Matthew J. Palm: ‘Menagerie’ offers strong memories.
In many productions, “The Glass Menagerie” can be as fragile as Laura’s breakable figurines.
Fading Southern belle Amanda has a fragile grip on reality; her daughter Laura’s mental state is even more delicate. The very nature of memory — and “The Glass Menagerie is so beautifully a memory play — is fragile as thoughts and images drift ephemerally through our minds.
Even writer Tennessee Williams, through Tom’s narration, tells us that memory plays are soft around the edges, with dim lighting and distant music.
Yet Beth Marshall Presents’ production goes against that grain with attention-grabbing results. A refreshing jolt of strength runs through the heart of this staging and makes it possible — and exciting — to look at this classic anew.
For the Garden Theatre, Marshall directs her excellent cast on a strippeddown stage. There’s no glass in sight, but Kenny Howard’s shrewd sound design captures the noises of memory — the way a door slams, the distinctive cranking of an old Victrola.
Projections enhance emotions. When Amanda recalls a love of yellow jonquils, images of the flower fill the stage. And a photo of the long-absent Wingfield patriarch looms larger than life over the troubled family he abandoned.
His wife, Amanda, deludes herself that things will be fine even as her family sinks further into decline during the Great Depression. Son Tom, an aspiring writer, seeks escape from his colorless life in the adventures at the movies.
Daughter Laura is so painfully shy that she can barely interact with people, preferring the company of her glass animals.
Anthony Pyatt Jr., who raged a year ago in a local production of “A Clockwork Orange,” keeps Tom’s fire mostly on the inside — but the audience is always aware of his flickering anger. Tom’s exterior detachment adds to the tension, though Pyatt could show a bit more regret in his narration.
Cami Miller’s Amanda is a steel magnolia — flowery and fluttery but with a core of iron. That her inner strength is based on ignoring reality only makes Miller’s performance more compelling.
Anneliese Moon and Zach Lane, as Laura and her “gentleman caller” Jim, do the best work I’ve seen from them. She’s sinking fast as her eyes plead for help; he’s a hopeful lifeline torn between tenderness and discomfiture.
Jamie DeHay’s striking set displays words from Williams’ text at key moments, an idea I thought would be too slick for the haze of memory. But I was wrong; people remember things that are said and things that can’t be unsaid. And I will remember this very fine production for a long time to come.