Tennessee “Tom” Williams wrote at his most trenchant and poignant best when he wrote about what he knew most about – himself…and his family. The Glass Menagerie, now playing at the Alley’s Hubbard Theatre, is his autobiography. One of his last works for the stage, Vieux Carré (1977), is a worthy bookend to Menagerie, as it follows a penniless gay writer from St. Louis to a shabby boardinghouse in New Orleans. The same journey Williams himself took in 1938.
Menagerie was Williams’ first hit after six prior attempts at play writing. It blew everything on Broadway away. Its poetry, characterizations, intense emotion, and raw power slammed into the staid blue hairs. No one wrote like he did. The dialogue, while highly stylized, still reads like actual speech. And the heightened flights of fantasy hadn’t been heard since, what, the Elizabethan era? Williams conquered Broadway, and his next run of plays is a who’s who of classic drama: A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth.
Yes, there were a few bombs interspersed among the list, but Williams was lauded as a hero, feted and adored as the potent, vibrant new voice of American theater. Fame destroyed him, though. Booze and pills eventually took their toll, and his later works were pounded by the critics. It wasn’t unwarranted criticism. Those latter plays were pretty lousy, self-indulgent, not worthy of him.
But Menagerie stands apart. This is when Williams became Williams. This “memory” play, adapted out of one of his short stories and an unproduced screenplay, is unique in the canon. It still shocks today, is as relevant as ever, and moves one with tremendous force. We get these people. We know them. They might be ourselves. Their dreams of escape, to be better, to long to be what they were years ago, to run away is potent in any era. These characters speak deeply to us.
Tom (a potent and feisty Dylan Godwin) is a dreamer and poet. He works at a shoe factory, a low-paid nobody. He gets by, but at what price? He wants more, but can’t find a way out. He spends his time at the “movies” or numerous bars on the way home. (This version of Menagerie, the Centennial Edition of 2011, has deleted Tom’s reveries of his time in the balcony and the anonymous male companions he finds there. Someone has de-gayed Menagerie.)
His sister Laura (in a coruscating, defining performance by Melissa Molano) is pathologically shy and crippled from a childhood illness. She’s obsessed with her miniature glass animal menagerie. She can’t hold a job and hardly leaves the apartment. Mother Amanda (Sally Wingert, flighty yet controlling) wants the best for her children, but lives in the past whenever it suits her. She wants Tom to reach his potential and wants to find a “gentleman caller” for Laura to get her married. What will happen to them is a constant refrain.
Later, Williams will morph Amanda into the stultifying Blanche of Streetcar. But this Amanda, though living in a past world of cotillions and 17 beaus in one day, isn’t a monster. She browbeats Tom and orders Laura around, but her sight is on the horizon. Why can’t her children do better?
Amanda finagles Tom to ask his co-worker Jim (a sturdy Luis Quintero, like Dale Carnegie on steroids) to come for dinner to meet Laura. Laura is petrified. But in one of Williams’ most pregnant scenes, as Jim and Laura sit on pillows in the candlelight, Jim draws her out, dances with her, and even kisses her, before revealing that he’s in a relationship and won’t ever see her again. Now that her beloved unicorn ornament has been broken by their dancing, Laura sits petrified by her menagerie, devastated, mummified. Her life is over.
Like his father who abandoned the family years ago and fled to Mexico, Tom walks out on his family. He must or he, too, will become buried alive. He may not ever see his fragile beloved sister and pestering mother again, but he will be always haunted by their memories. They will live with him forever. He may be free, but not from them.
One significant misstep in this production: Walking into the theater, we are greeted by floor-to-flies white sheer drapes that wrap around two sides of the angled square stage platform. What’s with the wispy curtains? What are they doing here in the Wingfield’s shabby St. Louis tenement apartment with its metal fire escape, cheap sideboard, and mirrored walls (?) into the kitchen. And what’s with the mirrored walls? What was set designer Michael Locher thinking?
Could all this be symbolic? The physical presence of memory? The drapes ascend and descend at pivotal moments in this classic play, but why? Isn’t Williams’ potent language symbolic enough? His poetry needs no transparent drapes to comment on his theme of reality vs. illusion, the brute force of life beating one down, escape vs. entombment. Whatever the reason, the curtains don’t work and are annoying and out of place.
Director Rob Melrose gathers all the gossamer of Williams’ delicate poem and weaves it emotionally into the stuff of volcanic family dynamics. Yuki Nakase Unk’s lighting is just as delicate and forceful. And the cast couldn’t be improved upon, especially Molano who will break your heart.
Everything in this Alley production is top notch. Except those damn moving drapes.
The Glass Menagerie continues through March 16 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays at Alley Theatre, 615 Texas. For more information, call 713-220-5700 or visit alleytheatre.com. $28-$100.
