The Glass Menagerie
Reviewed by Vanessa Cate
A Noise Within
Through April 26
It’s the 1930s in St. Louis, and Tom Wingfield is suffocating. Figuratively. In an apartment building writer Tennessee Williams describes as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.” And in a family that is fundamentally broken.
Tom (played by Rafael Goldstein) is essentially a stand-in for Williams in this near autobiographical play. A frustrated young writer, he works in a shoe factory (as Williams did in his youth) to help support his overbearing mother Amanda (reprised by Deborah Strang, who played the role at A Noise Within 20 years ago) and his sick sister Laura (Erika Soto). Their father has been gone for years, but his presence constantly looms over them.
Laura is sick in body and mind with a crippled leg and an intense anxiety one might confuse for shyness. In life, Williams’ sister suffered from schizophrenia and sought comfort in the care of glass figures. It didn’t end well for her: Rose Williams spent most of her life inside mental institutions after an unsuccessful prefrontal lobotomy. This play feels written out of a sibling’s guilt, a sort of penned penance.
In The Glass Menagerie, the fragility extends beyond Laura’s glass animals, and even beyond Laura, to the fabric of the family itself. Amanda does her best to encourage her children, but in truth, her constant nagging and reminiscing only pushes them further away. Tom yearns for adventure, and can you blame his desire not to live and die taking care of a toxic family?
Fred Kinney’s scenic design both pays proper homage to the playwright’s vision while adding a few small intricacies, such as a tiled floor fracturing at its edges. Jenny Foldenauer’s costume design is smart and detailed. However, Ken Booth’s lighting design is at times distracting and inappropriate, upstaging from the appropriate action onstage.
Design elements aside, the play honestly hinges on the portrayal of Laura. Soto appears buoyant and functional. Whether the fault of Geoff Elliott’s direction or of miscasting, this Laura doesn’t inspire a believable sympathy. Williams’s ingenue must escape into a fantasy world because she doesn’t know how to live in the real one — she is both shatteringly brittle and fiercely substantial, with a bright fire that burns within. This Laura is neither — a gregarious and conventionally attractive actress dons a slight limp, glasses, and a few “nervous ticks.”
Goldstein brings a genius to his work (as ever), but I wonder how much higher he could have soared if her were given more to act off of. Strang’s rendition of the matriarch is kinder and more reserved than it could be, but it does seem a deliberate choice made out of an intimate understanding of the character, and her performance in Act II really heats up.
Kasey Mahaffy’s “gentleman caller” Jim O’Connor is a knock-out. His performance is dynamite, and gives the other three actors something great to play off of. Both comedic and compelling, arrogant and sympathetic, Jim is a blowhard, but a sexy one.
However, once the gentleman caller exits the stage, the energy is once again deflated. The final image we are left with is a director’s choice, not in the script, which references the real life tragic fate of the writer’s sister, a stage picture that feels both hopeless and a cliche.
A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena 91107; through April 26. For full schedule and tickets: www.anoisewithin.org. Running time: Two and a half hours with one 15-minute intermission.
