The Madison Repertory Theater has bitten off a bit more than it can chew in its undertaking of Tennessee Williams’ difficult play “The Glass Menagerie.” This is a self-proclaimed “memory play” which demands its audience to leave the familiar constraints of reality and embark on a fantastical journey through the minds and dreams of the characters.
The script is extremely literary and requires a set of strong actors to reach all the depths of its audacity and subtlety. Although the Rep’s cast makes a noble attempt, they only scratch the surface of the intricate drama.
The plot concerns only four characters. Tom is the narrator and dreamweaver who spends his days toiling in a shoe factory to provide for his family, after his father abandoned them, while spending his nights at saloons and movie theaters.
He is joined on the stage by Amanda, his overly doting and obsessive mother. Amanda is a tragic caricature of her former glory as a demure southern belle. The character of Amanda bears more than a passing resemblance to Williams’ other famous anti-heroine, Blanche from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Both Amanda and Blanche are over-the-top in their self-centeredness — the audience and the other characters grow to resent Amanda’s overbearing stage presence.
The family is rounded out by Laura, Tom’s painfully shy and disabled sister. While the play revolves around Tom and Amanda, the play is ostensibly about Laura and her futile struggle for self-esteem. Laura embodies the play’s title: She is as fragile and lifeless as the glass figurines she obsesses over.
As the play unfolds in Tom’s memory and on the stage, Laura’s inability to interact with the world around her becomes painfully evident. Amanda develops an infatuation with the idea that Laura must find a husband, lest she end up alone and unhappy. But, as the goal of finding a husband for Laura becomes paramount to the characters and they slowly unite behind a common goal, the play slows to a painful crawl. Unable to connect with the audience, the actors’ sense of urgency comes across as artificial — made all the more awkward by the production’s ever-slowing pace.
Enter the play’s fourth character, Jim, the gentleman caller. Jim is the sole voyager from the real world. He slices his way brutally through the dream life of these desperate characters. He not only rescues Laura from her dreary and dull life but saves the play from following a similar destiny. The character is complex; the actor, Noah Brody, is smooth and skilled. Brody breathes new life onto the stage, just as the audience is ready to give up on the rest of the uninspiring cast.
In addition to the play’s four speaking characters, director Scott Glasser, who is leaving the Rep after this production, elected to add a fifth character to the mix, albeit a silent one. In Williams’ stage directions, the figure of the father who abandoned his family hangs in a portrait on the wall. It is meant to be lit at key moments to comment on the magnitude of loss that their father created. Glasser instead opts to have an actor play the father role. He walks on stage and among the characters throughout the play like a ghost forever haunting them.
Glasser’s last production is not lacking in creativity. Like the play itself, the stage’s props are meant to be imagined. Keeping within the production’s oft-repeated themes of glass, Glasser uses a live Glass harmonica played by Dennis James for the play’s music, which is ethereal but forced.
Like the entire play, the idea is creative, but it doesn’t work.
