The Glass Menagerie @ Circle Theatre
—Martha Heimberg
Circle Theatre mounted a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in their first season forty years ago. Saturday night, the critically lauded Fort Worth theater celebrated that anniversary with a fresh, revealing production of Williams’ breakthrough play, originally staged in 1944 in Chicago and directed here with verve and subtlety by Natalie King.
Closely autobiographical, Williams’ play is set in a cramped St. Louis apartment during the Great Depression. Cigarettes are 15 cents a pack and a shoe factory worker makes $65 a month. We learn this early on as Amanda Wingfield (the marvelous and clarion-voiced Denise Lee) babbles on about her grand Southern Belle past, and frets about the hard times she’s dealing with in the present.
The future isn’t all that promising, either. Her handsome, wandering husband, whose portrait remains prominently displayed, left long ago, and Amanda has a hard row to hoe for a woman trained to attract “17 gentlemen callers in one evening.” Now she tries to sell serial fiction, via magazine subscriptions, to acquaintances from DAR meetings.
Amanda’s unmarried daughter Laura (Ana Hagedorn), a secretarial school dropout, is shy to the point of paralysis, and looks to remain a pitiful spinster because she fears people will laugh at her limp. Amanda depends on the meager salary of her aimless son Tom (Savier Losornio) to keep the bills paid for the family. She nearly smothers spooked Laura with constant demands for some display of man-catching “southern charm,” and bullies the daylights out of Tom to go to night school in “accountancy”—or at least to bring home a suitable gentleman for Laura, whose only respite from the battering reality of her mother is staring at her collection of tiny glass animals for hours. What’s a poor mother to do?
Lee’s determined Amanda puts her shoulders back, her heart on her sleeve, and sets her formidable will to shaping her family’s future via a special evening planned to capture a husband for Laura. Tom has invited Jim (Tommy Stuart), a clerk from the factory, home for dinner.
Even before her all-out, fluttery, fantastical demonstration of “nimble” allure at the dinner party for Laura’s “gentleman caller,” Lee’s iron-willed Amanda is in terrifying control of the stage and the lives of her children. The scene where she forces them to mind their manners at dinner and chew each bite carefully before swallowing is so excruciating, it’s hard not to turn away. Yet Lee fully portrays the piteous financial desperation of a single woman of her era in Amanda’s bouncy, pleading phone calls to sell magazines for a few bucks.
Losornio, a recent graduate of SMU’s theater program, makes a dark-eyed and handsome Tom, showing an actor’s ease and confidence in stepping from the role of narrator (of his own past) into the scene he’s remembering. He looks a little like the young Williams’, with a quiet sweetness and just a touch of the knowing poet’s swagger in his emotional encounters with his controlling mother.
Hagedorn’s Laura is a study in still suffering and quiet humiliation. Her whole body curls to its center, like an animal of prey protecting itself under attack, when she says, “Yes, Mother.” As the collector of the glass menagerie of the title, her fragility creates both love and an exhausting sense of responsibility for her brother in the tense dynamic fueled by Amanda’s relentless will. But in a few glimmering moments when the lights dim, and the glass creatures shimmer to illuminate her face. Laura smiles and comes alive as a woman lit by something beautiful outside herself.
Stuart’s garrulous and jovial Jim is, as his character declares, a man of earnest purpose and poise, a skill he’s cultivating in an evening speech class. The beautifully played scene toward the end of the play, in which Jim recognizes Laura’s delicate beauty, is perfectly paced and so tender in its revelation and sad denouement, you may want a hanky or a hand to hold tightly.
Kudos to set designer Bob Lavallee for opening up the small stage for movement, and yet creating the intimacy required for a family drama. Lighting designer Kat Fahrenthold and projection designer Adam Chamberlin evoke myriad gentleman callers on the back scrim, and then the green open vistas of the deep Delta, as Amanda recalls her malaria-fevered dance card on the night she met her husband and her fate. Sound designer Brian McDonald’s era-appropriate music becomes part of the scene, but is never intrusive.
Costume designer Ryan Matthieu Smith decks Amanda out in white glory for her candlelit supper, and gives shy Laura an appropriate Peter Pan collar to cower in. Intimacy Coordinator Ashley White helps make the critical romance scene fleeting, lovely—and still safe!
Shattering and shimmering, Circle Theatre’s 40th anniversary revival of Williams’ great play still breaks glass…and hearts.
Running from October 28th-November 20
