The Glass Menagerie
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Kevin Hagan
At the Greenhouse Theater Center in Chicago
Produced by Shattered Globe Theatre
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on October 11, 2008
This review contains spoilers.
Years ago, I heard Edward Albee deliver a speech in which he said that his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about illusion. But compared to Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, it seems to me that Virginia Woolf is more about fabrication for the purpose of distraction. The characters in Menagerie fall into their illusions by reason of circumstance, and the resulting distraction happens to be a palliative accident, which, like a strong painkiller, becomes an addiction.
Any high-school student who's studied Menagerie knows the play to be rich in symbolism. There are so many symbols, in fact, that the playwright probably didn't even intend some of them to bear such a burden, although he did say that they abound in this play. How a theatre company treats the symbols determines the complexion of the illusions, and, consequently, how those illusions strike an audience. This is the direction from which I'm responding to Shattered Globe's current production of this wistful American masterpiece. On the reasonable assumption that anyone reading this critique is already familiar with the play, I'll forego the story summary.
Back to the symbolism. There's the fire escape, unicorn, Paradise Dance Hall, candelabrum, "Ave Maria", the shattered glass, and so on. But the heart of the symbolism, if you will, is the titular metaphor itself, the glass menagerie. This is Laura's fragile imaginary world, her escape from the restrictions of her physical disability, from the embarrassment of her social awkwardness, and from the distress of her family's financial insecurity. In this world, she retreats from the fact that she lacks both her mother's strength to cope with life's troubles and her brother's freedom to flee from his frustration at home.
Allison Batty, who played Laura Wingfield, did not convey an appropriately strong nexus between her character and the menagerie. Although her Laura was indeed timid, Batty gave her an air of emotional independence, perhaps through intonation, gesture, or attitude, making Laura something of an enigma. But by "enigma", I'm not implying complexity in the character as much as I am inconsonance in her interpretation. In Batty's Laura, there seemed to be two different characters with a common name and a common physical disability, one character shrinking from situations that require an emotional spine, and the other character rising to opportunities for manipulating her mother and brother. The duality I sensed in Laura wasn't the result of hypocrisy in the woman's character, or of a streak of sociopathy, or even of what psychiatry currently calls "dissociative identity disorder". It just felt like a mistake.
Given the centrality of the menagerie to the story, Laura's reaction to it should have been more proportionate. The unicorn, representing Laura, is "different" among the animals in her collection -- and it doesn't complain. When the unicorn's horn breaks, however, Laura loses some of her diffidence to become more like others, although Batty chose not to change Laura's demeanor accordingly. The disappointing consequence was loss of the impact of an otherwise powerful metaphor.
One of the two strongest performances came from David Dastmalchian in the role of Tom. Dastmalchian superimposed a lush gracefulness onto Williams' characteristic lyricism, creating a rhythmic ease, a calm acknowledgment of the reality in which Tom and his family live, a reality that consists of antipodes: strength and weakness, hope and despair, compassion and callousness, toughness and fragility. Dastmalchian elegantly and skillfully fashioned a frustrated poet in search of adventure, living under the illusion that the movies, and then the Merchant Marine, would energize his insipid life and stop what he perceives to be the suffocation of his creativity. All this was preparation for the moment when Dastmalchian showed his character to understand the relationship between Laura's shattered glass and his broken responsibilities to her.
In the second of the two strongest performances, Linda Reiter portrayed Tom and Laura's mother, Amanda, as a woman who waggles between illusion and reality. Reiter was faithful to the paradoxes in Amanda's character, such as her devotion to Tom and Laura at the same time that she fails to see how different they are from her. Reiter's Amanda was nagging, determined, and frivolous, and she was just as convincing as a mother living a vicarious life as Reiter's Helen was a mother living a genuine life in Shattered Globe's earlier production of A Taste of Honey.
Reiter payed special attention to the symbolism in Amanda's persona. For me, the finest example of this lay in the theatrical flourish she gave to Amanda's repeated boasting about having entertained 17 gentlemen callers one Sunday afternoon long ago. We don't know, of course, about Amanda's veracity, but Reiter's delivery ensured that her claim became irrelevant in the face of the illusory happiness the thought brought to her character. If Amanda shed her illusions, she'd have to acknowledge the low probability of Laura's ever being liberated from her dependency on mother and brother.
Jim O'Connor, of course, is at first a possible knight in shining armor for Laura, but he turns out to be simple and average. Mike Falevits played Jim as a sheepish man easily maneuvered by banal psychological cheerleading. Falevits focused on the "ordinariness" of his character, allowing him to symbolize "extraordinariness" to Laura, while he confidently helped her break free of her world of illusion and dependency. Ironically, and more importantly for the symbolism, the fact that Falevits kept Jim a normal man equated him with the broken unicorn, which, had Batty been in tune with her role, would have represented the turning point in Laura's self-image.
In his production notes for Menagerie, Tennessee Williams summarizes his perspective on producing a "memory play":
Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.
Hagan and Shattered Globe did justice to Williams' vision by creating the murky and shadowy atmosphere of this "memory play". In accord with the author's direction, they included music that resonates with the beauty and breakability of spun glass, dim unrealistic lighting to evoke a sense of memory, and the projection of words and images onto a screen to clarify the narrative. In fact, if the theme of Menagerie is the universal truth that unfulfilled longings are an inescapable fact of human life, then the first screen, on which we see the question "Oł sont les neiges?", takes on a particular poignancy.