Thanks to remarkable acting (especially by Judith Ivey as Amanda) and directing, Tennessee Williams' 1945 family drama, The Glass Menagerie, finds new, reverberating life in this production at the Mark Taper Forum. Gordon Edelstein, who recently mounted the play at his Long Wharf Theater in New Haven (and then at the Roundabout in New York), has not only brought out the play's poignancy and despair but its oft-overlooked humor.
Edelstein has Ivey to thank for that. Most actresses play Amanda as an angry, embittered soul; Ivey takes that portrayal further and deeper, emphasizing the woman's feistiness and silliness. The many laughs she gets are a reminder that, as Frank Dwyer observes in a program note, "At heart, Williams is a comic writer. We fasten our seatbelts for a bumpy ride, but it's almost always a joyride, too."
"The play is memory," Amanda's wastrel son Tom (Patch Darragh) says in an opening speech. Tom keeps looking back as the action unfolds, first from a vantage point Williams describes as a hotel room in New Orleans (not successfully established by Edelstein, in my opinion), then from the heart of the Wingfields' dingy St. Louis tenement. At times Tom even types or writes the dialogue being spoken by Amanda and Laura (Keira Keeley). A scrim and moody lighting further help to establish the transparent fictional veil through which we (and Tom) experience the story.
Ben McKenzie plays Jim O'Connor, the Gentleman Caller on whose shoulders the fate of the Wingfield family rests. Will he fall in love with Laura, the wounded waif who has retreated into the private realm of her glass figurines? The play's long second act deals almost exclusively with that question. If Jim connects with Laura and becomes the strong male figure missing in the Wingfield household (Tom is too weak, too sissyish to fill that role), The Glass Menagerie will then have an upbeat conclusion.
As we all know, though, the play does not end happily: Jim returns to his fiance, Laura to her fantasy world. Amanda's brave, desperate battle to keep her family together ends in failure and heartbreak; Tom abandons them all, fleeing from responsibility just as his father did before him
The Glass Menagerie's take on life is tragic, but thanks to Ivey's radiant and memorable performance -- and to the humor she and her superb fellow actors (and Edelstein) find in the text -- we experience laughter and joy along with ineffable sadness.
