Everything in “The Glass Menagerie” is fragile. Laura’s shelves of animal figurines, of course, but also Tennessee Williams 1944 script that the play’s opening monologue labels “memory”: “it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.” The challenge that any revival of the play today faces is to maintain that sense of the tremulous that builds slowly, inevitably, into an emotional gut punch leaving audiences as painfully fractured as the Wingfields in their hive-like apartment crammed between dance halls, warehouses, and human desperation. For many years a staple of high school literature classes, it can seem as familiar as it does strange, and great revivals walk a tightrope between these two poles.
The current production now on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre successfully makes the journey. It totters at points, has moments when its balancing act seems sure to fail, but the production perseveres both in chronological time and, more importantly, in conjuring up theatrical magic. Indeed, director Rob Melrose has set in motion a little train that leaves the station slowly but tightly hugging the rails, builds steam and transforms into a diesel locomotive that hurls into its arrival station.
For anyone for whom the play is only a pretentious title, its basic situation is plain enough. Tom Wingfield (Dylan Godwin) is remembering his final months living with his overbearing, southern mother Amanda (Sally Wingert) and his disabled sister Laura (Melissa Molano) in their decaying St. Louise apartment. All three characters are trapped: Tom in a soul-sapping job at a shoe warehouse being the breadwinner for his family; Amanda in her rosy memories of her plantation childhood that vanished with her marriage; and Laura in a pathological self-consciousness due to a limp that makes her feel everyone stares at her clomping into any room she enters. Her only release comes from caring for her collection of tiny glass animals—her menagerie. Their father, an employee of the phone company, vanished long ago, having, as the characters quip, fallen “in love with long distances.” After Laura’s disastrous foray into secretarial training and knowing Tom’s desire to leave, Amanda is hanging her hopes for their future on arranging a “Gentleman Caller” for Laura—a kind, stable man who will overlook Laura’s infirmities, be a good provider, and a faithful husband.
All this is seen through the haze of Tom’s guilty memory, as he remembers the events that lead him to join the merchant marine on the cusp of World War II. In a sense, the play is his talking cure, and the audience is his therapist. The trick is that the telling must make us have empathy, not just for the abandoned women in the play but for Tom.
This requires strong performances for difficult and complex characters—especially Tom. Godwin elects to stress Tom’s weaknesses more than his suffocated ambitions, and, with his spoken drawl and his sharp almost knife-like movements on stage, he almost convinces us, just as he almost convinces himself, that the family fate is beyond his control. And it’s in the “almost” that the play’s humanity resides.
The domineering mother, Amanda, is the play’s preening part. With her memorable phrases (“You’re a Christian martyr” is part of her telephone sales pitch to potential subscribers to a magazine for matrons) and shrill voice, not to mention her iron determination that bulldozes her children and tries to do the same for reality, she burns like a flame on stage. Sally Wingert captures Amanda’s shrillness well, but her strength and her desperation are less clear—not absent but minimized. Still, she gives a solid performance, and her control of Williams’ poetic language is excellent.
But the strongest performance is provided by Melissa Molano as the vulnerable Laura. She seems visibly to be trying to shrink herself on the stage, to blend with her perfectly designed dull costumes into the background. As a result, when she finds a slight spark of hope, she shines brighter by contrast than seems imaginable. She is touching without being cloying; she sets up the play’s climax of disappointment perfectly. As a result when her “Gentleman Caller” (Luis Quintero as Jim) finally arrives at her door, we see in his ordinariness the hope that all three Wingfields long for, and Quintero embodies ordinary. In a play designed for three divas, he is the spear holder, the extra, the man in the background who moves the story on. Williams hints at a deeper story for him but wisely leaves that for another play.
The only major disappointment here is the stage itself: the set of the Wingfield apartment is too big, too open, too close to being art-deco chic with its metal and polished wood. It misses the chance and the need to emphasize the claustrophobia of the Wingfields’ lives. It’s beautiful and makes good use of rising platforms, mirrors, and curtains, but it doesn’t suggest the despair Tom remembers. We see a designer’s set, not Tom’s ghost of a home.
Nevertheless, the production finds its fragile balance. It opens a window on the themes Williams would continue to develop in his career, and it captures his unique mix of poetry and emotion. That it does so in two fast-paced acts and overcomes cynicism and even preconceptions of the South make it worth a trip through the Houston Rodeo traffic. The Alley’s “Glass Menagerie” survives unshattered but shattering.
–Robert Donahoo, Sam Houston State University
“The Glass Menagerie” is on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre through March 16.
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