Tennessee Williams @ Berkeley Rep
*/Menagerie à Trois/*/Play Review: /“The Glass Menagerie,” /by Tennessee Williams at the
Berkeley Repertory Theater./
In this frankly autobiographical classic, we're treated to the spectacle
of young Tom Wingfield (Williams' thinly veiled alter ego) turning
himself from a hen-pecked, working-stiff Momma's Boy into a writer.
Not just a run-of-the-mill hack writer, mind you, but a dramatic genius
of unparalleled poetic power. Nobody onstage, of course, knows that's
where Williams is headed, but we do in the audience: the masterpiece
before us is proof enough. Ironic that it should come at the price of
all the human wreckage the play depicts.
For in the process of finding his voice, the budding writer has to
forsake two women who entrap him. He shares a threadbare Saint Louis
flat with his painfully retiring sister, Laura, and his flamboyantly
domineering mother, Amanda. Against the backdrop of the Great
Depression, their menage of hand-to-mouth respectability depends
entirely on Tom's meager wage as a warehouseman.
Williams, in his title, likens this three-beast zoo to a collection of
glass animals (Laura's hobby). It's meant as a metaphor of fragility,
but it also conveys a sense of transparency. We see right through all
three protagonists; they're rendered with an honesty that is
crystal-clear, yet full of sympathy.
And, as a testimony to Williams' integrity as a writer, the most
sympathetic portrait of all is of his number one nemesis, his mother.
She's a man-eating magnolia, a Mississippi belle uneasily transplanted
to the urban Midwest. Abandoned by her feckless charmer of a husband,
she soldiers on single-mothering of her two past-prime adult children.
For Amanda, “maintaining standards” is not just a matter of making ends
meet, materially. It's all about manners and – especially – diction. By
turns wheedling, sarcastic or elegiac, she's an eloquent apotheosis of
passive aggression.
Rita Moreno milks the role for all it's worth. She's come a long way
from her dewy portrayal of the teenage Maria in the 1961 film version of
West Side Story. As the sexagenarian Amanda, she projects a sagging
world-weariness precariously propped up by a combination of desperation
and fierce dignity.
Yet, for all her self-imposed stress, the character is also richly
comic. Hard-up as she is, Amanda finds herself constantly forced to
stitch silk purses out of sows' ears. Her yearning for genteel
conventionality propels her to non-stop zany improvisation, a paradox
that Moreno exploits with idiosyncratic speech rhythms and body
language. For sheer intensity, no-one can out-riff her.
Except, perhaps, for Tom, who in self-defense has had to invent his own
arsenal of verbal weaponry. Surly and oafish until provoked, he can
instantly launch into flights of innuendo, raging tirades, sly seduction
or lyrical nostalgia. Erik Lochtefeld plays him as a hair-triggered land
mine of a man, tight-packed with surprises that draw blood.
The verbal violence of the mother-and-son warfare drives Laura ever
deeper into her autistic foxhole. Emily Donahoe well captures the
crippling pathology of the character, but also the underlying sweetness.
Whenever her perennial pout gives way to a sidelong, pickerel smile, it
fleetingly lights up the stage.
She is the keeper of the menagerie; her vulnerability is what holds the
others in thrall. Until Laura can find some way to face the outside
world, her mother has to maintain the cocoon of the tawdry little
apartment and her brother has to keep pulling a paycheck.
Amanda's cotillion background has taught her that the acceptable way for
a well-bred belle to broach society-at-large is through a parade of
suitors. So she nags Tom to line up a “gentleman caller” for Laura. At
length, he produces one: a once-glamorous high school athlete now
reduced to the status of a management trainee at the warehouse.
Terrence Riordan plays the hapless caller as a brisk glad-hander, fresh
out of Toastmaster training. In his manic boosterism, he nearly
surprises himself into seeing Laura's hidden beauty, and she briefly
blossoms under his fleeting glance.
But then he recollects his “real” life – the management ladder, the
night school self-improvement classes, the fiancée – and smilingly bows
himself out of the Wingfield world. Which implicitly shatters the
menagerie and wins Tom his costly freedom.
All this is seen through a glass darkly, in the rear-view mirror of
Tom's memory. From time to time, he stands apart from the onstage action
to address the audience as a narrator, lyrically recalling the story in
retrospect. At these moments, he steps right out of the scene –
literally. He hovers eye-to-eye with the audience, perched on a
steel-grill catwalk that rings the stage.
This levitating effect is just one of the smart innovations director Les
Waters incorporates in his staging. For instance, set designer Scott
Bradley uses translucent glass for the floor of the irregular,
lozenge-shaped apron that represents the apartment. That way, lighting
director Matt Frey can illuminate the actors from below, like strollers
on Redding's own Sundial Bridge, to enhance the dream-like effect.
Such attention to production is right in line with Williams' own vision
of his plays. His scripts are famous for their lengthy stage directions
meticulously spelling out the mood he's trying to achieve. “Memory takes
a lot of poetic license,” he writes when setting the scene for the/
Glass Menagerie./ “It omits some details; others are exaggerated...for
memory sits in the heart. The interior [of the apartment] is therefore
rather dim and poetic.”
This prescription applies as well to Williams' language and storyline as
to his stage set. With these words, he freed himself and a generation of
theatrical successors from the slavish realism of early 20^th century
drama. No wonder this Depression era artifact holds up so well even now.
The play is so well received at the Berkeley Rep that its run has been
extended for an extra month, through July. Not to be missed.
Labels: Reviews
