A MENAGERIE to Treasure

 

As I write this review, I cannot shake the feeling that I have finally seen The Glass Menagerie—that official Classic of American Drama—for the first time. Perhaps this is merely inevitable—prior to the other night, I had not read or attended a performance of the play in years. Yet I suspect the feeling is primarily due to the magnificent production playing at Rep Stage though March 14. (The run was extended two weeks to compensate for performances cancelled by the recent snowstorms.) Those who make the trek out to Howard Community College will see four extraordinary actors demanding (at times forcefully, at times with exquisite grace) that we take another, deeper look at the familiar.

In his production notes, Tennessee Williams describes his first great success in the theatre as a “memory play”—that is, it happens primarily in the memory of its narrator, an older-than-his-years poet named Tom Wingfield (Karl Kippola), as he recalls the distant events that chased him from his family’s tiny St. Louis apartment and a dead-end job in a shoe warehouse. In his furious wake, Tom left to fend for themselves his aging mother, Amanda (Tamara Johnson), and his fragile sister, Laura (Christine Demuth); it is the guilty fear that he has abandoned them to poverty—or worse—that compels him to linger, in spite of his restlessness, and tell us his version of the story.

This distinction is crucial, for Tom is the definition of an unreliable narrator—indeed, he acknowledges this himself, describing the world he conjures as “dimly lighted,” “sentimental,” “not realistic.” Yet I have never been so keenly aware of the ache beneath this admission as I was during Rep Stage’s production. The tragedy of The Glass Menagerie is that Tom will never know what has happened to the family he left behind—and therefore neither will we.

Director Michael Stebbins and his designers have taken to heart Williams’s urgings in the script to develop an atmosphere of nostalgia. Terry Cobb’s lighting design locates small, radiant pools in the midst of shadows that evoke lost possibilities more than gloom. Sound designer Chas Marsh underscores the action with slow, jazzy melodies and, as requested by Williams, a “single recurring tune … which dips in and out of the play as if it were carried on a wind that changes.” Most interestingly, Stebbins—assisted by photographer David Hobby—retains the projected images that are frequently cut from productions of the play; these projections, which Williams intended to highlight crucial moments and themes, float unobtrusively above Greggory Schraven’s surprisingly spacious set—the Wingfield apartment and surrounding alley are not entirely convincing as Williams’s “warty growths … burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.”

The same cannot be said of the actors, who glide across the stage (or stumble, as the occasion demands) in sadly heroic attempts to infuse unfulfilled lives with dignity. The flashiest roles belong to Johnson and Kippola, who play mother and son as opposites in nearly everything but their tempers. Amanda, the daughter of a wealthy Delta planter, lost the comfortable future that had been her birthright when she fell in love with a man beneath her social station. Johnson gives Amanda a flawless veneer—all polish and Southern charm—and when she smiles we see a little girl still untouched by disappointment, but when angry her body stiffens, her eyes go cold, and it seems excruciatingly obvious to everyone but herself that she is crushing her children under the weight of her misfortunes.

In contrast to Johnson’s formidable elegance, Kippola slumps over his coffee and books, stuffs himself into rumpled clothes, and grabs nervously at his mouth, as though fearing his dreary existence has silenced him. In his role as narrator, he speaks and moves more deliberately, but whether he stands inside his memories or observes them from a distance, the picture is of a man for whom conviviality and social pleasures are as alien as the crowded isolation of city life must be to Amanda. In fact, my initial impression of Kippola was that he appeared too old to play Tom—it seemed impossible to believe that Demuth’s angelic Laura is the elder sibling, as stated in the play. But Kippola’s age soon became a virtue, further setting him apart from the family he fled but cannot escape.

Amanda and Tom dominate Act I, but the play’s crucial scenes happen in Act II, when Tom—at his mother’s insistence­—brings home a “gentleman caller” named Jim (Brandon McCoy) to introduce to his sister. It turns out that Laura knew Jim in high school and had a secret crush on him; over the course of their evening together she moves from terror to hope to elation to disappointment … and her response to this disappointment has always been for me the play’s greatest mystery: Will it be the final blow that crushes her spirit or the turning point in her life, an unlocked reservoir from which to draw new strength? Demuth traces Laura’s journey from beat to beat with masterful precision—one’s heart leaps and falls with hers—yet at the final curtain I was no closer to solving the mystery. The not-knowing is heartbreaking, and I realized in that moment my suffering was Tom’s.

As for the gentleman caller, McCoy is a revelation. Williams describes Jim as a “nice, ordinary young man,” but the ordinary man possesses a very healthy ego, and his frequent boasts would be maddening did we not see him through Laura’s adoring eyes. McCoy and Demuth generate such electricity, I left the theater convinced Jim had felt it too—that he is not merely “nice” to Laura out of pity, nor even touched by her delicate beauty, but genuinely, powerfully attracted to her, making his inevitable choice all the more painful.

The Glass Menagerie was my favorite Tennessee Williams play even before this production—compared to the operatic A Streetcar Named Desire, I found its apparent simplicity more poignant and truthful. Without sacrificing poignancy or truth, Stebbins and company have revealed the extent to which that simplicity is an illusion. They have given this rich, compelling play the production it deserves.

The Glass Menagerie is playing at Rep Stage, located on the campus of Howard Community College at 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway in Columbia, on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7 P.M., Fridays at 8 P.M., Saturdays at 2 P.M. and 8 P.M., and Sundays at 2 P.M. and 7 P.M., through March 14^th. Tickets are $18-$30; Wednesday performances are designated pay-what-you-can. For more information, call 410-772-4900 or visit www.repstage.org.