene. But there’s nothing iffy about the performances.

Fine performances, yes, but fine performances can miss the point. The acting style is honest — that’s the point. The actors never go over the top. Tom’s often portrayed with confrontational fury. Jones plays him as a man who’s learned to suppress his reactions and only occasionally explodes — you can tell when Tom’s biting his tongue. I’ve seen versions of Amanda resembling the Red Queen in “Through the Looking Glass.”
Doyle’s portrayal is soft and ostensibly sweet; she’s a passive-aggressive bully. Laura doesn’t make a big deal of her limp — or indicate her anxiety with nail-biting gestures for the folks in the back row. Her character’s trying to hold it together, trying desperately to seem normal. Jim is usually a Dale Carnegie-cliché-spouting bore; here, we see he’s a decent guy with a decent heart and mind. In every case, the actors aren’t playing off-the-shelf Tennessee Williams characters derived from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor movies. On their stage, Tom, Amanda, Laura and Jim are what they’d be in the real world. Honest is the only word for it.

You may think you’ve seen “The Glass Menagerie” before, but you really haven’t.

Don’t miss this intelligent, original, gutsy, honest production.

IF YOU GO
“The Glass Menagerie” runs through Oct 12, in a Two Chairs Theatre Company production at Players Theatre, 838 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. For more information, call 365-2494 or visit theplayers.org.