Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf Theatre

David Begelman

When the theater and Tennessee Williams found each other in 1934, the playwright mused it “was for better and for worse.” Leaving a three-year stint in a mindless factory job behind him, American drama would have been a decidedly lesser thing without that decision. Williams, along with Eugene O’Neill, may be the best thing that has happened to the legitimate theater in this country. And The Glass Menagerie, in the opinion of this reviewer, tops the list of the playwright’s greatest achievements, a product of what Gore Vidal has called, “the glorious voices in his head.”

That being said, audiences will have to judge for themselves whether Gordon Edelstein’s new production of the play at Long Wharf Theater qualifies for one of its memorable stagings. There are enough new spins in his approach to the play that may raise purist eyebrows. They include playing up dialogue for laughs and introducing changes that wander afield from the playwright’s original intent.

For example, in the four character drama as scripted by Williams, Tom (played by Patch Darragh) is both narrator and character, whereas the director tended to collapse these two separate personas. In the original play, Tom addresses the audience through a fourth wall, stepping outside the immediate action. In the current production, he is an actual participant in it from the beginning. What was originally intended as reverie conveyed to the audience becomes a recitation ground out on a typewriter within actual scenes.

In the original script, Williams took pains to describe a family (a mother, sister, and brother) beset with “the implacable fires of human desperation,” a plight their living situation mirrored. Their cramped tenement quarters, “flanked on both sides by dark narrow alleys,” and making for “hive like cellular living,” was accessible only through a fire escape. In the current production, the home becomes a more spacious, albeit modestly furnished, living space.

As Williams scripted it, Tom initially appears in merchant sailor’s garb, not only signifying the future direction of a wish to escape the oppressiveness of his home life, but one that parallels the decision of an absentee father who abandoned the family years before. A picture of the latter hanging on a wall in the original drama is of a World War I doughboy. In Mr. Edelstein’s version, the father is pictured as a moustached man in a straw hat. Later, the father sends his family terse postcards from Mexico, and is described as a “telephone man who fell in love with long distance.”

Lastly, Laura Wingfield’s glass menagerie in the Williams’ play is displayed in a standing bureau, an “old fashioned what-not” piece of furniture, in order to highlight its importance to her. In the current production, the precious collection sits idly, darkly, and inconspicuously on a green blotter on a downstage desk.

The mother, Amanda Wingfield, is central to the drama. Yet she is seldom portrayed in the rounded way this role deserves—Judith Ivey’s characterization included. Unfortunately, there is no cinematic record of Laurette Taylor’s performance in a signature role widely regarded as a wonderment.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory piece set in the Great Depression. Amanda is a mother who, while controlling and intrusive, struggles to hold a family together. So there is another element underneath all the dottiness, and one that few interpreters of the role have chosen to underscore: an inner matriarchal strength. It is the balance struck between this implicit quality and Amanda’s nagging surface that is the real acting challenge of the role. But what actress within living memory has taken it on? Ms. Ivey has all the elements of the character in place, including an accomplished Southern accent. Yet without the component in question, she never manages to rise above the purely churlish aspect of Amanda’s personality.

Patch Darragh’s Tom Wingfield enters in a business suit, rather than seaman’s uniform. He makes a promising start in the role, although his second act scenes tended to rely on a technique that occasionally lapsed into mannerisms.

While Keira Keeley’s Laura radiated vulnerability (Tennessee Williams’ continual preoccupation with the mental deterioration of his own sister, Rose), the directorial choice of having her wear a leg brace was a bit heavy-handed. Ms. Keeley’s second act scene with the Gentleman Caller happily warmed up a characterization that, while still registering fragility, shed some of the indicating plaguing her portrayal up to that point.

Josh Charles’ Gentleman Caller, Jim O’Connor, was a consistently skilled and realistic portrayal of the fantasized suitor who turns out to be a dinner guest already engaged to another woman. Ironically, Williams characterized the Gentleman Caller as “the most realistic character in the play, coming as he does from another world of reality.”

There was another world experienced by the Wingfield family long before the events in the play. It was one suggested by the phrase ou sont les neiges flashed twice on a wall in the original script. Excerpted from a poem by the medieval poet François Villon, its first line translates as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” With respect to a playwright, now deceased, whose tortured existence nonetheless resulted in a most impressive body of work, we might well pose the same question.

The Glass Menagerie opened at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven, CT 06511, on May 13, 2009 and continues until June 7, 2009 Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 203.787.4282, or online www.longwharf.org