Amanda Wingfield captures the mood of The Glass Menagerie best when she warns her son Tom: "The future becomes the present, the present becomes the past and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."
Tennessee Williams' 1945 play is replete with themes of regret, untapped potential and the general malaise of suburban living that still resonate today. Held at the Paul Green Theater at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Glass Menagerie is performed by the PlayMakers Repertory Company.
In faithfulness to the original, PlayMakers draw from the toolbox of expressionist theater. The play opens with Tom Wingfield, played by John Tufts, breaking the "fourth wall" and narrating past events from memory. The stage set is appropriately sparse, comprised mostly of furniture that embodies the living room of an urban apartment in a late 1930s America.
Only five characters are necessary to bear Williams' masterpiece to fruition. As Tom's story unfolds, his recollections are brought to life by his mother Amanda (Judith-Marie Bergan), his sister Laura (Marianne Miller), a older version of himself (Ray Dooley) and Laura's gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor (John Brummer).
Overall, the performances are engaging and pay respectable homage to Williams' classic.
Bergan, as Amanda Wingfield, does an exceptional job. She perfectly captures the histrionics of the overbearing, overprotective mother who desires to live vicariously through her children's success.
Her compelling performance belies the exhausting attention to nuance and the multifaceted role-playing required of a genteel Southern woman. She seems to express the weariness of her ambitious role when she proclaims, "I know all about the tyranny of women."
Dooley plays a subordinate role to the women of the play, but does a fine job expressing the angst of his ennui while working at a factory and the yearning he has for adventure-a calling he answers when he escapes to become a merchant marine. Dooley's exasperation with his mother and tenderness toward his sister are played with impressive dynamism, and he often resembles a young Tom Cruise in both appearance and acting.
The thematic and symbolic importance of Williams' play rests largely on the shoulders of protagonist Laura Wingfield, and Marianne Miller handles the weight of this responsibility with varying degrees of success. In the original play, Laura is aloof, crippled and cripplingly shy. And while Miller's performance captures these characteristics, they don't seem to honestly cohere in her delineation until the second half of the play. Empathizing with Laura is difficult, as Miller presents a figure perhaps more cloying than Williams intended, though she does deliver a moving performance in the denouement.
Like Revolutionary Road, The Glass Menagerie presents themes of domestic unhappiness and the inaccessibility of the American Dream, making it a great theater companion to the Oscar-nominated film.
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