"The Glass Menagerie' at Walnut's Studio 3

Last year the Walnut Street Theater took a big risk in producing Eric Conger's The Eclectic Society, a world premiere by an unknown playwright. I was doubly impressed when I heard that the Walnut— the company with America's largest subscriber base— would take another gamble by forming a touring company, the Resident Ensemble Players.

Then I learned that the new company would perform Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, one of the most produced works in America. I didn't see the artistic point of dragging this 70-year old corpse of a play across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic for six weeks, or spending the money to pay four regional actors to export a product that small communities could easily grow locally—assuming they would want to see it at all.

Williams's semi-autobiographical drama has always struck me as incredibly self-indulgent (why would anyone but academics care that memories of his sister haunted Williams all his life?). Its story of an overbearing mother driving one child into the ground and the other into exile reminds me of the advice a high school coach once gave: Choose your parents wisely.

Typical family?

In most productions, The Glass Menagerie contains little that would recommend it beyond the typical family drama. Williams's play casts its eye back on depression-era St. Louis, where warehouse worker Tom (played here by Damon Bonetti) toils in a job beneath his talents to support his mother Amanda (Wendy Scharfman) and his slightly crippled sister Laura (Jillian Louis). On $65 a week, the three of them share a tiny walkup, can't pay the bills and can't plan a future.

While Tom fills his evenings with dreams of becoming a writer (more autobiography), mother Amanda berates him constantly— about his eating habits, his drinking and smoking and even the books he checks out of the library. Amanda fears that Tom will repeat his father's history and abandon the remnants of their family. Although she refuses to think realistically about Laura's prospects, Amanda offers Tom an escape: Find a husband who can support your sister and you can run off to find adventure.

Crippled sister, fading gentility, alcoholic son— it's not hard to see why Christopher Durang parodied this play in For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls.

Sympathy for Amanda

But at the Walnut, it's hard to leave the production with anything but the deepest sense of resonating despair. Director Bill van Horn and his four magnificent performers have stripped the play of all self-indulgent affectation and melodrama.

Van Horn places Tom's story in the background, dimming the remnants of the "memory" play and diminishing the central conflict between Tom and Amanda. In turn, Scharfman— if not making Amanda likable—convinces us that this otherwise narcissistic matron truly has her children's interests at heart.

This slight change deepens Menagerie's tragedy and alters its theme. Instead of seeing Amanda as a domineering villain (as she's usually portrayed), here we see her expressing genuine concern about Laura's future and Tom's virtue. By downplaying the emotional violence of their bickering, Bonetti and Scharfman illustrated the divide between a woman who lives chronologically through the generations of her family, and the generation of her son that began to seek personal meaning.

Too pretty?

These choices also changed the stakes. Instead of focusing on Tom's freedom— and, in the autobiographical sense, the future of Tennessee Williams as a writer— this production centers on the bleak prospects that await Laura. Initially, Jillian Louis struck me as too pretty to play Laura: Surely, I thought, some man would have overlooked her slight physical disability.

But Louis accentuates her limp with a nervous quality that unhinges those around her. When the first gentleman caller she's ever received (a compelling Jared Michael Delaney) arrives for a prospective courtship, he at times looks terrified. And when he leaves, Louis sits motionless, transfixed by despair and ready to shatter into bits if life deals her one more heartbreak (which Tom must do when he departs).

Laura's innocence and sincerity, her inability to connect with the world, displaces her from both her mother's past and Tom's adventurous future. The world will always leave some Lauras behind. In this particular case, Louis's performance left me feeling that there is, quite simply, no hope for her at all.

The Walnut took a risk that paid off: This fresh, powerful and insightful production deserves to travel and find new audiences.♦


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