Precious Glass

Williamstown makes Menagerie work

by Steve Vineberg

THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Neel Keller. Set design by Hugh Landwehr. Costumes by David Murin. Lighting by Rui Rita. With Dana Ivey, Eric Stoltz, Jenny Bacon, and Tate Donovan. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, through July 5.

In the opening production on Williamstown's mainstage, actress Dana Ivey and director Neel Keller achieve the impossible: they make The Glass Menagerie work. Beloved as it is, Tennessee Williams's 1945 memory play has stymied all the other revivals I've seen, and the actresses who've attempted Amanda in my experience -- Shirley Booth, Katharine Hepburn, Maureen O'Sullivan, Joanne Woodward, and Julie Harris -- have all stumbled over it. I think that's because the play pretends to be about Amanda and her daughter, Laura, but is really about her son, Tom, the narrator figure whom Williams, following the impulse of many young writers, fashioned in his own image. (In a 1995 production at New York's Roundabout Theatre, Zeljko Ivanek went all the way with the link between character and playwright and made Tom gay.) And Williams's anger at his own mother curdles the wistful, wilted-Southern-belle image he projects for Amanda in act one. By the end of act two, her treatment of her son is so unjust that it makes her unlikable, and an audience that has cultivated the affection for her that Williams seems to encourage feels betrayed.

Keller, who's the associate artistic director at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse, solves this dramatic puzzler by minimizing the element that's always drawn theatergoers to The Glass Menagerie -- the fragile, wind-chime poetic quality. Then he buckles down to shape the play around Amanda and her daughter, whose slightly crippled leg, the legacy of an adolescent attack of pleurosis, is merely a symptom of her debilitating shyness. When I heard Eric Stoltz, with his distinctive high, craggy voice, marching through Tom's opening speeches like a weary but purposeful foot soldier, my first thought was that he was miscast. But Keller doesn't want us to get lost in the seductive rhythms of these speeches, and structurally he wants to pull Tom back to the narrator's position. Stoltz, a gifted and generally underrated actor, gives a witty, down-to-earth performance, and a very generous one: he steps gallantly to the side in favor of Ivey's Amanda and Jenny Bacon's Laura.

Ivey's Amanda is not a will-of-the-wisp fluttering tragically in the broken light of her plantation past. She's a bulky, resilient woman with a sense of humor, whose sharp memory of the trick life played on her -- the youth she threw away on a handsome, honey-tongued ne'er-do-well -- has kept her wary and driven in ways that make her a constant nag and sometimes a bitter one. When she discovers that Laura's terror has caused her to drop quietly out of a business course at a local college, she speaks of the "little birdlike women," spinsters of the South who live on the "grudging charity" of relatives, and Ivey gives the lines an angry, almost acrid edge: there'll be no such future for her, you hear her protesting, or for her daughter. And when Amanda recalls the summer when she filled her house with jonquils and caught malaria and met her husband, Ivey's dizzying fervency makes it unsettlingly clear what she lost; the past isn't a sachet for her -- it's an ongoing pain in her heart. (This is hands-down the finest reading of this famous speech I've ever heard.)

In a poignant way that no other production I know has ever managed, Keller links Amanda to Laura, whose loss at the end of play -- when her high-school crush, brought improbably home to supper by her brother, brings her a moment of romantic magic and then snatches it away -- is a tiny, anguished echo of her mother's. (Tate Donovan is charming and entirely convincing as Jim, the "gentleman caller.") We understand that this is the only swain Laura will ever have, this accidental passerby who kisses her impulsively in the candlelight before going home to another girl; but even a whiff of romance is enough for her to feel, like her mother, that she's lost the world. Jenny Bacon makes you fall in love with Laura, but there's a dark quality in her voice at some moments that offers a glimpse of how deep and hellish her loneliness must be.

I've said that Keller's production plays down the poetry; as I hope my description of the performances of these two remarkable actresses makes clear, however, he doesn't eliminate it. It's there in the spare Hugh Landwehr set and in Rui Rita's lighting, both of which set a desolate, Depression-era mood. Keller puts Williams's poetry at the service of the drama, which he's had to reconstruct, really, from a problematic text. This is an astonishing production.