Williams classic cast in a new light
The Glass Menagerie
★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)
Written by Tennessee Williams.
Directed by Laszlo Berczes.
Until October 12 at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. ShawFest.com or 1-800-511-7429. Tom says that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, his memory play, so the other characters that populate it are exaggerated versions of themselves; his mother Amanda and sister Laura are “sentimental” and “not realistic.” He distinguishes the gentleman caller Jim, who escapes this exaggeration because he is an “emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from.”
But Laszlo Berczes’s production of Tennessee Williams’s best-known play, commonly considered to be thinly-veiled autobiography, presents a different argument. Each of these four characters inhabit their own worlds, and some are capable of navigating between each others’. The device of positioning the play as Tom’s memory and not an actual representation of real events may have given Williams more flexibility and permission in writing about his own mother and sister, but it also gives the play, renowned and moving as it is, an uneven playing field.
In some ways, Tom languishes in guilt for leaving them to pursue writing in a more exciting city, in others, he justifies this decision. But in an exciting experiment, Berczes’s production wonders in a quiet and subtle way what would happen if Tom’s introduction wasn’t an explanation of the rules of the game, but a man’s — and an artist’s — attempt to control everyone’s story as his own. Small shifts in staging and performance choices don’t get in the way of a play that has always worked, and still does in the Shaw Festival’s first production of it, but adds a satisfying layer that lets the female characters escape the constraints that Tom’s perspective otherwise would.
As the audience files in, Tom (or is it Andre Sills, the actor who plays Tom) does magic tricks for the audience — he’s already trying to control how we see things, what we think is real, playing the charming narrator. When the play begins, Amanda (Allegra Fulton) and Laura (Julia Course) are wearing similarly conservative outfits of dull-coloured cardigans and long skirts, with a painted effect on the trim as if the oxidization on Balazs Cziegler’s shoebox in-the-round set has seeped onto the humans inside it. Sills, in a salmon coloured long-sleeve shirt, stands out in a way that feels obtuse — he’s trying too hard to paint them with the same brush.
But the illusion doesn’t last. Course is an extremely wellrounded Laura, not shy by nature, only when confronted with new people, and entirely in her element when interacting with her collection of glass figurines. Course’s focus on the animals, speaking quickly to herself as she moves them about the apartment, suggests a deeply rich interior life that productions have been tempted to skim over.
Fulton’s Amanda isn’t the tyrant Tom needs her to be. In fact, in their first scene at dinner, he’s the one who snaps at her first. It’s true that Amanda does spend a good deal of her text focused on her glory days as a Southern belle, before her husband left her with two kids to fend for herself, but neither Fulton or Berczes judge her for that. In the second act, in dressing up for their dinner guest, she is wearing a dress that’s young for her, but she doesn’t look gaudy in Hanne Loosen’s yellow silk gown, becoming of Belle in Beauty and the Beast. She looks sweet. She is sweet. She is genuinely charming, leaning into her Southern drawl in a romantic singsongy way.
Contrary to Tom’s initial description, Jonathan Tan’s Jim is probably the least realistic performance, but still enthralling. There’s little part of his Jim that isn’t affected by his career ambitions and his night classes in public speaking. It’s as if he’s treating this dinner invitation as a practice job interview, and the beginnings of his conversation with Laura as a personal challenge — a test of his newly practiced social skills.
That said, the scene that unfolds between Laura and Jim is excruciatingly romantic, a salve to Course’s gutting portrayal of anxiety and fear upon Jim’s arrival (Course looked so pained I wanted to jump from my seat and hug her). Their dance in the living room expands into a fullblown waltz that bursts through the confines of the small set, which Laura skips in and out of, drawing laughs from Tom who’s watching from a dark corner, and a gentle and proud smile from Amanda, who watches from the kitchen. This is certainly a peek into Laura’s memory, in which we experience the thrill of a blossoming love.
Laura loves her glass collection because of the way the light shines through the figures, but Berczes’s production feels like it’s situated in a prism, rather than a glass box. Instead of seeing things clearly, we’re seeing perspectives separate, rebound, and intertwine with each other again; a more complicated idea of whose memory we typically get to see on stage.