George  Weinberg-Harter

San Diego Arts

"The Glass Menagerie" at the Old Globe

In a Vitreous Humor
By George  Weinberg-Harter
Posted on Apr 18 2008
Last updated May 01 2008

Every detail of a great play like Tennessee Williams’ first masterpiece "The Glass Menagerie"(1944) eventually grows familiar to a constant theatregoer. And as with great music or poetry, repetition does not dull but only sharpens appreciation and emotional response.

For me the Old Globe’s new production of "The Glass Menagerie," excellently directed by Joe Calarco, provoked sharper emotional pangs than any version, stage or screen, I’ve yet seen. Maybe over the years one grows less callow and more susceptible to pathos and tragedy. Others perhaps less susceptible in the audience, however, continued to chuckle at the play’s ironies long past the point where those reactions ought to be muted by the sorrow of the story.

At the show’s start, Michael Simpson as Tom – the runaway son and brother of the diminished Wingfield family – returns in his narrative memory to the apartment where years before he had seen his mother and sister for the last time before abruptly abandoning them. The old place is represented in Michael Fagin’s spare but sleekly polished arena scenic design as an open plan of vacated rooms with ghostly white dust covers on the furniture. Simpson’s Tom, halting and unsure, removes a cover to reveal the case containing his sister Laura’s collection of fragile little blown-glass creatures, and the effect on him – the memories it provokes – seems excruciating and devastating. And at that moment the memory of all that is painful in Tom’s tale – communicated through Simpson’s empathetic performance – came keenly back to me too.

When Tom’s initial reverie of narration is at last broken by the recollection of his mother Amanda calling him to dinner, her first words, filtered through Lindsay Jones’ sound design, hollowly echo as from a distance. Tom seems then hooked by this, ensnared once more into the emotional trap of pity and self-pity that for a long time prevented his escape from the painful family bonds of his mother’s guilt trip and of his helpless love for a physically and mentally disabled sister. And if an audience’s mood is the right one, they should be caught up in this as well.

As the entrapping mother Amanda, Mare Winningham’s petite person and small features harmonize with the precise and understated dialect she bestows upon this role of a fading but unreconstructed Southern belle. Amanda’s airs and graces, her never-ending reminiscences of the many gentleman suitors who once came calling, her iron insistence on imposing the genteel manners of a vanished time upon the shabby present existence of her tiny family drive son Tom to sarcastic guilty rebellion and fire his fervor to flee.

Winningham’s eventual transformation of Amanda into a later reincarnation of something like her younger self, in order to the charm the one lone "gentleman caller" that Tom manages to lure over for dinner on behalf of his reclusive sister Laura, makes a surprising contrast. Dressed (by costume designer Anne Kennedy) in her long-disused high-waisted ball gown instead of her dowdy everyday house dress and shapeless cardigan, gliding about with poise and carriage rather than her usual slightly stooped trot, her hair released from its tight bun into lush waves, and herself full of captivating chitchat instead of bitter reproaches, Amanda almost seems to turn the trick for Laura as she puts the visiting Jim O’Connor (Kevin Isola) in the most receptive mood possible and steers him towards her shrinking daughter.

Kevin Isola’s bright, brash, and goodhearted Jim provides a true sparkle of upbeat American hopefulness amidst the colossal downer that is the interpersonal mess of the Wingfield family. Though temporarily stalled in his career plans by the aftermath of the Depression (the play is set in 1937), Jim’s Horatio-Algerian ambition is to hook up to the nascent television industry. Isola captures the dynamic essence of the guy with the help of a wide and forward stance and a sincere and ready grin. But, alas, with other commitments Jim is unavailable to provide little more than his brief moment of light and warmth in the encroaching dimness of poor Laura’s constricted destiny.

Laura Wingfield is portrayed with distressing delicateness and a lame grace by Michele Federer. Sometimes as she stretches out along some stairs or huddles on the floor, Federer creates a haunting suggestion of Andrew Wyeth’s handicapped and isolated female figure in his painting "Christina’s World." I have often seen Laura correctly played as vulnerable, fragile, and withdrawn, as agonizingly diffident, and yet with a sad sweetness about her. Federer hits all these notes in Laura too, but also evokes to a greater degree than I remember seeing a fey and almost delusional quality besides. When Federer’s Laura obsesses over her glass animals, holding them against the light and staring transfixed, she seems to be retreating into a closed interior universe where the figurines possess a reality for her intense enough to be psychosis. When the entirely normal Jim hears her voice these ideas, he only laughs them off – bless him – as her surprisingly vivid imagination. But the audience is allowed to see more deeply and dangerously into her fantasies.

But, mercifully, Laura’s fantasies protect her as well as isolate her. And, oddly, this somewhat ameliorates the almost unbearable closing pathos of her situation. When one of her favorite glass creatures is accidentally broken, her reaction is not as dire as one might fear. She immediately weaves a protective fantasy about the breakage. And one can see that this may give her a kind of tragic strength, in that she even preserves an isolation from these sentimental creations of her own imagination. One may hope that this will serve her in some way when she (and her mother) eventually learn that her beloved brother has abandoned them forever. Happily, the playwright exempts the audience from viewing such a potentially racking scene. We (and Tom) can only imagine it.

Chris Lee’s gentle lighting design keeps the scenes mostly in shadow. A muted illumination appropriate to memories comes mostly from above so that eyes of the characters are often shaded. When the Wingfield’s electricity fails, Lee’s lighting mimics the actual candles on stage – candles that at the end Laura extinguishes one by one, to Tom’s hugely moving final lines: "Blow out your candles, Laura – and so good-bye ...."

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About the author: George Weinberg-Harter George Weinberg-Harter has been active in San Diego theatre since childhood, appearing in many local stage productions as well as doing graphic art for them. He has helped start theatre companies, authored and co-authored a number of plays produced locally and is a co-founder of the Fellow Calligraphers of San Diego. He is a member of the Actors Alliance of San Diego, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, and the San Diego Press Club, which has presented him with its 2007 First Place Excellence in Journalism Award for Drawing or Illustration.
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