Rialto Note:
Broadway Fresh: The Glass Menagerie
13 November 2013
Not being a fan of Tennessee Williams’s work, I agreed to see the current revival of The Glass Menagerie because Cherry Jones was to play Amanda Wingfield, and I didn’t want to miss that. I didn’t know how Ms Jones would play Amanda, but I did know that she would play the role in several ways at the same time, as indeed she did. The actress has a knack for bringing out the antagonisms within all of us without allowing them to cloud the coherence of her presentation. There is a great deal of sparkling naughtiness in Cherry Jones on stage, even when she’s playing an allegedly dour old nun, as in Doubt. The role of Amanda Wingfield offers many opportunities for romping subversiveness, and Ms Jones makes the most of them, brightening the play’s tone considerably. Grim The Glass Menagerie may be, but it need not be dreary. As it turned out, Cherry Jones wasn’t the only member of the company with a darting pulse. It was a quality that she appears to have shared with every one of her colleagues.
The Glass Menagerie is set in a lower-middle-class living room in St Louis: dreary. But Bob Crowley, credited with the scenic and costume design of this production, sets the show on an airily expressionistic course before the house lights go down. Taking our seats, we see a few sticks of furniture, and a sofa that I’m sure would have been called a “davenport.” These are all suitably dingy. But the walls aren’t dingy, because there aren’t any walls, and the draperies aren’t dingy, because there aren’t any windows. Instead, there are fire escapes, as we call them: rickety-looking metal terraces connected by equally exiguous stairs to terraces above and below. From the Wingfield apartment, a fire escape climbs dizzily into the rafters, suggesting with the assurance of a Brahms finale that real escape from this apartment is going to be difficult, perhaps perilous, and possibly impossible: how do you cross the infinite? The Wingfields live in the dark, at the bottom of something. They appear to come and go — all but Laura, the crippled daughter of the house — but they never really leave this dismal space that is, nevertheless, strangely exhilarating for the audience, not only because the fire escape climbs so crazily but because the living room is set atop an inky lake that not only replaces the view outside with a reflection of the life within but underscores the precariousness of that life, which might at any time tumble into it. The pool creates a visceral anxiety in the audience, in accordance with Chekhov’s Law. If you have a tank of water onstage, somebody is going to get wet. That nobody does fall into the water acts, almost maddeningly, to heighten the anxiety, which goes undischarged.
That’s what I didn’t like about The Glass Menagerie when I was an undergraduate: it offered a ticket to nowhere. The problem faced by the Wingfield family remained unsolved at the end. Or so it seemed to when I was young. Last night, I understood that the problem itself is what changes: it is shown to be unsolvable. Laura Wingfield is never going to attract a husband. It has also been demonstrated that the alternative solution to her predicament — being cared for by her brother — has been withdrawn. Tom Wingfield just might take Laura under his wing, but in order to do so he would have to push his insupportable mother out of the nest. That’s what The Glass Menagerie comes down to: the dramatic proof of a thesis that, as of the opening scene, has not yet been put to the test.
***
The shouting between Amanda and Tom is what’s usually easiest to recall about productions of The Glass Menagerie, but there’s more to the play than their hoarse frustration. Much of the second act is devoted to a scene of extended conversation that can be extremely dull. But not in this production. Here, the scene for Laura and Jim, the “gentleman caller,” is a genuine duet, finely choreographed for two strong actors. The playbill features a “Movement” credit, to Steven Hoggett, and the performance is dotted with many moments of stylized gesture. The gestures are somewhat reminiscent of Grant Wood’s paintings, and their effect is sustained by Nico Muhly’s haunting, lyrical music. These elements establish a tenderness at the heart of the nightmare. As Jim, the gifted Brian Smith is the very type of an American fine young man, graceful about acknowledging that he was spoiled by easy high-school triumphs. He establishes an instant rapport with Laura — who loved him from afar in his glory days — but with time we realize that it is the rapport of a brother, not a lover. Jim would almost certainly make a better brother than Tom does. Unlike Tom, Jim wants to achieve success in the world as it is. As the poor girl, in one of the classic stage’s most thankless roles, Celia Keenan-Bolger brings an unquestionable integrity to Laura that amounts, toward the end, to grandeur. She and Mr Smith make this a genuine, if eccentric, love scene.
Zachary Quinto, who plays Tom, is making his Broadway debut, which would be starting at the top if it weren’t for a sheaf of Off-Broadway credits and a sterling performance in Margin Call. He looks nothing like Cherry Jones and is somewhat difficult to imagine as her son, but by the same token he evokes the absentee father who “fell in love with long distance”: as evidence of a mésalliance, he is eloquent. But he pulls off the even neater trick of presenting all of Tom’s petulance and impatience and cynicism, his resentment and his oceanic ambition — perhaps that is the sea into which he falls at the end — without making the character unpleasant. At no point did I share his mother’s exasperation with him. Mr Quinto doesn’t so much impersonate Tom as hold him carefully close, like a lantern that the draft must not be allowed to snuff out. Never has the portrait of the artist as a young man been displayed with such urgent good faith.
It is undoubtedly the vitality of Cherry Jones, the sheer aliveness of her, that enables her embodiment of an Amanda who, while frequently tiresome and thoughtless, is neither a monster nor a pathetic wreck. Amanda is limited, as we all are, and she is getting on as best she can, which is the most that can be asked of anyone. It is easy to remember Williams’s Amanda as a close relative of the deluded Blanche DuBois, but Ms Jones will have none of it. There is nothing toxic in her Amanda’s determination to remember the bright side of things — as she must, for she sees precious little enough of it. When I was young, I probably missed the absence of an Atridean secret in The Glass Menagerie, the germ of a doom that would explain the rotten downfall of the Wingfields’ fortunes. Cherry Jones makes me wonder if anything can ever be altogether rotten. It is impossible not to remember her Amanda as a woman coquettishly capering across the carpet, full of life. And so I left the theatre with a decided spring in my step.