Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Shattered Illusions
Hearts may break in JBU's ‘Glass Menagerie'
Every play, even the most iconic, was once brand new. In the April 2, 1945, New York Times review of “The Glass Menagerie,” critic Lewis Nichols says “warm and tender reports from Chicago” were “for once … not in error.” “‘Memorable’ is an overworked word,” he says, but adds it’s the only one for the production. “‘The Glass Menagerie,’ like spring, is a pleasure to have in the neighborhood.”
Eighty years later, says Josiah Wallace, John Brown University associate professor of speech and theater, the Tennessee Williams drama continues to be one of the most produced plays in the world.
“Williams has expertly crafted character, dialogue, and plot action that powerfully pulls the audience into the world of the play,” he enthuses. “He delicately mixes the heartrending with a significant amount of comedy, and leaves the viewer emotionally arrested and grasping to understand how to balance personal ambition with familial care.
“In short, the play is powerful, and the characters’ ambitions and insecurities are the sort of enduring themes that are forever paired with what it means to be human.”
“Upon my first reading,
I was surprised with how contemporary the play felt,” says Tanner Zank, a sophomore working as assistant director and dramaturg. “It deals with themes of isolation and guilt that I think will still feel resonant and timely to a modern audience.”
The premise of Williams’ play centers on Amanda Wingfield, described by Dramatists Play Service as “a faded remnant of Southern gentility who now lives in a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, who has a physical handicap and debilitating shyness. When Amanda convinces Tom to bring home from his workplace a ‘gentleman caller’ for Laura, the illusions that Tom, Amanda, and Laura have each created in order to make life bearable collapse about them.”
“Laura is a character trapped by her circumstances and her mind,” says sophomore actress Ella Fletcher, who came to JBU from Redlands, Calif. “I like to think I am bolder and more autonomous than Laura, but there is something to learn from her worldview. This role is teaching me compassion and understanding for people whose brains work differently than mine.”
Wallace says choosing the drama for the winter play at JBU was easy.
“I’ve been assigning scenes from this play for my acting students for years, and every single time they perform the text I marvel at its power and sensitivity to the human spirit,” he says. “Presenting this play is a wonderful opportunity for student actors to grow in their craft and share an important piece of theatrical literature with an audience. In a world where mental health and social isolation are growing crises, I was also struck by how this classic play powerfully explores these issues.”
Wallace is taking the description of “The Glass Menagerie” as a memory play to heart.
“Williams’ original text is actually full of expressionistic descriptions of the action,” Wallace says. “[So] a completely modern, realist approach to the text limits its potential.
“While our approach to the acting is fairly traditional,” he goes on, “the production design leans into the oppressively askew architecture of things like the original production of Elmer Rice’s expressionistic ‘The Adding Machine,’ and the integration of magical lighting effects and multi-surface projections are key pieces to our presentation of the play. I’m particularly pleased with a glass brick motif that we were able suspend into the set’s walls. We are leaning into the cloudy nature of memory and the unbalanced nature of the character’s personal struggles.”
Wallace says he expects audiences to wonder about the future for Laura and her brother, but “I mostly hope that they recognize our emotional need for theatrical experiences like those found in plays like ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ The story doesn’t wrap itself up easily, and I hope that it sticks with them in the way that enduring pieces of art should.”