‘Glass Menagerie’ is fragile in places, but polishes a classic
S.F. Playhouse gives new life to Tennessee Williams’ 1944 gem
Crack open “The Glass Menagerie,” and you might find a dreamscape inside. At San Francisco Playhouse, Tennessee Williams’ 1944 masterpiece is like a series of nested worlds with the tops broken off.
A cramped, bare-bones apartment rises like a tiny island center stage. When our narrator Tom Wingfield (Jomar Tagatac) jumps off it onto the stage floor, it’s like he’s plunging into the cold of the subconscious’ ocean. Hovering above is the cursive neon sign across the alley from his apartment, itself encased by a giant gold frame — perhaps it’s the movie house proscenium to which Tom always runs off. But Christopher Fitzer’s beguiling scenic design unfolds into yet another layer: the unadorned walls of the theater’s backstage. Actors wait on the playing space’s fringes when they’re not in scenes; any real escape — from the Wingfields’ poverty, from their obligations and history, from each other’s infuriating personalities — is impossible.
Auteurs splash paint on Shakespeare all the time. Now, in a production that opened Wednesday, May 8, director Jeffrey Lo reveals Williams as a canvas that’s just as wide and ripe. Even if his brushstrokes don’t always jell, it thrills to reimagine a text familiar from high school syllabi as a place where anything can happen.
In the memory play that gave rise to the genre, Tom is aching for adventure and poetry, his sister Laura (Nicole Javier) wants to hide her limp from the world, and their mother Amanda (Susi Damilano) doesn’t understand why her kids can’t conform to the narrow paths she has laid out for them. If she could chew their food properly for them, she would.
When they can’t take it any more, lights by Wen-Ling Liao might abruptly turn yellow, as if characters can no longer see straight. Or the static of Laura’s beloved victrola might crescendo till it singes to a crisp. But other sound choices by designer James Ard are not so felicitous; one sequence so evokes a chase in a contemporary action movie that you halfexpect Jason Bourne to burst onstage.
Auteurs splash paint on Shakespeare all the time. Now ... director Jeffrey Lo reveals Williams as a canvas that’s just as wide and ripe.
A forced quality pops up elsewhere. Tom keeps scribbling in a notebook, ripping off pages and thrusting them toward others who ignore the offers — all as if the production itself didn’t know what to make of the choice.
Still, individual moments sing. Tagatac has the power to take the whole world’s grief on his shoulders and mourn it for you. When Damilano’s Amanda tries to get him to sit up straight, it’s as if she fancies herself a sculptor who could mold his pecs to his shoulder if she wanted.
When Jim (William Thomas Hodgson) gives the family a brief reason to hope as a “gentleman caller” for Laura, you might appreciate anew how his social graciousness isn’t a skill but a soul-deep generosity. Each time she says something awkward — revealing, for instance, that she attributes consciousness to the glass figurines she treasures as pets — he indulges her with a “yes, and” prompt. But then, when he accidentally breaks one of them, she’s able to come out of her shell and return the gift — to find something to say that makes the situation right, in a line that Javier makes as devastating as anything you’ll ever hear on a stage: “Glass breaks so easily.”
If sometimes the momentum in this production proves just as fragile, such scenes supply ample compensation. Watch as Javier’s Laura gets kissed, her expression unclouding for the first time — like she’s just breathed fresh air, tasted clean water, after a life of soot and grime.