Rep’s haunting ‘Menagerie’ peers through darkened glass
Complexity of family life is explored
Family is impossible; finding your own voice apart from it is indispensable. But there’s nothing like its absence to remind you of the reasons it remains forever present: the love, protection and support that it embodies. Most of all, there’s the love, however mangled its expression.
In the devastating Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” that opened Friday night, director Mark Clements has been true to Tennessee Williams’ great play and troubled life, both featuring a family that Williams desperately needed to leave but never ceased to love.
That push-pull is driven by Amanda, whom Hollis Resnik presents in all her many-sided complexity.
Yes, she’s an annoying chatterbox. But in accelerating the pace of Amanda’s seemingly ceaseless patter, Resnik captures the underlying anxiety of a woman on the edge, economically and emotionally. She talks, preemptively and exhaustively, to keep the darkness at bay.
And yes, she can be both manipulative and misguided in advancing her agenda, but Resnik never lets us forget what drives it: Her fervent love for her two children. There’s as much love — and as many hugs — here as I’ve seen from a “Menagerie” in a long time.
For all that, Ryan Imhoff makes clear why Tom had to go. Much as he loves his mother, she’s driving him crazy, as is the dead-end job that’s slowly killing his dreams, one day at a time.
Imhoff adeptly toggles between this young Tom — softer in cadence and demeanor if still angry and desperate at being trapped — and the narrating Tom, one decade older and harder, his youthful rage having curdled and grown bitter.
Sporting a sailor’s pea coat and cap, the older Tom looks worse for wear. But it’s Imhoff’s flattened voice and occasional deadpan demeanor that mark how time has ravaged the hopes of a man who has lost touch with his best self.
There’s never any doubt in this “Menagerie” that Tom’s best self is symbolized by Laura, the sister who wasn’t as lucky and didn’t get out.
Making a rare but welcome Milwaukee appearance, Kelsey Brennan reminds us that Laura is both slightly lame and shy, while credibly suggesting how much more Laura might have become. In her great scene with Brandon Dahlquist’s Gentleman Caller, Brennan literally dances to life, swept off her feet with the joyful recognition that she, too, might walk in light. No such luck. “Menagerie” begins and ends in the dark. What light there is plays off Philip Witcomb’s stunning set of smoky glass, which conjures half-seen ghosts of a sister and mother whose voices sometimes give off an eerie echo, making clear to us that they’re not really there. Except, of course, that they are. They play on in Tom’s mind, harrowing him and haunting us, forever.
“The Glass Menagerie” continues through April 9 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, visit www.milwaukeerep.com. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.