"...an astonishing and unusual production"

May 25, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Tom Story, Kate Maguire, and Aya Cash.
Photo by Kevin Sprague.

Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, although an early play among the thirty he wrote, remains one of the most produced and loved, and Eric Hill's production, now playing at Berkshire Theatre Festival's Unicorn Theatre, is one so awesomely presented that it bids fair to be on the Top Ten list of best plays at the end of what may be one of the strongest (and longest) summer theatre seasons in the Berkshires.

Hill's distinctive directing style, poetical as well as intensely physical, is evident from the first moment when Tom Wingfield (Tom Story) as narrator (and ruer of a past he could not control but which haunts him as he strolls the forestage) hangs up his sailor cap and coat and steps back into that past—depression days in the America of the 30's-- to play out with his mother Amanda (Kate Maguire) and sister Laura (Aya Cash), the hot summer of despair that drove him to abandon them.

Williams' style calls for intense realism and it is there in the shabby interior of the tenement home in St.Louis, and in the violent outbursts of frustrated dreams, or the poignant memory of lost ones. It is there in the setting of the period exploding in a half a line of ironic dialog when the Gentleman Caller (Greg Keller) asks house-bound lame Laura "If she took in the Chicago World's Fair.?"

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The Glass Menagerie
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Eric Hill
Previews May 24
Opens May 25
Closes June 30

But Williams also demands expressionism and symbolism that must weave in and out of the production, the acting and the setting. Telephone lines sag back and forth above the small house, moving off into time and space; the crippled sister must be remembered as "blue roses" by the gentleman caller; even a jonquil must be smashed, as well as that most potent symbol, the fragile glass unicorn who must take his humble place along the other horses.

All four actors are well cast and give memorable performances.

Kate Maguire's Amanda (a role originated on Broadway in 1945, starring Laurette Taylor and since recreated there by the likes of Helen Hayes, Maureen Stapleton, and even an aged Julia Harris who had been Laura in the original production), not only holds her own among these great actresses, but makes it hers - a new Amanda, accent in place. Her feisty nagging struggle with and for her children, her determination that good for them can bloom and lift them out of their shabby depression tenement lives, her hopeless sad belief that a vase of jonquils on table can bring not only her own past, (with 17 gentleman callers) but at least one caller for the hopeless maimed, physically and emotionally, daughter she loves and bullies, vibrates in her performance, and makes poignantly sad the great beauty her face assumes, briefly, in the last act when clad in long outmoded finery she is radiant with a soon to be dashed hope.

Cash's Laura in the beginning makes no claim to even a hint of beauty. Her face is white and almost vacant in her anguish at being unable to please her mother, at being fearful of life itself. She is as fragile as the glass animals she cherishes and retreats to dusting when unable to defend herself against her mother's rueful taunts. Haunted by her self-consciousness over the clumping shoe she must drag across her life, she is full of a helpless love for mother and brother. And for a moment in the second act she is suddenly magically beautiful as she stands staring out at the audience, her face lit like that of a Madonna in a medieval painting.

Keller's Gentleman Caller fills every moment with the (hopeful?) optimism of his role. He casts a large shadow on the back wall — and on the ending of the play. He is the successful high school hero of the Year Book who has found that the years of the 30's in America are not kind to such as he. But he is, he thinks, only stalled in his bleak warehouse job, and dreams of a future called television. His genuine attempts to be kind to the forlorn Laura, their poignant dance that smashes more than the glass unicorn, are as moving real as is his embarrassed departure.

And then there is Tom Story who as narrator and son (surrogate Williams) carries the burden of the tale. He is magnificent, from his opening monologue, through his violent confrontations with his mother, through his tenderness for his sister, and especially poignant in his closing monologue, when in grief and loss he must bid Laura to blow out the candles.

And he makes Laura's imagined touch on his shoulder as he stands, transfixed before a window full of colored glass, so real, that one would expect her to appear behind him if one could not also see, in a sensational bit of staging at the plays' end, the abandoned Laura and Amanda sitting at the table, very still.

The play is threaded with moments one wants to freeze in place. The character groupings so telling, the threads of symbol and reality holding together so dynamically. Tom trying to write a poem at the breakfast table while his mother dials the ancient phone, forgetting the early hour and trying to earn a pittance from a client's magazine renewal as Laura hovers by her phonograph polishing her glass treasures. Or Amanda on the "terrace" wishing for her children on the moon, her face softened with love and hope.

Or the moment near the end of the first act when the audience itself is aswirl in the circling patterns of the lights that are haunting the public ball rooms that impinge on the city area in which the family lives.

The realist/expressionistic pattern of the play is ably abetted by Carl Sprague, Olivera Gajic, Matthew E. Adelson, and Scott Killian, responsible for scenery, costumes, lighting and sound.

This is an astonishing and unusual production of the Glass Menagerie and fortunately will be running until the end of June. Hurrah all around!!!!!