Lucy Komisar
"The Glass Menagerie"
plumbs the desperate illusions of southern women of the 1940s
"The Glass Menagerie."
Written by Tennessee Williams; directed by Gordon Edelstein.
Roundabout Theatre Company at Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46
Street, New York City..
212-719-1300.
Opened March 24, 2010; closes June 13, 2010.
http://www.glassmenagerieny.com/
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar March 30, 2010.
 |
| Patch
Darragh in "The Glass Menagerie." Photo by Joan
Marcus. |
Dreariness is the design motif of Gordon Edelstein's
persuasive staging of Tennessee Williams' 1944 memory play about
a family trapped in unhappiness and illusion. Dreary dark wallpaper
hovers over the single bed with a rose spread in the New Orleans
hotel room that the "writer," Tom (Patch Darragh),
Williams' alter ego, inhabits. The same claustrophobic space
becomes the St. Louis tenement rooms he shared with his mother
Amanda (Judith Ivey) and sister Laura (Keira Keeley).
The mood created by designer Michael Yeargan is quite different
from that I recall in an earlier production, where "the
writer" was not a continuing presence and an all-white
and bright drawing room – that said "New Orleans"
more than "St. Louis," was a cheerful place that seemed
to hold memories and promise of a better life.
In Edelstein's production, you know from the beginning that
dark events will follow the dark décor.
 |
| Keire
Keeley, Patch Darragh, and Judith Ivey in "The Glass
Menagerie." Photo
by Joan Marcus. |
Judith Ivey is superb as Amanda Wingfield, a southern
lady, gregarious, garrulous, full of herself and her past beaux,
almost embarrassed to have had a daughter that lacks the social
qualities she prizes.
Keira Keeley is subtle and moving as Laura. Her limp, the result
of childhood polio, has so eaten away at her sense of self,
that her real disability is psychological. She is painfully
shy, with a manner half frightened, half apologetic, as if she
is asking pardon for inconveniencing others by her physical
flaw. In 1944, possibilities for women were at best limited.
And for Laura, contact with others was so terrifying and disappointing,
that she fled from the secretarial school that might have led
to independence and self-worth, and chose to live in an imaginary
world peopled by little glass animals.
Patch Darragh is brilliant as Tom Wingfield, the son who feels
caged, working in a shoe warehouse to support his mother and
sister. Amanda, a nag, is suffocating him. On the outside he
seem withdrawn, but inside Darragh shows Tom to be boiling.
 |
| Michael
Mosleyand and Keira Keeley in "The Glass Menagerie."
Photo
by Joan Marcus. |
Peering down from the wallpaper, an unremarked
portrait and presence, is the mustachioed man in a straw hat
who fathered the children and then left them and Amanda 15 years
before.
Is there a way out of this trap? When Tom brings home a work
colleague, Jim O'Connor (Michael Mosley), Amanda imagines he
is the "gentleman caller" that can transforms Laura's
life. Jim is a charmer, a "power of positive thinking"
guy. Is he the one, or is this just another illusion?
This sweet, sad production admirably captures Williams' youthful
sense of entrapment but also, though it might not be what he
intended, the desperation of women who saw themselves as essentially
flawed and their salvations only in marriage.
