Judith Ivey as Amanda (foreground) and Keira Keeley as Laura and
Patch Darragh as Tom (background) in a scene from The Glass Menagerie
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
If you think you are well versed in Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, you are in for a surprise with director Gordon Edelstein’s reinvention of this American classic. This revelatory interpretation sets the play in a New Orleans hotel room where Tom, the narrator, is attempting to write his memories of his family that he has left back in St. Louis. He sits at a typewriter, with a bottle of whiskey, reading out loud what he has written, the famed narration to Williams’ play.
As we listen to him, his mother Amanda and sister Laura invade his room and his recollections become real to us. The luminous Judith Ivey creates a memorable portrayal of the woman based on Williams’ own mother in this Long Wharf Theatre co-production now at the Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. The framing device works beautifully, giving new meaning to the narration, the play is the author’s attempt to capture his family on paper for all time. The only drawback of Edelstein’s interpretation is that the leisurely paced running time of two hours and forty-five minutes is longer than the play usually takes.
At times Patch Darragh as Tom, Williams’ stand-in for himself, speaks along with one of the other characters or appears to be taking notes in a journal. The back wall of his hotel room designed by Michael Yeargan becomes transparent and allows his “memories” of his mother and sister to first appear through the scrim before the characters enter through the doorway and invade his space.
There is less furniture than usual: the double bed of the hotel room makes do as the living room sofa of the Wingfield home when Amanda covers it with a gold-colored throw. A desk down front by the left side of the apron doubles as Tom’s work space as well as the setting for his sister Laura’s collection of glass animals which occupies so much of her time. The dining room table (that will be used for the supper for the gentleman caller that Tom invites home from work to meet his sister) remains against the upstage wall even during the second act dinner party.
The wide stage with its empty spaces at times seems too large for this intimate drama but this is a family in which one character is always missing: the father who worked for the telephone company and fell in love with long distances. His portrait appears lit up at key moments through the rear wall which turns transparent. In the second act, Jennifer Tipton’s remarkable lighting plot makes it appear that the conversation between Laura and Jim, the gentleman caller, is lit entirely by the three-pronged candelabrum and one additional candle. It is a haunting and beautiful effect, made possible through the most subtle of effects.
As Amanda, based on Williams’ mother Edwina, Ivey is warm yet inquisitive, sympathetic yet loquacious, hard as steel yet yielding to the most obvious compliments. Her continually shifting moods cover the entire gamut of emotions. However, in her soft but demanding way she dominates her children: we know why Tom cannot wait to leave, aside from his hated, uninspiring job at the shoe warehouse. Keira Keeley as Tom’s homebody sister Laura has a much more pronounced limp than usually played which makes her all the more fragile. Her voice - which sounds like it will break at any moment and doesn’t - delineates her shyness in a way that little less can.
Darragh has an uncanny resemblance to the young Tennessee Williams both in physique and in voice quality. His Southern accent is pitch-perfect, resembling recorded interviews of the playwright. At times using a high-pitched voice to mimic his mother and at other times taking an effeminate stance, he also suggests levels to Tom’s sexuality previously unexplored. Costumed by Martin Pakledinaz, he becomes more rumpled as the evening goes on, as though his desperation is taking a physical toll on him.
Michael Mosley, as the friend from the warehouse who is into self improvement with night courses, depicts everything Jim O’Connor ought be: self-confident, aggressive, poised, a go-getter with a gift of gab that rivals Amanda’s own. The scene in which he gets Laura to dance for the first time is brilliantly handled. Other actors have just lifted Laura up so that she is, in fact, being carried around the floor. Mosley begins to lead so forcefully that Laura just seems to pick up the rhythm from him as they start to glide across the floor. The production is also unusual in that it used no music unless Laura winds up the gramophone or if we are told it is coming from the dance hall across the street. Edelstein lets the play’s poetry create its own music.
Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie has now become overly familiar from many stage and screen versions. Gordon Edelstein’s reinterpreted production will make you feel that you have never seen the play before, though the slow pacing makes this more of a commitment for the audience. With a cast led by the radiant Judith Ivey, this is a memorable rendition of a play that too often seems like a pale imitation of an earlier one. The framing device of having Tom writing the play in his New Orleans hotel room years after the events have occurred adds a whole new dimension to a story that is about as well known as any in the American canon.
The Glass Menagerie (through June 13)
Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 W. 46th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-719-1300 or http://www.roundabouttheatre.org