Scott Glasser directed his first play for the Madison Repertory Theater 10 years ago; it was Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Now, a decade later, he is retiring from his longstanding position as the Rep’s artistic director. Williams’ other famous work, “The Glass Menagerie,” will be Glasser’s last production at the Rep.
The Badger Herald: What kinds of unique things did you choose to do with setting and staging?
Scott Glasser: Eventually, I said we don’t need doors, we don’t need fire escapes or any of that stuff. We don’t need reality because what we have is a landscape that these characters exist in. So right away that causes problems because we have a small theater, but it looks huge in this version. So what (scenic designer) Frank Schneeberger and I sort of developed is a landscape that is an abstraction of fractured glass with all these shards sticking up. The image comments on the fragility of these characters and the feeling that we are standing on something that could fall through at any moment.
BH: So the set is in effect a metaphor for the characters?
SG: Yeah, for their existence. There is this netherworld between the reality that they can’t deal with and the need for survival in an unforgiving social environment. None of them fit in; they all feel like outsiders, so they retreat to behavior and dreams that make sense to them.
BH: You did something interesting with the character of the father, who is only supposed to appear in a photograph on the wall.
SG: We have an actor playing him who haunts their dreams. He appears and disappears to each of the characters at key moments; they see him and they feel him. He’s there commenting on them, but he doesn’t speak.
BH: This is a particularly challenging play to direct because it’s a “memory play” — can you comment on that?
SG: I’ve been disappointed by a lot of productions of this play. I went back to Williams’ writings and his notes about it and looked at what he had intended. We usually think of this play as being bound by realism, the fire escape, the walls, the brick, all of that. But the play itself is much more lyrical. It’s almost like a series of dream images that appear and disappear into the fog.
I looked at that, and I started paring the unnecessary things away from the play and also decided that really what the play is about is the interior landscape of these people, it’s about their hopes, dreams and fantasies. It’s an alternate reality where the characters have a sense of themselves in a much more self-gratifying world.
You have a lot of layers to this play, the character’s memories, and then the narrator is Tom. This is Tom’s memory of events, some of which he didn’t experience. So he’s imagining scenes that he never witnessed based on some of the information he has and his own wishes for the other characters. He’s piecing together the story of his leaving home, what led up to his leaving and the complicated relationships that he has with his mom and his sister. So I think that opening up the play to memory and images, both Tom’s and the characters, enables the audience to get inside these people.
