Theater Review—

Long Wharf’s Treatment Makes ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Worth Seeing

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — So you say you’ve seen The Glass Menagerie before, meaning that you don’t need to see it again, that you don’t want to see it again? No, maybe you only think you saw it. Maybe you read it in high school, or saw some college production, or a summer stock revival, or perhaps you caught a rerun of the movie on late night television, whatever… and you figure you’ve had all you want to hear of Amanda Wingfield whining about all the “gentlemen callers” whom she entertained in her salad days.

Maybe you even saw the less than memorable production in New Haven some years back, and you feel that entitles you to dismiss the Tennessee Williams “memory play” as dated, old hat, not the thing to waste a perfectly good afternoon or evening on.

Mistake! The current production on stage at New Haven’s Long Wharf , as directed by Gordon Edelstein, is so good that it is as if you had never seen it before, and at the same time, it makes it clear that Tennessee Williams remains one of the eternal figures in the pantheon of American theater.

The Glass Menagerie, Williams’S first big success, is highly autobiographical in its scope. Narrated by the lonely, drifting Tom Wingfield, it recalls the time years before, when, during the throes of the Great Depression, he chose to break loose from the chains of responsibility to his mother and sister, abandoning them to hopeless poverty.

Just as the playwright did in real life, Tom works at a mindless job in a warehouse, stealing moments in the toilet to jot down scraps of poetry, in order to support his fading southern belle of a mother, and his painfully shy sister in the St Louis tenement where they eke out a bare existence.

Amanda Wingfield alternates between prodding her children to make something of themselves: daughter Laura, who is enrolled in a business course, and Tom, urging him to bring home suitable men for Laura to meet.

Laura, who limps because of a crippled leg, is so fearful of people that she withdraws into a fantasy world centered around her collection of tiny glass animals. She infuriates her mother by revealing that she had stopped going to classes.

Amanda, burnished by inflated memories of her insouciant Mississippi girlhood when she had so many suitable gentlemen callers that they were falling over one another in pursuit of her attention (though she picked the one loser in the bunch, who eventually deserted her and the children), is determined that she will see her daughter follow the traditional southern path and marry an appropriate young man with prospects.

When Tom finally capitulates to her demands and invites home the one co-worker who doesn’t sneer at him for his dreamy bookish ways, Amanda is delighted. She sets her trap, pulling together alluring outfits for herself and Laura, bathing the room in candlelight, and preparing a tempting meal (which she pretends was cooked by Laura).

Things don’t go the way she planned…

Director Edelstein has chosen to set the play not in the St Louis tenement that is usually made the central focus. Instead, as befits what is billed as a memory play, it opens in an anonymous hotel room in some unnamed city. Pouring whiskey from a brown paper bag into a water glass, and fumbling with a cigarette, an older Tom sits down at a typewriter in the reflected blinking light of a neon sign on a rainy night.

As he dredges up the memories of his past, Jennifer Tipton’s lighting subtly transforms the stage into his old home. Through a wall that has become semi-transparent, Amanda appears, laughing brightly, and chattering to her children, her fantasies about prospects and hopes.

The quartet of actors who bring the story to life are absolutely brilliant, both as individuals and in the way they work together. The Wingfields are a family. Despite Amanda’s nagging and grandiose posturing, what comes clearly through is that she does love her children, and, however uncomfortable she makes them, they recognize the sincerity of her intentions.

When after much prodding and poking she gets Laura “ready” for company, and holds up a mirror to show the young woman her appearance, the reluctant smile of surprise that dawns on Keira Keeley’s face, and Judith Ivey’s proud nod of confirmation, speak volumes.

Patch Darragh as the harried and distracted Tom morphs into the melancholy transient, who has tried to forget, but still grieves over the knowledge of Laura’s pain.

And as Jim O’Connor, the up-and-coming gentleman caller, who has dreams of his own — which don’t include the Wingfields — Josh Charles is a mixture of shallow platitudes from a businessman’s self improvement course, and a perceptive sensitivity that leads to casual kindness without commitment.

This was a production that made the audience leap to their feet and cheer when it was over. Intense, rueful, at moments comic, and above all an exploration of the entanglements of memory, Long Wharf’s The Glass Menagerie is a play to go see.