Tennessee Williams Cannot Actually Roll Over in His Grave, but I May Dig Him Up and Flip Him Just to Make a Point

The Glass Menagerie

Widely considered one of Tennessee Williams’s best plays, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, examining the complicated themes of family, responsibility, and generational trauma through the lens of the young man Tom Wingfield and his family in depression-era St. Louis. Tom is a factory worker, whose mother Amanda and sister Laura live at home. They were left by Tom’s father years before, and Tom is forced early-on to take a “man of the house” role and provide as best he can for the three of them. Amanda is a former southern belle type who constantly struggles with the changing state of the world around her. Laura is slightly older than Tom, but is subjected to a frustrating cripple in one of her legs, which forced her to wear a brace in her formative years. She no longer wears the brace, but displays a clear limp now that she is older. One of the central struggles of the play is Amanda’s desire to live vicariously through her daughter during this phase of her life, in which Amanda expects an array of “Gentleman Callers” to be constantly visiting them to court Laura.

A tension is introduced between them, because Laura is simply unable to look past her own flaws, which are magnified in her own eyes, to the point of not being able to view of herself as worthy of courting at all. She intentionally isolates herself, spending most of her time with a collection of delicate glass animals, constantly dusting them and admiring them in their case. Meanwhile, Tom feels suffocated by his responsibilities to his mother and sister, and goes “to the movies” at night to escape the claustrophobia and frustration caused by his home, torn between wanting to pursue his dreams but not wanting to repeat the sins of his father, which put them in this position in the first place. When he returns from his evenings at the cinema, he is often drunk, leading the audience and his mother to question the reliability of his accounts. There are clear parallels between the self-isolating methods of Laura and Tom, and here is where lots of the play’s effectiveness lies. The most important scene of the play comes when at his mother’s request, Tom brings a friend, Jim O’Connor over for dinner with the intention of setting him up with Laura. Tom is unaware that this is Laura’s high school crush. The evening goes unexpectedly well, with Jim being surprisingly sensitive to Laura’s insecurities; they even share a dance and a kiss before Jim ultimately lets her and her family down in the end, leaving them alone once more.

Clearly, there is a depth in subject matter here that has allowed the show to be mined time and time again for new angles. Tom’s unreliability is a narrator, combined with the show’s hazy memory feel, means that practically every time it gets a new staging, directors can find new things to emphasize and the audience could potentially be getting a fresh look at an old classic. With that said, this West End version, starring Amy Adams, fell flat and was ultimately disappointing.

I continually felt that the direction of this show was relying on the star power of Amy Adams to carry the show, and although she is amazing, that is an unfair thing to ask of anyone (especially when her character isn’t on stage for the most important scene of the play, and a good portion of Act II). The design of this show looked promising, with an empty stage surrounded by many great period set pieces and a variety of black scrims, which I expected to drop down and plunge sections of the stage into a haze, invoking memories. None of this happened, and the lighting did very little to invoke these effects as well, and we were just subjected to a show in which all the important action happened in a black void center stage, while the characters that weren’t immediately involved lurked in the well-designed wings. It’s totally inexplicable to me.

Furthermore, some of the play’s most important scenes were given essentially no weight. The central moment in the play, when Jim and Laura dance but stumble, and break her favorite glass animal, the unicorn, just before Jim reveals that he is in fact engaged and cannot pursue Laura in the ways he has implied. Earlier in the play, Tom also breaks one of her animals in a moment of anger as he storms out of the apartment. These moments hold immense weight as part of the metaphor for Laura’s trauma, but were handled clumsily in the play. Both times, the audience was meant to imagine the glass breaking, without even a sound effect to accompany the big moment. This is another inexplicable choice to me, for the director clearly had no problem with breaking props, as Tom’s actor throws a glass against the back wall of the stage nightly, in a fairly forced outburst towards his mother.

Because of the show’s depth in subject matter, there is a lot more to critique about this particular production, but suffice it to say that the cast, audience, and play itself deserve directorial choices that work with the text, rather than struggle against it at seemingly every turn. I wanted to like this one, but I couldn’t, and I ultimately attribute that to the direction.

[now playing: Let Down – Radiohead]