‘Creative crush’ led Field to ‘Menagerie’

‘Wingfield very complicated’

NEW YORK, March 11, (Agencies): Sally Field had a chance to cross “The Glass Menagerie” off her bucket list 13 years ago. It didn’t take.

The Emmy- and Oscar-winner is once again playing Amanda Wingfield, the fearsome Southern belle at the heart of the Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece. Field may have played her at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2004, and yet, here she is, playing her again on Broadway.

“It is really right up at the top — the finest American play ever written,” Field said. “There’s no doubt about that. I think that it invites investigation time and time again.” Of Wingfield, she added: “She’s a very complicated character to play.” Field, 70, follows other celebrated actors who have landed on Broadway in recent years to tackle roles they had earlier tried on, including Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard,” Jessica Lange in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Jeff Daniels in “Blackbird.”

For Field, it was a simple decision: “There are very few really interesting characters for older women in theater or in film or even, honestly, in literature. I mean, there are some but you have to look for them.” “The Glass Menagerie “centers on an aging, overpowering mother who hopes her unhappy son can fulfill her dreams of finding the perfect “gentleman caller” for her shy and damaged daughter. The last Broadway revival was in 2013, starring Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto.

Field

This revival is directed by Tony Award-winner Sam Gold and co-stars two-time Tony Award winning actor and director Joe Mantello, playing Field’s son, along with Finn Wittrock and Madison Ferris.

Field admits she has a “creative crush” on Gold, the much-admired director of the musical “Fun Home” who last year had explored the work in Amsterdam. Adding Mantello was just icing on the cake. “Of course I would always consider doing Amanda again but under these circumstances it was better than good,” she said.

Gold couldn’t believe his luck to entice Field. “I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” he said. “She was like, ‘I just want to get back on stage.’ And I was really excited about that play, which is her favorite part. So it just worked out to be the easiest decision ever made.”

“The Glass Menagerie” that has emerged at the Belasco Theatre is more bare-boned than previous productions, according to Field. “It isn’t your mother’s ‘Glass Menagerie,’” she said. “It is a harder look at it.”

She won Academy Awards for “Norma Rae” and “Places in the Heart” and was Oscar nominated for her Mary Todd in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” She also spent five seasons in ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters,” winning an Emmy in its first season.

Field, whose only other appearance on Broadway was as a replacement in 2002 in “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia” by Edward Albee, is a huge theater fan, seeing as much as she can, often multiple times.

“It’s all worth seeing. I think right now, American theater is really exciting. I think in New York — offBroadway, on Broadway — it’s a very exciting time. And I might add, I think, an important time for artists, for voices, for what theater is — for the dangerous nature of theater.”

Of all the plays in the American canon, “The Glass Menagerie” seems a most unlikely candidate for deconstruction. But that doesn’t deter Gold (“Fun Home,” “Othello”) from laying hands on this Tennessee Williams gem and subjecting it to a severe reinterpretation — thereby hugely challenging the efforts of a very keen Sally Field.

The production design immediately telegraphs Gold’s reductive approach to the playwright’s 1944 masterwork. Andrew Lieberman’s austere set is exposed to the paint-blackened bricks of the theater walls and dressed with a simple kitchen table set and a props cart. Adam Silverman’s pinpoint lighting adds to the severity of the design.

Like the stage setting, Williams’s play has been stripped to the gut, shorn of its lyrical accoutrements and reduced to its raw text. But a strategy that might illuminate other dramas disregards the fact that these embellishments — the harmonies of the language, the melodic accents, the music of nostalgia — are intrinsic to the writer’s plays, and especially to an intimate “memory play” like this one. Understated in the muted performances, the poetry is not quite lost, but diluted.

Joe Mantello, a Tony Award-winning director (for “Assassins” and “Take Me Out”) as well as an actor (“The Normal Heart,” “Angels in America”), is more mature than Tom Wingfield is typically played. The directorial choice to age the character not only distances Tom further in time from his mother Amanda (Sally Field) and sister Laura (Madison Ferris), but it also minimizes his sense of guilt.

Tom’s memories are not kind in this production. For one thing, the Wingfields’ modest apartment in St. Louis becomes positively threadbare in his recollection. Their financial “embarrassment” is portrayed as near-poverty. And when Amanda relives her social triumphs as a Southern belle, her son envisions her in an atrocious ball gown (designed in Pepto-Bismol pink by Wojciech Dziedzic) that robs her of her faded beauty and mocks her own fond memories of her past.

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It’s easy to imagine a project that could get J.J. Abrams’ name on a Broadway marquee. A “Star Wars” stage outing from megaproducer Disney Theatrical Productions, maybe. Or possibly a team-up with “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who composed the cantina tune for Abrams’ franchise-reviving “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

Harder to figure? The actual project that’s getting Abrams to Broadway: “The Play That Goes Wrong,” the goofy British backstage farce that begins previews in New York tonight. Abrams is one of the lead producers.

A comically disastrous play-within-a-play put on by the fictional Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, “The Play That Goes Wrong” seems a far cry from Abrams’ work on “Star Wars”, “Star Trek” and “Westworld.” But it turns out the story of his involvement in the production isn’t all that complicated — and it’s connected to “Force Awakens.”

“I was shooting ‘The Force Awakens’ in London and I had a free night,” he recalled recently. “There was something called ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ that had just opened, so I bought a ticket and I went to go see it and I hadn’t laughed that hard in the theater before.”