Review: “Glass Menagerie” shines the nostalgic light of memory

Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie”, directed by Sam Gold, greets the audience with a bare stage with just a table and four chairs in one corner and a phonograph in the other. The carefully weeded out scenic design, by Andrew Lieberman, makes the black brick walls of the backstage visible, with radiator pipes running along them. The play starts unannounced with Joe Mantello, playing Tom, casually walking out on stage and starting his prologue with the house lights still on.

Tom’s modern casual attire by Wojciech Dziedzic, round glasses and boyish haircut further confuse the audience with its “50-something hipster” vibe. But after all, it is a “memory play”, and the incongruity between Mr. Mantello’s age, and 23-year old Tom from 1937 creates an effect of suspension between memory and reality, text and live theater. Tom looks like a theater director, putting on a play of his past.

photo by Julieta Cervantes

Most of the times he seems estranged from the other characters, as if looking at them through the prism of reflection. His attitude can be also attributed to the dull reality of his present. The necessity to work at the warehouse to provide for his aging mother, as well as his mentally and physically fragile sister, makes him feel trapped and tired. But in the rare moments when he hugs his two beloved women, with a longing more appropriate for a lover than a relative, it seems like Tom is reaching out to them through time.

When the show starts, you don’t know the rules of the game yet, especially if you are watching a preview. Is the fact that the house light goes off only after 30 minutes a technical malfunction or a deliberate decision by the lighting designer, Adam Silverman? It might be intentional, based on some of the other radical alterations to the size of the space by means of just the lighting. The discomfort of watching the show in a brightly lit theater switches to the soft embrace of complete darkness when the power in the apartment shuts down. The candle-lit scene between Laura (Madison Ferris), Tom’s sister, and Finn (Jim O’Connor), their guest, happens literarily in a small circle, lit by a candelabra, drawing all eyes in the theater to this pivotal conversation. 

photo by Julieta Cervantes

In Tennessee Williams’ play, Laura has a limp. Sam Gold decided to visually radicalize the young heroin’s physical condition by casting an actress with muscular dystrophy, in a wheel chair, Madison Ferris. When she appears in the beginning, accompanied by her mother, Sally (Amanda Wingfield), the audience seems to be thrown off a little. How else could you explain timid chuckles when Ms. Ferris climbs up the short flight of stairs to the stage in a way that makes sense to her body?

Sadly, the audience is not accustomed to seeing disabled actors on stage, especially on Broadway. This is Madison Ferris’ Broadway debut and she seems right at place next to brilliant Amanda Wingfield. Sam Gold masterfully uses the timing and choreography dictated by Ms. Ferris’ physicality, taking her out of the wheel chair for the most part of the paly. Her slow entrance in the complete silence is, in a way, torturous by its detailed realism. Some of the scenes, on the contrary, use the disability for an almost comedic effect, like a physical therapy session that Tom and Sally give to Laura on the dining table while Sally is trying to convince women over the phone to subscribe to a magazine for a commission. The dance scene between Laura and the “gentlemen caller” Finn portrays a breathtaking intimacy precisely because of Ms. Ferris’ fluid choreography style.        

Amanda Wingfield, playing the former Southern beauty Sally, dissolves completely in her grown up children, worried about their future in the challenging time of the Great Depression. Occasional bursts of her own dreams and desires are manifested through memories about her youth, when she had a flock of Gentlemen Callers chasing her. Fluffy, pink, and ridiculous in its fairytale perfection, the nature of her memory is embodied in the “princess Barbie” dress she wears for the dinner with Finn. Where as for Tom memory is an open wound he is looking to heal through reflection, for Amanda memory is a pink gas veil she puts on to obscure the harsh reality and the less than promising future.                           

 

photo by Julieta Cervantes

The scenic design by Andrew Lieberman, for the most part cold and unwelcoming, has a wonderfully surprising element of water showering onto the stage from above. Accompanied by the sound design by Bray Poor, this massive rainfall makes for one of the most spectacular effects I have ever seen on stage, hence its simplicity and heart-piercing poetical beauty. When the rain passes and the neon sign “Paradise” (meant to belong to the bar across the street) spills its green light across the puddles, breaking the intimate candle lit circle, my soul sings, reveling in its own memories of summer showers.

“Glass Menagerie” opened on March 9^th and runs through July 2^nd in Belasco Theater at 111 West 44^th street. Tickets can be purchased in the theater box office or by phone (212) 239-6200. For performance schedule and more information, visit glassmenagerieonbroadway.com.