“Memory takes a lot of poetic license,” Tennessee Williams wrote in the stage directions of his most famous “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie. “It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”
When The Glass Menagerie was first performed in 1944, Williams struggled to best convey these aspects of memory. At first he prescribed projected images on the walls of the house; later he took them out after he decided they detracted from the strength of Laurette Taylor’s performance. At publishing, he included copious notes in the introduction about the theme of memory. The music, he felt, was also crucial: “When you look at a piece of spun glass you think about two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of these should be woven in to the recurring tune…” In his new adaptation of Williams’ classic at the American Repertory Theater (ART), Director John Tiffany has taken the same themes of memory, beauty, and ruin, but largely ignored the playwright’s exacting stage directions, replacing them with his own vision in largely successful ways.
The Glass Menagerie shows the struggles of the Wingfield family through the memory of Tom Wingfield, a young man restless to leave his job at a shoe factory and travel the world. He is supporting his mother, Amanda, and disabled sister, Laura, as well as his father, “a telephone man in love with long distance” who left the family years ago. Tom struggles with his restlessness as his mother tries to find a suitable husband for Laura. At last a potential suitor arrives, symbolically—in Tom’s remembrance—the “long delayed but always expected something that we live for.”
Tiffany had Cherry Jones set in mind as Amanda Wingfield before he proposed directing The Glass Menagerie to the ART. The play and actress are a winning combination. Jones never misses a beat of humor nor slips for a moment from her role as an adoring, meddling mother, anxiously plotting her children’s futures while she muses about her past as a Southern belle. She draws the biggest laughs from the audience when she arrives on stage in the last scene in an old-fashioned nineteenth century dress, and yet remains three-dimensional in her eccentric revelry.
The same authenticity characterizes Celia Keenan-Bolger’s performance as Laura, the shy, crippled daughter of the family. Keenan-Bolger undergoes a particularly impressive transformation in her scene with her “gentleman caller,” played by Brian J. Smith. As the scene unfolds she reveals her character’s untapped inner life, bringing playfulness and humor that is all the more joyous after her equally-convincing meekness during the rest of the show. Smith plays his part as a very American optimist without any unnecessary irony, letting the part speak for itself.
Yet it is Zachary Quinto, who plays the family son, Tom (a fictionalized Tennessee Williams, of course) who brought the most buzz to the production. His celebrity precedes him from television roles in American Horror Story, Asylum, Heroes, 24, and Six Feet Under, as well as his reprisal as Spock in the upcoming sequel Star Trek into Darkness. His Tom is dark and on-edge, as well as bitingly funny. Quinto is at his best in scenes where this sarcasm is full-blooded, especially in his interactions with Jones.
Occasionally Quinto’s physicality slips from Tom’s restless movement and one sees a hint of—presumably—his own demeanor. He seems to have not quite bought into the same reality as the other actors. This irregularity might be a statement about the artistic Tom’s withdrawal from his family and his boring job. Or it could be a directorial choice related to Tom’s role as “the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.”
Yet Quinto’s work needs clarity between different mental states. Jones, Bolger, and Smith are so invested in their accents, their physicality, and what their character wants in each scene that Quinto’s self-conscious, abstract brooding almost seems disconnected from the very interesting conflict of the plot. What is needed are clearer distinctions between his struggle as the narrator to cope emotionally with the story he is telling and his struggle as Tom-of-the-past with his familial and existential angst. The stage directions of the play write that the narrator “takes whatever license with dramatic convention as is convenient to his purposes,” but all purposes need clarity and good acting entails it.
Tiffany also abandons the use of gramophone music for a soundtrack by Nico Muhly. This works beautifully, often as an insight into representation of the characters’ inner states. Movement, directed by the choreographer Steven Hoggett, is also central in this production. There are several moments too striking to spoil in a review, but even less surprising ones add poetry and grace. Jones and Keenan-Bolger set the table with sweeping, abstract hand movements; Keenan-Bolger warily reaches down several times into the black liquid that surrounds the stage, which reflects light like the glass she collects. It’s an illuminating gesture, almost as if she is testing the edges of her small world. The small, intimate set almost seems to floats in the liquid. It is designed by Bob Crowley, who also designed the costumes. His other striking touch is a fire escape that appears to recede infinitely upward, cleverly adding space to an otherwise intentionally claustrophobic set.
Most of the play takes place in this darker, older, world that reads very much as the memory it is. Then, in the last section of the play, both costumes and set are modified with brighter colors and even Chinese lanterns to welcome the gentleman caller. The elements look out of place, jarring either because they are from too long ago or because they are strikingly modern. The switch, though almost ugly, is an effective image of the struggle that all the characters undergo with time itself. They are not really at home in either the present or the past, but they try to bring both into their trying lives.
It is this battle with time that allows The Glass Menagerie to remain meaningful and relatable production after production. “For time,” Tom notes at the end of the play “is the longest distance between two places.“ Pain and longing necessarily follow. How can individuals and families bear the sorrows and scars of the past and the uncertainty of the future? Amanda’s attempts to create a version of her genteel past for her children, Tom’s plans to run away, the gentleman caller’s self-improving optimism, and even Laura’s strange glass menagerie are all attempts to answer this question, and to live on in a uncertain, memory-plagued world. The theme might be trite in the hands of another playwright, but doesn’t age in Williams’ lyrical treatment.