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Feb.27,2005 -Mar.6,2005 |
The Glass Menagerie
Production doesn't do justice to play
By Bruce Raymond
Originally Published: 2005-02-06
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Rosemary Dunsmore as Amanda Wingfield, and Damien Atkins as Tom Wingfield
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Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, currently on stage at CanStage's Berkeley Street Theatre, has been described as the memory play of a dark and bewildering family. Certainly, Chris Abraham's production of the play is indeed bewildering, partly due to casting, but more so to the fact that this intimate play is performed on an oversized stage.
I would assume that just about every theatre goer is familiar with the story of Amanda Wingfield, a faded southern belle who hopes to make her introverted daughter into the social success she herself had been - at least according to her own recollections. Amanda's husband, who had been working for a telephone company, long ago fell in love with long distance and deserted his family for parts unknown. The play takes place during the "dirty thirties," and the Wingfields are surviving more on pride than on substance. Amanda is counting on her son, Tom, to provide for the family, but Tom already is becoming restless. His only respite from the grinding spiritual and physical poverty in which he finds himself is to immerse himelf in the movies every night.
Laura's main preoccupation is to lavish tender loving care on a menagerie of glass animals. Amanda knows that Tom eventually will follow in his father's footsteps, but as long as he provides for Laura, Amanda doesn't care if Tom "goes to the moon!" One way that Tom can provide for Laura is to find her a beau, and he half-heartedly does so by bringing home a friend from the warehouse. Unfortunately, the friend isn't quite the gentleman caller that Amanda had hoped for, and this is where the tragedy of the story lies.
A great plot with lots of gritty dialogue, however, the essential intimacy of the story is lost in this production because the actors are forced to wander 50 feet from one side of the stage to the other in order to be certain that the entire audience can see what's going on and share Tom's agony.
Similarly, the glass menagerie is placed to one side of the stage, where half the audience can't really see it, and the dinner table is set upstage behind gauze curtains that effectively hide it from view.
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