[My report on The Glass Menagerie was difficult to compose. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to say or how I felt about the production. I had trouble deciding how to articulate what I wanted to say and what to leave out. There’s so much to say about this play (about which I know a fair amount as well) and this production, that the report has run very long as well. (The press coverage was also fairly extensive, but more than that, it, too, was packed with opinions, criticisms, and explanations.) I’ve decided to leave the report at its extended length rather than cut it drastically (or post it in two parts, which it doesn’t warrant). As long as “The Glass Menagerie” is, you’ll see that the review round-up is again half of the length.]
There’s
no argument that Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was one of the greatest
playwrights of the 20th century.
Thirty-four years after his death, his plays are still among the most
popular stage works in the Western world; just since 2000, there have been
eight Broadway productions and 14 Off-Broadway productions of works by
Williams. Add to that all the
productions around the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and
anywhere else the name Tennessee Williams resounds and the number reaches into
the hundreds. The film versions of
Williams’s plays are staples of television even today, and many of the
playwright’s scripts have been remade for the small screen, often to great
acclaim and popularity. Roles like
Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Alma Winemiller, Amanda Wingfield, Brick Pollitt,
Maggie the Cat, Big Daddy Pollitt, and others that have become iconic in the American
theater, have also become touchstones for actors, the Hamlets and Hedda Gablers
of our era.
Even a
quick glance at the list of recent revivals of Tennessee Williams plays will
reveal that still among the most popular are his great plays from the 1940s and
’50s: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947),
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and the
one that started it all, The Glass
Menagerie (1944). Glass Menagerie
may be Williams’s most popular play of all, edging out even Streetcar in New York by one revival.
So even though a Tony-nominated revival from Harvard’s American
Repertory Theatre hit Broadway just 3½ years ago, Scott Rudin and the Lincoln
Center Theater decided to bring in a new one.
Directed by Sam Gold (Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home, Public Theater and Broadway,
Tony for Best Direction of a Musical; Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses; the upcoming A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath; Othello at the New York Theatre Workshop; Annie Baker’s The Flick, 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama,
and John, reported on ROT on 1 September 2015), the
limited-run revival of The Glass
Menagerie started previews at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre on West 44th
Street, east of Broadway, on 7 February 2017 and opened on 9 March; the run is
scheduled to end on 2 July. I caught the
8 p.m. show on Friday, 24 March, with a friend of my usual theater companion
(Diana hurt herself shoveling snow after our recent mini-blizzard the previous
week).
The
play, which is Williams’s most (and most openly) autobiographical script,
features characters based on Williams himself (born Thomas Lanier Williams III,
the prototype for Tom Wingfield, the narrator), his histrionic mother (Edwina
Dakin Williams, the model for Amanda Wingfield), and his mentally fragile older
sister Rose (who suffered from schizophrenia and was the model for the
physically handicapped Laura Wingfield).
Many of the high school experiences attributed to Laura in the play
actually happened to Tom Williams, and Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller, is a
composite of the most popular boy in Tom’s school (Soldan High School, the same
one Tom, Laura, and Jim went to, whose yearbook, for which Williams wrote, was
called The Torch as in the play) and
a young man he worked with at the shoe company named Jim Connor. The Williams family lived in a small, dark apartment
in St. Louis from 1918 until he left for the University of Iowa in 1937. Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin (“C.C.”)
Williams, a drunk, a bully, a gambler, and a brawler, was employed at the
International Shoe Company (which became the warehouse where Tom Wingfield and
Jim O’Connor both work in the play), but before the promotion and transfer to
the St. Louis main office, C.C. had been the stereotypical traveling salesman,
mostly absent from the home and living a separate life on the road. After Williams graduated from Iowa in 1939, he
moved to New Orleans (where he took the name “Tennessee” and turned from writing
poetry to plays), and then New York City; until his burial, he never returned
to live in St. Louis.
Williams
drew on a 1943 short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (published in 1948), which
essentially tells the same story as Glass Menagerie, which was also the
basis of a screenplay he had written in 1943 for MGM under the title of The Gentleman Caller (originally considered
as a vehicle for Lana Turner, then only 23, as Laura). Williams started rewriting what became The Glass Menagerie for the stage that
same year and it premièred in Chicago as the Civic Theatre on 26 December 1944
with fading stage star Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda. Co-directed and co-produced by Eddie Dowling (who
also played Tom) and Margo Jones, with scenic and lighting designs by the renowned
Jo Mielziner, the play transferred to New York’s Playhouse Theatre on Broadway
(and later the Royale) where it ran for 563 performances—a very long run for
that day—from 31 March 1945 to 3 August 1946.
Winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and the
Donaldson and Sidney Howard Memorial Award, it was Williams’s first professional,
New York, and Broadway success (after the failure in 1941 of Battle of Angels to make it into New
York City). As Jackson R. Bryer reports
in The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia
(Philip C. Kolin, ed., Greenwood Press, 2004): “There were 24 curtain calls on
opening night, and virtually overnight Williams went from obscurity to being
the subject of feature stories in Time
and Life magazines.”
The
play was an instant worldwide hit. It
premièred in London on 28 July 1948 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket directed by
John Gielgud with a scenic design again by Mielziner; Helen Hayes starred as
Amanda and Frances Heflin played Laura. In
New York City alone, there have been nine revivals on and off Broadway before
the current one: in 1965 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (directed by George
Keathley, with George Grizzard, Pat Hingle, Piper Laurie, and Maureen Stapleton);
1976 at the Circle in the Square Theatre (directed by Theodore Mann with a scenic
design by Ming Cho Lee; starring Pamela Payton-Wright, Paul Rudd, Maureen
Stapleton, and Rip Torn); 1983-84 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre (directed by
John Dexter with a scenic design by Lee and costume design by Patricia Zipprodt,
with Jessica Tandy, Bruce Davison, John Heard, and Amanda Plummer); 1994-95 at
the Criterion Center Stage Right (produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company
and directed by Frank Galati with a scenic design by Loy Arcenas, starring Julie
Harris, Calista Flockhart, Željko Ivanek, and Kevin Kilner); 2005 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre (with Jessica Lange,
Sarah Paulson, and Christian Slater); 2010 Off-Broadway at the Roundabout/Laura
Pels Theatre (with Judith Ivey and Laurie Kennedy); 2013-14 at the Booth
Theatre (originally produced by Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre, with Cherry
Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Zachary Quinto); May 2015 produced by the Masterworks
Theater Company Off-Broadway at the 47th Street Theatre; and May-June 2015
produced by Be Bold! Productions at the Players Theatre. John Tiffany’s 2013 Broadway staging reopened
on 26 January 2017 at the Duke of York Theatre in London’s West End with Cherry
Jones reprising her performance as Amanda, running through 29 April.
Other
significant productions included several interracial or all-African-American
casts. In a 1965 mounting by Reuben
Silver at the Karamu House Theatre in Cleveland, the Wingfield family was black
but Jim, the “gentleman caller,” was white.
In 1991, Whitney J. LeBlanc staged an all-black Glass Menagerie
at San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in which Laura’s disability
served as a metaphor for skin color and the photo of the Wingfields’ absent
father and husband was of a white man, raising the image of miscegenation. A 1994 production at the Will Geer Theatricum
Botanicum in Topanga, California, directed by Heidi Helen Davis cast two actors
as Tom, one older as the narrator and the other younger as the son in the
memory scenes.
As it
happens, I’ve also seen two plays related to Glass Menagerie, both
one-acts. One’s a precursor to Glass Menagerie called Escape (written
by Williams in 1937) I saw in 2004 as
part of Five By Tenn
at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center when I reviewed it for the Tennessee Williams Annual Review.
(I posted my review, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” on ROT on 5
March 2011. The play was later
retitled Summer at the Lake when the collection was restaged
in New York City. I believe it’s been published under that title in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays
[eds. Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel; New Directions, 2005].) The other play was part of the Acting Company’s Desire, a
bill of adaptations by different playwrights of Williams stories (report posted
on 26 September 2015). John Guare’s version of “The Portrait of a Girl in
Glass” was called You Lied To Me About Centralia. It recounts
what happens to Jim, the gentleman caller, after he leaves the Wingfield
apartment and meets his fiancée, Betty, at the train station.
The
play’s been filmed twice, first in 1950 (the first time a Tennessee Williams
play had been filmed) with Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda, Arthur Kennedy as Tom, Kirk
Douglas as Jim, and Jane Wyman as Laura, directed for Warner Bros. by Irving
Rapper, and again in 1987 by Paul Newman (nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes)
for Cineplex-Odeon Films with his wife, Joanne Woodward, as Amanda, John
Malkovich as Tom, James Naughton as Jim, and Karen Allen as Laura. Williams denounced the 1950 version as one of
the worst transfers of one of his plays to film and it has never been released
on video. In Newman’s version, Malkovich
stressed Tom’s homosexuality, which is only implied in the script (or the
original short story). In the U.K., ITV Play of the Week aired a
black-and-white TV version of Glass Menagerie in 1964, and in 1966 CBS Playhouse broadcast a version
starring Shirley Booth (who was nominated for an Emmy for her performance) as
Amanda with Hal Holbrook as Tom, Pat Hingle as Jim, and Barbara Loden as
Laura. The American Broadcasting Company
aired a teleplay of Glass Menagerie starring Katharine Hepburn as
Amanda, Sam Waterston as Tom, Michael Moriarty as Jim, and Joanna Miles as
Laura in 1973; it was reportedly Williams’s preferred screen adaptation of the
play and the entire cast was nominated for Emmys for the work (Moriarty and
Miles each won). Several
foreign-language adaptations have been staged or televised over the decades,
and the play has been parodied a number of times as well.
Radio
versions of the play were aired in 1951 on Theatre Guild on the Air with
Hayes as Amanda, Montgomery Clift as Tom, and Karl Malden as Jim; 1953 on Best
Plays with Evelyn Varden as Amanda
and Geraldine Page as Laura; and 1954 on Lux Radio Theatre with Fay
Bainter as Amanda and Frank Lovejoy as Tom and Tom Brown as Jim. In 1964 Caedmon Records recorded The Glass Menagerie starring Jessica
Tandy as Amanda, Montgomery Clift as Tom, Julie Harris as Laura, and David
Wayne as Jim.
Tom
Wingfield (Joe Mantello), who both acts as narrator and plays a part in the
narrative, climbs up to the stage from the auditorium and, while the house
lights are up full, opens the production with what Hilton Als of the New Yorker rightly called a “glorious
opening monologue,” introducing the play to the audience as his recollection of
his mother, Amanda, and his older sister, Laura. As he speaks, he gets from off stage the
Victrola on which his sister will play the records that comfort her. (This is a sort of do-it-yourself staging for
the actors.) Because it’s a memory play,
Tom, graying—Mantello, 54, is the age of the narrator, not the son in the
memory scenes (Eddie Dowling was 55 when he played the part at the première of
the play in Chicago)—and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, cautions the audience
that what they see may not be precisely what happened. Though Tom warns us, “I give you truth in the
pleasant disguise of illusion,” director Gold will take us on a starker,
harsher journey into the Wingfields’ past.
After
Tom’s introductory monologue, Amanda struggles to bring her daughter, who in
the Gold’s staging is wheelchair-bound, up to the apartment, first pulling the
empty chair up the steps and then going back down to help Laura climb up step
by step on her butt backwards. It is
painstaking, awkward, and hard to watch, and places Laura’s disability directly
center stage. Later, Tom lays Laura on
the table and administers physical therapy as Amanda sells magazine
subscriptions over the phone. (Laura’s
disability is an enhancement of director Gold’s, which I’ll mention again
shortly. The actress suffers from
muscular dystrophy in real life, a fact that wasn’t much publicized—Ben
Brantley mentions it in passing in his New York Times review—and isn’t mentioned in her program
bio. It’s noteworthy that the playwright
himself had a limp resulting from a near-fatal childhood bout with diphtheria
and Bright’s disease when he was about five and his sister, Rose, had had
pleurisy as a child—which young Tom had misunderstood as “blue roses” just as
Jim O’Connor had with Laura.)
Amanda (Sally
Field), a former Southern belle now past her glory days, shares a dingy St.
Louis apartment with Tom, 22 at the time of the play, and Laura (Madison Ferris,
in her Broadway début), 24. Amanda’s
husband and the siblings’ father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long
distance” and left the family “a long time ago,” haunts the family via the
“larger-than-life-size photograph over the mantel” (invisible to the audience
on the fourth wall in Gold’s production). Amanda lives in her past as a sought-after
debutante entertaining many “gentleman callers,” relishing the admiration she
remembers receiving from so many eligible young men. She frets about the future of her daughter, who’s
handicapped and extremely shy. (Amanda
won’t let the word “cripple” be spoken in the home: Laura just has a little
“defect.”) Tom works in the warehouse of
Continental Shoemakers (the stand-in for C. C. Williams’s employer, the
International Shoe Company, where the would-be poet also worked for a time) but
resents the banality and boredom of everyday life as he endeavors to write. To get away from his mother’s nagging and
scolding, Tom (like Williams himself had done) escapes to the movies at all
hours of the day or night.
Amanda’s
fixated on finding a “gentleman caller” for Laura whose insecurity has led her
to drop out of both high school and Rubicam’s Business College. To disguise the fact that she no longer
attends the secretarial classes, Laura says she goes out walking and visiting
the zoo, and when she’s home, she spends her time with her collection of miniature
glass animals and listens to old phonograph records left behind by her father. (We never learn how she negotiates the
apartment building’s stairs or the streets of the city in her wheelchair alone.) Harried by his mother (“Will you? Will you? Will you? Will you, dear?”), Tom invites an acquaintance
from work, Jim O’Connor, home for dinner.
Amanda,
suddenly turning coquettish and upbeat, spiffs up the apartment, sets the table
with her best tableware, and prepares a special dinner—salmon loaf because it’s
Friday and Jim’s Catholic—for the special guest. When Laura learns that the gentleman caller
is a young man on whom she had a (secret) crush in high school, she’s so overwhelmed
by her lack of self-confidence that she feigns illness and retreats to the
living room. When Jim (Finn Wittrock)
arrives, Amanda, dressed in a preposterous pink tulle gown (the New York Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz called it
“a Pepto Bismol explosion”) that made her look like a deranged ballerina,
entertains him with tales of her youth when she’d been inundated with suitors.
During the
meal the electricity goes out—Tom hasn’t paid the light bill; he’s used the
money to pay for his membership in the Union of Merchant Seamen and is planning
to leave home like his father—plunging the apartment into darkness. (Costumes are by Wojciech Dziedzic and the
lighting is designed by Adam Silverman, both from Gold’s Amsterdam production.)
It starts to rain, but not just outside
the apartment—this literal downpour (courtesy of J&M Special Effects) soaks
everything and everyone in the apartment as well!
Jim and
Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for the power
to be come back on, and as the evening progresses, Jim sees Laura’s sense of inferiority
and encourages her to think of herself more highly. He dances with Laura sweetly (in Gold’s
staging, Jim lifts Laura off the floor, where they’ve both been sitting, and
holds her up in a sort of squat as they dance), but accidentally bumps against
her glass menagerie. This knocks the
glass unicorn, Laura’s oldest and most cherished figurine, off its perch and
breaks off its horn. Jim apologizes, but
Laura responds: “I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel
less—freakish! Now he will feel more at
home with the other horses, the ones who don’t have horns. . . .” This is a striking reference to the prefrontal
lobotomy performed on Williams’s sister Rose in 1943, the year in which the
dramatist wrote The Glass Menagerie,
intended to relieve the symptoms of her schizophrenia—to make Rose, as it were,
“feel less freakish.”
Jim tells
Laura she’s pretty and kisses her, but just when it looks like romance might
bloom, Jim tells Laura that he’s engaged to be married. Laura gives him the broken unicorn as a memento
and he leaves. When Amanda learns that
Jim’s engaged, she turns her disappointment on Tom, who didn’t know about Jim’s
engagement, and bitterly lashes out at him.
Tom angrily rushes from the apartment, shouting as he leaves, “. . . and
I won’t go to the movies!” to which his mother replies, “Then go to
the—moon—you selfish dreamer!”
In Tom’s
closing monologue, he says that he left home soon afterward and never returned.
Like Williams, Tom explains, “I traveled
around a great deal.” (The writer was
known to his friends as “Bird” because whenever he felt life closing in on him,
he’d take flight for some far-off location.) Tom says of his sister, “I tried to leave you
behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”; Tennessee Williams
remained devoted to Rose, the success of Glass Menagerie ensuring that
he could always take care of his sister, institutionalized for the rest of her
life from 1937 until her death in 1996.
Tom’s final words to Laura are: “Blow out your candles, Laura.” The line appears on the tombstone of Rose
Isabel Williams (1909-96)—which is next to her brother’s in a St. Louis
cemetery; Edwina Dakin Williams (1884-1980), their mother, is buried on her
son’s other side. (In the text, Laura
follows her brother’s direction, but in Gold’s production, Ferris shakes her
head “no” and Mantello douses the candles with water.)
In his
“Author’s Production Notes” to Glass Menagerie, Williams presents an essay on what
he called “plastic theater.” (That’s
where I first encountered the subject and became a little obsessed with it because
I felt it was overlooked; see my article, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee
Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012.) The playwright wrote about it
only once more, in “Williams: Person-to-Person” in a 1955 New York Times, and it’s still not heavily
covered in the scholarship, though it gets passing mention a lot.
Williams
wanted dramatists to write into their scripts all the aspects of theater (as
well as other arts) they could use to tell their stories or make
their points, and not leave it up to the directors and designers to impose that
on a purely literary text. His original stage directions for The Glass Menagerie were very
Brechtian in style (Williams had studied and worked with Erwin Piscator, Bertolt
Brecht’s mentor), calling for decidedly plastic elements including dozens of text
and image slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and cinematic lighting
dissolves and fades, but Eddie Dowling took all that plasticity out, sensing
that the Broadway audience in 1944 wouldn’t accept it. John Dexter’s
1983-84 Broadway revival was the first time the Brechtian devices Dowling
removed from the original production were presented to an audience, and I’ve
read about some productions in the past 20 years or so that put those FX back
in, but I’ve never seen one.
Almost all of Williams’s
plays exist in two or more variations, usually considered an “acting” version
for production and a literary version for reading. The script Williams wrote, which contained
the Brechtian staging devices I described and other elements omitted from the
1944 and ’45 premières became the literary edition of Glass Menagerie, originally
published by Random House (and later, New Directions, Williams’s longtime
publisher). The version based on
Dowling’s staging in Chicago and New York City is published as an acting text
by the Dramatists Play Service. Sam Gold
seems to have based his revival on the so-called literary edition of the
script, though his physical production is vastly different from anything
Williams described.
A
production can be ”plastic”—this one isn’t—but Williams’s idea was about playwriting,
not directing or producing. As I understand plasticity in theater, it
really has to involve the whole production, not just the set and my impression
of this production is that Gold simply plopped a perfectly acceptable straight
(that is, essentially naturalistic) performance onto a rehearsal set. (Aside
from Amanda’s and Laura’s party dresses, the costumes generally resemble
actors’ contemporary rehearsal clothes.)
Except for Laura’s “enhanced” disability, of course. Other
aspects of the physical environment which Williams’s dialogue mentions but
which Gold has removed are nevertheless referred to. I can’t really
figure why he did any of this.
I found
the vast, nearly naked stage—there’s a long, plain folding table and four
chairs at center-right (not period pieces, but modern utilitarian metal furniture
like you’d find in a rehearsal studio) and an old-fashioned gramophone down
center-left that sits on a milk crate (no table of any kind)—isolating and
ambiguous. That’s it for a set.
There’s no fire escape (though it’s spoken of) and no pretense that
there are neighbors, either in the building or outside: the Wingfields exist in
a world of their own. The Paradise Dance
Hall across the (invisible) alley, from which no music emanates here, is
represented solely by a disembodied neon sign Tom hauls out form the wings. (The scenic design is from Andrew Lieberman,
based on his setting for Gold’s Amsterdam production.) The rest of the stage is bare to the walls, like
the Belasco probably looks when it’s dark. (Just off right is some kind
of tall shelf—it was just out of full view from my seat so I could only
see a sliver behind the proscenium arch—which holds all the props the actors
need for various scenes, like a service station for waiters in a restaurant or
a self-service backstage prop shelf. When Amanda or Tom needs something
for a scene, they just walk over and get it, like when they set the table for
the dinner with Jim: they traipse back and forth as they say the dialogue
getting the table cloth, plates, glasses, food, etc.)
Gold
directed Glass Menagerie for Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam
in 2015, so I gather this is Gold’s take on what van Hove, whom Brantley
called “the world’s leading practitioner of explosive theatrical minimalism,” would
have done with it (though, I don’t believe van Hove went this far with either
of the Arthur Millers—2015’s and ’16’s A
View From the Bridge and The Crucible
on Broadway—he directed recently to great acclaim). I said the production
didn’t sound “plastic,” and I wouldn’t say it is really, but it may have been
what Gold thinks is plastic. (I’m assuming that, first, he’s read Williams’s
essay in the script and, second, he’s tried to apply the concept. Either
or both of those assumptions might be false.)
I
suppose there’s nothing really wrong with any of this—except it doesn’t seem to
make any sense. What’s Gold’s point? Either I’m missing something
(a lot), or the emperor has no clothes. The
director himself stated, “I’m not very interested in pretend,” according to Sasha
Weiss in the New York Times Magazine. “I’m interested in putting people onstage. I want people. And I want a world that reflects the real
world.” If that’s Gold’s aim, I think
he’s dead wrong: The Glass Menagerie
isn’t about the “real” world—it’s about the world of memory and illusion. Tom—and Williams—tells us so. But that’s not really a point or a theme, anyway. Oddly enough, just to be clear, I didn’t hate
it. I’d bet, however, that Diana would have . . . in spades!
Certainly, Gold’s Glass Menagerie, which runs two
hours and five minutes without an intermission, isn’t as bad as Brantley made
it seem in the Times (the headline for his review in the print edition
was “Fixing What Ain’t Broken” and on line, his notice was entitled
“Dismantling ‘The Glass Menagerie’”). The physical production is just
weird—but the acting was actually quite fine, if a little intense. I’d
love to see this cast do some kind of straight version of Glass
Menagerie, even a Brechtian one like Williams originally intended. (Field
has done Amanda in a different production in 2004, directed by Gregory
Mosher at the Kennedy Center, the final event of the same “Tennessee Williams
Explored” program at which I saw Five By
Tenn, the program’s opening presentation.)
I overlooked
Brantley’s mention of Ferris’s MD (the Times
is the only outlet whose reviews I read before I see a show because that
paper is delivered to my door), but I did read Neil Genzlinger’s piece about the
actress in the Times the day after the performance. Needless
to say, the revelation changed my understanding of why Laura moves the way she
does in the production. (Oddly, when I
was looking for a way to describe Ferris’s movements, especially getting out of
her wheelchair, I thought of MD, but I don’t know enough about the
symptoms of that condition so I didn’t go there.)
I don’t
necessarily buy Genzlinger’s assertion of Gold’s motivation for casting Ferris
and, therefore, making Laura’s disability more significant than Williams
obviously intended. (In his Toneelgroep
production, Gold reportedly gave that Laura a heavy brace on her leg rather
than the slight limp specified in the text.
There’s no indication that the Toneelgroep actress, Hélène Devos, is
handicapped.) I also don’t buy that
this makes Amanda simply more willfully blind (as Tom says in his opening
monologue); I think it makes her delusional. If Amanda’s delusional
and not just in denial, what I believe is Williams’s point in Glass
Menagerie is destroyed and replaced with something else that’s no
longer so universal (again, as Tom says in his monologue). Most of us are
in denial about something in our lives; few of us are actually delusional.
I agree
that enhancing Laura’s disability makes Jim “nobler” and more generous, but I
don’t think that’s really necessary. He’s already a demonstrably kind and
upright man; increasing those qualities doesn’t serve the play much.
It also makes Tom much more selfish and uncaring than he is with a
less-damaged Laura. Leaving a shy girl with a limp alone in the
hands of a mother who’s merely in denial is one thing, but leaving a severely
crippled and dependent girl in the hands of a delusional mother is almost
heartless. While I imagine Williams
might see himself as selfish, I don’t believe he’d portray himself as
mean and uncaring—especially as we know how devoted he was to his real sister.
Now, a
director has some right to reinterpret a play—especially when the writer’s
dead and can’t object—but that doesn’t mean all the liberties he takes, even
under the guise of artistic license, are correct or worthy. As my friend
Kirk Woodward, a director himself, asks in his recent ROT article “Falsettos” (5
January), some “approaches are clever, but do they really serve the play, or do
they pull our focus out of it? Is the
play the thing, or do we leave mostly thinking that that director really is a
clever fellow?” Artistic license doesn’t
justify everything.
By the
way, as for those writers whom Genzlinger cites who said Ferris “isn’t
very good”—I didn’t have any problems with her performance as Laura. Within the character as the director sees
her, Ferris created a credible and honest portrayal. I guess her physical
limitations restrict what she can do on stage—in the realms, as Genzlinger
pointed out, “of facial expressions, comic timing, physical bits”—but in Laura’s
crucial scene with Jim, Ferris is fine.
Additionally, Ferris is a strong and determined daughter in the face of her
mother’s manipulations—for instance in the scene where Amanda shoves falsies,
the “gay deceivers,” down Laura’s dress and Ferris becomes a resolute teenager
resisting her mother’s machinations.
Also
within Gold’s construct, the other three cast members are also
commendable. Wittrock’s Jim, of course,
is the play’s and production’s “most realistic character,” as Tom tells
us. (Williams just describes him as a
“nice, ordinary, young man.”) That’s
pretty much how Wittrock plays him, quite straightforwardly, if a little more
intensely than usual for the role. (I
said earlier that Gold’s performers acted with greater intensity than the level
at which the play’s traditionally pitched.)
He drives his point about the public speaking course he touts a little
harder than necessary, for instance, and his solicitude for Laura, though still
ringing sincere, is so fervent that some viewers could (and did, I gather)
suspect it’s cynical (and that his engagement announcement is an excuse not to
become involved with Laura and the Wingfields).
I didn’t—and don’t—feel that way.
Jim’s a glad-hander, but he’s honest and even disingenuous, and
Wittrock’s portrayal (Marilyn Stasio called it “grave kindness” in Variety) convinced me that he genuinely
liked Laura in high school—not romantically but as a potential friend—and that
his compliments and out-reach to her now are also real.
As Tom,
Mantello (whom I haven’t seen on stage since he did Angels in America on Broadway in 1993; he’s been mostly directing
these days: The Humans and Wicked, among others) makes a solid
narrator—perhaps even too solid, given the ethereal nature of the part. (This older Tom didn’t bother me as it did
some writers. I saw him as the Williams
of post-Night of the Iguana, from the
period of short plays like The Milk Train
Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, I Can’t
Imagine Tomorrow, The Gnädiges
Fräulein, and The Mutilated: the rememberer, not the
remembered.) He’s separated from the
world of the past not so much by the
curtain of memory, but by a kind of intestinal, innate detachment, which
carries over into his portrayal of the son as well. Mantello’s Tom may be a little too grounded
for the dreamer Williams wrote him to be: his Tom Wingfield within the
narrative, the memory, is angrier and harder than the would-be writer I
imagine, but once again, that’s Gold’s interpretation of these characters and
this play—it’s realer than I perceive it.
In part, of course, the heightened characterization of Field’s Amanda
pushes Mantello’s Tom into a more extreme posture in response—also surely part
of the director’s vision.
Field
(whose Broadway début in 2002 in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, replacing Mercedes Ruehl, was the
first of her now three stage appearances) reportedly gave audiences a subtle,
determined, even maternal Amanda in Washington 15 years ago. For Sam Gold, the two-time Oscar- and
three-time Emmy-winner has amped up the determination but left the subtlety and
maternalism behind. If the Amanda
Williams wrote is a misguided and self-deceived meddler in her children’s
lives, Gold’s vision, realized without reservation by Field, is a true dragon
lady, a destructive force who leaves ruin in her wake. The gentility and refinement of her Southern
heritage has been worn away in Field’s portrayal by Depression poverty, disappointment,
and worrisome children. Glimpses of the
other Amanda can be seen when Field is on the phone with her DAR sisters,
selling them the magazine subscriptions that are her bread and butter. Then comes all the Southern charm and
friendly chattiness that Field’s Amanda has abandoned for most of her day. It’s not a sympathetic portrait, as I imagine
her Kennedy Center performance was, but it’s real and not a little
disheartening. Amanda Wingfield would be
about 50 at the time of Glass Menagerie—how could a woman live 20 or 30
more years that way? (Edwina Williams
lived to over 90.)
On Show-Score, The
Glass Menagerie earned an average rating of 60 based on a tally of 54
reviews, a fairly low score. As you’ll
see, the opinions leaned heavily toward the negative, and many reviewers were
quite passionate in their complaints. The
survey broke down into 56% positive notices, 33% negative, and 11% mixed. Show-Score’s coverage included
a single top score of 95 and six 90’s, and three low scores of 10 with two
15’s. (I’ve never seen scores below 35
since I started checking Show-Score.) My round-up will include 29 reviews.
“Revisionist
reboots of modern classics can open your eyes—or make them glaze over,”
cautioned Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily
News (one of the reviews scored at 15). “Broadway’s stark, stripped-back new take on ‘The
Glass Menagerie’ starring Sally Field lands, alas, in the latter category.” Dziemianowicz explained: Williams’s “masterwork
has never emerged smaller, flatter or less poignant.” The Newsman
added, “On paper, it’s intriguing. In
practice, it makes for a disjointed ‘Glass’ that is empty of emotion and
impact. Intimacy gets lost when actors
seem to be in different plays.” He even
suggested that the “actors don’t connect” to the play, finding fault with
Mantello (“too tic-y by half”), Wittrock (“one-note eager-beaver-y”), and
Ferris (“a newcomer whose lack of experience shows”)—though he acknowledged
that Field “fares best and holds her own in a low-key, mostly drawl-free
performance.” Of Laura’s final defiance
over the candles, Dziemianowicz declared: “I’m with her: The naysaying Laura
mirrored my response to the evening.”
In the Wall Street Journal, Edward Rothstein dubbed
Sam Gold the “dramaturgical counterpart” of Laura Wingfield, who finds “reality
. . . too painful.” Gold’s “apparently unhappy with reality as well—the play’s
reality,” charged Rothstein. “So he
creates a world of artifice more suited to his tastes.” His previous forays into auteurship “did not set off too many alarm bells, but here the
effect is unmistakable.” (This is one of
the notices that Show-Score rated at 10.) To start with, the WSJ reviewer asserted, “Andrew Lieberman’s bare-bones design . . . is
distracting rather than revealing” and then Rothstein questioned at some length
the rationale for casting an actress with MD: it “follows doctrines of
identity-politics,” he asserted. The
individual performances don’t fare much better in Rothstein’s estimation: Field is
“surprisingly disappointing”; Ferris, who “has never been in a professionally
staged play,” “barely hints at Laura’s shifting wisps of hope, shame and
despair.” The review-writer’s
conclusion? “Mr. Gold’s preferred
figurine here is not glass, but leaden and sodden, presumably to highlight its
21st-century spunk. And his.”
Brantley’s
Times review (rated at 45) began
with, “That shattering sound you hear coming from the Belasco Theater is the
celebrated director Sam Gold taking a hammer to everything that’s delicate in ‘The
Glass Menagerie.’” He continued this
metaphor:
Don’t expect these [‘jagged,
glistening shards of Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play’] to be reassembled
into an illuminating portrait of the anguished Wingfield family from this 1944
drama. Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have
dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it
back together again.
Brantley
believes that Gold “wants the flat-out truth, raw and bleeding, and hang all
that illusion business,” which “means scrapping Williams’s lyricism, too, and
every theatrical trick he uses to conjure the fragile web of a man’s recalling
a past he longs to forget.” The Timesman observed, “As you may have
inferred, this is a production in which subtext elbows text out of bounds.” He describes the production as “less a
thought-through interpretation than a sustained scene-study class” in which
individual elements, which may even have integrity on their own, “fail to
connect in meaningful ways.” In the end,
Brantley complained:
On occasion, Mr.
Gold’s interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you
see your past at its distorted worst. But
even that vision is not sustained. When
a plot turn plunges the theater into abject darkness late in the play, it only
gives literal life to what you’ve been feeling all along.
Of the
performances, the Times reviewer
said, “Ms. Field gives us a grim, angry, kitchen-sink Everymom” and detecting “inklings
of Woody Allen in Mr. Mantello’s line readings,” Brantley felt he “seems
distanced from the past not only by the years but also by a flippant
detachment.” In contrast, “Ms. Ferris,
who emanates a no-nonsense spirit of independence,” the Timesman found, “is the least pitiable Laura I have seen.” He rounded out the cast by stating, “Mr.
Wittrock gives the most conventional, and vital, performance in the production,
exuding an only slightly exaggerated air of shaky all-American confidence.”
Linda
Winer of Long Island’s Newsday said
of this Glass Menagerie in her “Bottom Line”: “Radical, riveting
rethinking of beloved classic.” (The Newsday notice received a score of 90 on
Show-Score.)
She asked, “Why does Broadway need another revival of Tennessee
Williams’ familiar masterwork?” and then answered herself: “The ‘Glass
Menagerie’ that Sam Gold staged with the equally magnificent Sally Field, Joe
Mantello, Finn Wittrock and the especially remarkable Madison Ferris is like
none we have seen before.” She
specified:
The style is not
poetic, the edges are not soft nor dreamlike, and the heart-shredding family
dynamics are not literally placed in the St. Louis tenement that Williams set
in the ’30s. And yet, the unspooling . .
. is as true to what Williams called a “memory play” as any I have known.
Comparing
Gold’s mounting to an indie film, Winer characterized it as “timelessly
contemporary and shot full of raw insight into past and future productions.”
In am New York, Matt Windman described the
Broadway revival of Glass Menagerie (in a review that earned a Show-Score rating of 35) as “misconceived,” asserting
that the production has brought Gold’s “winning streak . . . to a screeching
halt.” After having stripped out all the
traditional appurtenances of the play, Windman asserted that all that remains
“is a painfully self-aware production that is devoid of Williams’ trademark
lyricism.” Field’s Amanda exudes “a
strong whiff of kitchen sink realism” and Ferris’s Laura, though “an
interesting but questionable interpretation,” declared Windman, “is commendable”
as “self-assured instead of delicate.”
Max
McGuinness declared of the production in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times that the “sense of
quiet, brittle despair is heightened here by Sam Gold’s stripped-back,
decontextualised staging.” In a review
that Show-Score rated 80, McGuinness praised the
costume (the cast is “dressed much as they would be if you found them in
Starbucks”) and set (“the stage is empty save for some nondescript furniture
and a gramophone”) concepts and the performances, especially “the play’s
candlelit final scenes, which hum with ghostly intensity.” In the U.S. edition of the Guardian, also an 80-scored notice, Alexis
Soloski characterized Gold’s revival as “a cerebral, often surprising
deconstruction and reinvestigation of an American classic.” Soloski warned us that we “might think
they’ve muddled the address” when we enter the Belasco Theatre because “at
times [the interpretation is] wilfully at odds with the play as written,
particularly its stage directions.” She
declared of Gold’s style:
Throughout, the
production swirls realistic gestures with more expressionist ones. The theatricality is self-conscious, at times
self-congratulatory. It estranges
spectators from the characters and the situations—in ways more and less
productive—but still allows much of the language to be heard clearly and
anew.
“As the
play continues,” the Guardian reviewer
continued, “it marshals a stealthy emotional force,” adding that “Field
portrays Amanda with sympathy and genteel bluster.” Ferris’s actual handicap “deepens and
complicates [Laura’s] relationship with Tom, though Soloski felt “the
production asks her body to do too much of the work of the role” because of the
actor’s inexperience.
Christopher
Kelly of the Newark Star-Ledger
declared: “This is not a traditional take on the 1944 classic,” which means “one
distracting directorial flourish after another, until you’re pretty much ready
to cry uncle.” (Show-Score rated the notice 35.) Kelly explained, “But beneath the weight of
Gold’s interpolations, the . . . delicate ‘The Glass Menagerie’ . . . collapses.” He added that “too
often we’re pulled out of the experience of the show.” On the acting, the Star-Ledger reviewer pronounced, “With one marked exception, the casting
feels wrong. Field often looks lost on the giant stage, and offers a
mostly one-note interpretation of Amanda.”
Mantello’s Tom “comes off as too wise and measured” and Wittrock “works way
too hard to come across as appealing and adorably earnest.” In contrast, Kelly asserted, “The best thing
about the show is Ferris,” who “performs with plainspoken grace and
heartbreaking vulnerability,” since it’s “the one directorial flourish of
Gold’s that really works, because her presence deepens and complicates the
meaning of the original material.”
Ferris’s performance is “a stirring breath of fresh air in a show that
otherwise feels conceptualized to its death.”
The review-writer concluded that “everything else about the production
just calls attention to itself.”
Robert
Feldberg remarked in the Record of
Bergen County, New Jersey, “Asking an audience to use its imagination is a good
thing, but sometimes there’s a gap too far.”
Gold is “stripping away of anything not connected to the memories of Tom
Wingfield,” noted Feldberg, who then devoted the rest of his review (which was
rated a “mixed” 55) to the actors. Field
is “proficient if not distinctive” and though “Mantello gives the evening’s
best performance,” judged Feldberg, casting an actor in his mid-50’s in a role
usually played by a 30-something actor made it difficult to “accept him as
Amanda’s son, or the brother of Laura.”
But the Record reviewer
declared, “Gold’s most daring staging and casting” is Ferris as Laura. Feldberg found that “in this production, the
woes of the Wingfield family take second place to the experience of watching
the bravery and determination of a young actress.”
The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a
review that earned a middling 70, explained:
Some are complaining
that Sam Gold’s new production of The Glass Menagerie . . . has
somehow robbed Williams’s most familiar play of its poetry. Maybe that’s true if you equate poetry
exclusively with the magical and moonlit side of life. But for me . . . The Glass
Menagerie’s poetic strength lies in its realistic harshness and pain . . . .
The play’s poetry lies in its harsh,
tormenting facts. Odd that so many theatergoers have come to regard it as some
sort of delicate daydream.
Feingold
names two “questionable choices” as director, the second of which is the
realistic indoor rain storm which soaks the stage and the actors: “an intrusive
directorial metaphor in a production otherwise valuable precisely because it
eschews fancy-dress metaphors.” The
other “distracting directorial choice” is casting Ferris as Laura, “not because
of any artistic limitations . . ., but because her situation in effect rewrites
Williams’s conception of Laura.”
In the New York Observer, Rex Reed quipped angrily: “No, they are not blasting for
a new subway under the Belasco Theater. The
noise you hear is the sound of a mortified Tennessee Williams, turning over in
his grave over what pretentious hack director Sam Gold has done to his great
memory play.” Calling the production an
“arrogant experimental bore,” Reed declared that Gold has “dismantled and
shredded [the play] for kindling in a production that is different for the sake
of being different.” The Observer reviewer asserted that
crediting the scenic design and lighting to Lieberman and Silverman “is a
head-scratcher, since there is no set at all” and “most of the play takes place
in such darkness that you can’t see what’s going on half the time (a blessing
in disguise).” Labeling the revival “abominable!”
Reed described it as “[s]tripped of its poetry, the rich lyricism of America’s
greatest playwright is reduced to the rubble of words that sound alarmingly
banal.” The review-writer complained
about so much of the production, which he dubbed a “dark, depressing
revisionist rehauling” without “clarity of vision and control of tone,” that I
can’t fathom how it earned as high a score as 30. Reed’s only pleasure came from the Gentleman
Caller scene, which was “well played with dash, wit and humane benevolence by
Finn Wittrock”—except the reviewer wondered “why is it staged entirely in the
dark?” Reed concluded, “For the most
part, [Gold’s Glass Menagerie] comes off as a hopelessly half-baked
endeavor to change and cheapen a seminal classic for the sole purpose of being
different. It doesn’t work. Tennessee Williams is different enough
already.”
In his
85-rated review in New York magazine,
Jesse Green labeled Gold’s revival “a rigorously de-romanticized, contemporary
rethinking”—and even cites Williams’s production notes to justify the “nakedly,
bracingly theatrical” reimagining. “By
paring everything extraneous from the mise en scène,” asserted Green, “Gold and
his designers . . . are preparing the audience to embrace the exploratory
nature of the production.” The man from New York acknowledged, “One of the
casualties of this approach is what Tom calls ‘the social background’ of the
play”; instead, we get “a novel and largely convincing interpretation of the
family’s warfare as a symptom of the powerful but constraining love they share.” Field depicts Amanda as “a spirited,
practical mother stuck with impossible children” and she gives “even finer
performance when her ‘charm — and vivacity — and charm!’ are
stripped away.” Mantello provides a “daring
take [on Tom as] more of a feckless brat: prone to sarcasm and not so much
poetically sad as grumpily guilty” and Green “noticed [that] he is complicit in
the family tragedy.” Ferris doesn’t play
Laura as “the morbidly shy and self-negating girl Williams describes; she’s
resigned and mordant.” Wittrock gives a
“winning performance.” Green’s final estimation was:
[Gold’s] new
perspective . . . creates a tension
that, on the good side, wonderfully opens the play up to view. Being forced out of its familiar ruts makes
the play tell different stories. On the
problematic side, Gold’s readjustments posit a kind of ghost play next to
Williams’s: a play that’s just as interesting but somewhat distorted.
In the New Yorker, Hilton Als lamented bitterly
in the second of Show-Score’s lowest-rated
notices:
The despair and
disgust I felt after seeing the director Sam Gold’s rendition of Tennessee
Williams’s 1944 play, “The Glass Menagerie” (at the Belasco), was so
debilitating that I couldn’t tell if my confused, hurt fury was caused by the
pretentious and callous staging I had just witnessed or if my anger was a
result of feeling robbed of the beauty of Williams’s script.
“The
first problem in a production rife with problems,” Als complained, “is that
Gold makes clear his desire to leave his mark on the play—at all costs,
including the play itself.” The New Yorker review-writer blamed this
attack on the influence of Ivo van Hove’s style: “a ‘radical’ approach to text
and performance that promotes the director as the true star of a production,
over the script and the actors.” He
questioned whether the sparseness of the setting is “an effort to underline,
perhaps, the poverty of the times, or the strained poverty of this show’s
imagination” and asserted that “all the actors tear through the script with
little care for what is being said or how to say it.” In general, Als criticized, “You get the
sense that what interests him most is the idea of being ‘serious’ in a European
way.” The reviewer’s final judgment is
that “in ‘Menagerie,’ Gold puts a stop to the language by inserting himself and
his own intellect where the Wingfields should be.” He seemed to see this as an indication that “Gold
felt he could reduce the script itself to a memory, too, and choreograph scenes
according to what it all means—to him. Sorry. He is no match for Williams.”
David
Rooney described this Broadway Glass Menagerie in the Hollywood Reporter has “a bold
experiment that’s often riveting but seldom wholly satisfying” which “rips away
illusion like a bandage off a wound—along with other signatures of the
playwright such as poetry, magic, artifice—in a forensic examination that
fights against the text.” The HR reviewer added that “in twisting
Williams’ incomparable voice into the service of Director’s Theater, he has
allowed the fresh insights to be overshadowed by the losses.” Rooney
warned, “Despite some fine work from the actors, you end up being moved more by
the sheer resilience of the writing than by the intrusive presentation.” But he demurred a little, acknowledging, “That’s
not to say this destined-to-be-divisive production doesn’t demand to be seen,
not least for the chance to watch Sally Field uncover the raw, wrenching
despair beneath the abrasive nagging of her tenacious Amanda.” (Rooney’s review scored a “mixed” 65.) The review-writer criticized the performances
(except “superb” Wittrock) and found that “the starkness of the theatrical
concept here calls attention to itself and mostly keeps us shut out.” Rooney concluded, “The result is one of the
most hauntingly lyrical dramas in the American canon transformed into a blunt
dysfunctional family play in which indelible melancholy gets trampled by anger
and bitterness.”
Entertainment Weekly’s Maya Stanton
declared (in a notice that received a score of 90) that of all the many
Broadway productions of Glass Menagerie, “it’s safe to say that
audiences have never seen a version quite like this before.” Gold “applies an innovative yet
back-to-basics take on” the play and, with “a top-notch cast and crew,”
delivers “a stunning, emotionally rending production.” Having “stacked the deck with acting talent,”
the director makes it “obvious that this is a much-needed fresh perspective on
the show—and it only gets better from” from Tom’s opening monologue. Among his praises for all the actors and
their interpretation of the characters, Stanton especially applauded Ferris,
whom she dubbed a “revelation,” for bringing “an element of realism and
independence to a character normally played as helpless.” She also lauded the design team of Lieberman
(“the stripped-down set and clever effects ”), Silverman (“the ingenious
lighting”), and Dziedzic (“the visual punchline of Amanda’s wardrobe”), who “knocks
it out of the park.” Stanton concluded:
Gold takes risks with
his nontraditional staging choices, and though his vision might not be for
everyone, there’s no arguing that it’s a bold, creative one. The rare revival that breathes new life into a
classic rather than defaulting to convention, this Menagerie is
well worth another look.
In Time Out New York, David Cote labeled
Gold’s revival of Glass Menagerie as “starkly compelling, bravely
executed,” what the man from TONY
called “the 3M Plan: minimal, metatheatrical, modern dress.” He surmised that “forcing us to look seems to
be part of Gold’s tactic.” Cote, too, praised the designers (adding
compliments for Bray Poor’s soundscape), and compliments the actors, even
though he found that that they’re “all over the map,” guessing that this was
intended “perhaps to suggest family members trapped in different worlds.” The reviewer summed his 85-rated review up with:
For
all this production’s cerebral choices and cold, distancing design, the
emotional impact is there: love, disgust, betrayal, shame and the longing for
understanding. Yes, Menagerie is
memory, and I’ll not soon forget this shockingly fresh frame and angle.
Marilyn
Stasio asserted in Variety :
Of all the plays in
the American canon, “The Glass Menagerie” seems a most unlikely candidate for
deconstruction. But that doesn’t deter
director Sam Gold . . . from laying hands on this Tennessee Williams gem and
subjecting it to a severe reinterpretation . . . .
Stasio
continued (in a notice that Show-Score scored at 40), “Like
the stage setting, Williams’s play has been stripped to the gut, shorn of its
lyrical accoutrements and reduced to its raw text.” The Variety
writer judged that such a “strategy that
might illuminate other dramas disregards the fact that these embellishments . .
. are intrinsic . . . especially to an intimate ‘memory play’ like this one.” In Gold’s production, she found that “the
poetry is not quite lost, but diluted.” Nonetheless,
Stasio reported that the candlelight scene between Wittrock’s Jim and Ferris’s
Laura “illuminates the soul of his heartbreaking play.”
On the
airwaves, Jennifer Vanasco asserted on WNYC, “Director Sam Gold is a genius at
creating intimacy on stage,” having demonstrated it previously with Fun Home, which won him a Tony, and “he
does it again” in Glass Menagerie. “But here, it backfires.” The reviewer on the New York City outlet for
National Public Radio observed that “under Gold’s hand, the family feels cozy,
not claustrophobic, which [raises] the question of why Tom is so eager to
leave.” The characters’ intimacy,
however, contrasts with “the giant, nearly-empty stage, with the actors lit
harshly and wearing contemporary clothing. There’s no coziness there.” The production’s “literal-ism . . . pulls
the poetry away from Williams’ play.”
Though Vanasco, whose notice scored 45, appreciated the “beautiful stage
pictures” of the rainstorm and the candlelight scene, she thought “the overall
effect is as if Gold is just trying out a bunch of ideas.” She concluded, “There isn’t a cohesive
vision. We are left, instead, with a play that’s been pulled apart and analyzed
and seems to be waiting for someone to put it back together again.”
On
WNBC, the network’s television outlet in New York City, Robert Kahn reported, “Gold
puts his stamp on ‘Menagerie’ with both hyper-realistic elements and a
minimalist set so barren it can only leave us to focus on the actors.” Impressed with both the
acting and the production design, his review, which Show-Score rated at 80,
concluded that “the juxtaposition of styles makes this ‘Menagerie’ as
interesting as any I’ve seen.” Roma
Torre’s review on NY1, the news channel of Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable), which scored a 30, began with the declaration that Gold’s “bizarre
conceptual take on” the play “may be best left forgotten.” Torre acknowledged that Glass Menagerie need not be “all that realistic,” adding, “But
what Gold has devised is quite confounding.”
The NY1 reviewer explained: “Part of the problem is that his directorial
decisions are so radical in some cases they take the audience out of the play’s
poetic reverie.” Furthermore, “The
production’s selective reality seems curiously random,” she added. “Individually,
Field, Mantello and Finn Wittrock as the Gentleman Caller do excellent work,”
Torre reported, “but stylistically the cast doesn’t mesh all that well.” Like me, the cable reviewer mused, “I can
only imagine what they could have done in a more coherent production.” Her final assessment, though, was harsh: “I
applaud any director's efforts to reimagine the classics, but this production
never got beyond the experimental stage, and should have been left in the
rehearsal room.”
In
cyberspace, Michele Willens of Theatre
Reviews Limited labeled Gold’s revival of Glass Menagerie “controversial
and fascinating” with the director’s “wildly inventive choices.” Willens reported in her 75-rated review, “The
minimalist staging . . . works here, as this is a family that does not have much.
The lighting . . . may initially cause
discomfort, but it is appropriate.” The TRL review-writer praised the acting of
Mantello, but found Wittrock “goofy and over-confident”; Willens also thought
casting Ferris was “slightly exploitive” and was “not convinced it aptly fits
the playwright’s intentions.” As for
Field, however, the reviewer dubbed her “a sure Tony nominee, who has given us
a sympathetic and contemporary-feeling Amanda.”
Willens concluded, “This is not a “Glass Menagerie” for everyone. . . . But with an open mind, you will most likely
find it moving.”
On TheaterScene, Victor Gluck blamed Ivo
van Hove for making his minimalist technique “look easy” so that “American
directors are now attempting to copy his methods without entirely understanding
them or without thinking them through.” Gold’s Glass Menagerie
revival “is such a one,” Gluck declared.
He’s removed “all of the historical relevance as well as the scenery”
and he’s removed “all of the poetry and all of the emotion.” In a notice that scored only a 40, Gluck
complained, “At times it appears that the production has simply thrown out the
script and done it their way.” He found
fault with the performances of Mantello (“he seems angry and bitter which gives
the play a slightly sour note”), Ferris (“hard to believe that her Laura would
have been undone by her life experiences”), and Wittrock (“suavely bland”), but
pronounced Field’s Amanda “a lovely performance” which Gold “does everything he
can to sabotage.” The TS reviewer asserted, “Stripped of its
poetry, The Glass Menagerie loses most of the magic that
Williams’ play embodies and simply becomes an acting and director’s
workout . . . . It seems to have
been attempted simply for the sake of trying something new.” Gluck’s final estimation is a warning that “if
you love the play, you will want to give this production a miss—unless you wish
to see it in a form you never imagined possible.”
Donna
Herman described the Broadway production of Glass Menagerie on New York Theatre Guide as “stripped down
and pared back” and cited Gold’s interest “in only one thing, really. People,”
as the rationale for his approach. But
the NYTG reviewer lamented that “in
his effort to understand the humans in front of him, Mr. Gold has taken them
out of context and lost them, and the audience in the process.” On Broadway
World, Michael Dale, calling the current revival “exquisite,” warned that
spectators “may think they’ve stumbled onto a run-through in the middle of the
rehearsal process.” Dale’s review
received a score of 85, and he has praise for all the actors as well as Gold’s
interpretations of the characters. The BWW review-writer’s general assessment
of the production was, “While Gold does work a bit of stagecraft into the
production before the final blackout, the evening’s brightest spotlight is on
the words of Tennessee Williams, as played by an excellent ensemble.” He concluded, “This grounded version of THE
GLASS MENAGERIE is fully absorbing and thrilling in its simplicity.”
CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer warned theatergoers at
the top of her 30-rated notice that “Sam Gold’s The Glass
Menagerie may be more than they bargained for.” Sommer complained about Gold’s giving “himself
permission to ignore the often striking inconsistency between words on the page
and what’s seen on stage.” (She found
this most disturbing in scenes involving Ferris’s Laura.) The CU
reviewer, however, thought, “Despite . . . poor choices . . ., this Glass
Menagerie is intriguingly different and never boring.” Still, Sommer found that Gold’s emulation of
van Hove “is so extreme that the directorial vision has upstaged the author’s
poetic magic.” She had mixed feelings
about the cast and reported that “ultimately this cast fails to merge into a
satisfactorily coherent and cohesive production.” Sommer’s overall evaluation of the experience
was: “While even Mr. Gold’s most mouth-agape choices couldn’t assail this
virtually indestructible play, what ultimately held my attention was seeing
just what bizarre business he would come up with next, and how the actors dealt
with it.”
In one of Show-Score’s lowest-rated reviews (15), Matthew Murray
on Talkin’ Broadway started off with
a compliment:
Few next-generation
directors have proven their understanding of understatement better than Sam
Gold. An expert at stripping away
emotional and production excesses to find a human heart beating underneath,
Gold has transformed [many diverse plays] into sumptuous experiences that, at
their best, are about far more than themselves.
Then
Murray let loose with his “however”: “It’s that history of mining theatrical
necessity rather than mere theatrical effect that most makes his revival
of The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco such a colossal
disappointment.” He asserted that “the
decoration, the artifice, and the gimmickry aren’t just most of the thing,
they’re the whole thing” and complained: “Rather than dig into core of what
Tennessee Williams was trying to convey . . ., Gold has smothered its
profundities with so many external artistic pretensions that the result may as
well be the deconstructionist work of experimental Belgian director Ivo van
Hove.” Set designer Lieberman “has
cranked up the volume on nothingness,” “Dziedzic’s costumes are downscale
contemporary dress,” and Silverman’s lights “are unforgiving, veering violently
between everything and nothing”; only Poor’s sound “dares consider subtlety as
an option.” Gold, said Murray, “has
fallen into [the] trap” of making “a production . . . more about itself than
the play” so it “is as likely as not to war with Williams’s intent.” The TB
reviewer admonished, “Innovation at
the expense of the play is no virtue, however, and none of what Gold adds brings
us any closer to Williams.” His bottom
line was that “by making his production the destination rather than the
vehicle, Gold obscured most of the magic the play can have at its best.”
On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart cautioned,
“This isn’t the memory play we remember,” explaining that “Gold makes some
baffling choices to undermine the power of Williams’ story, leaving us pining
for better productions.” In a
review that scored only 40, the TM
reviewer nonetheless found excellence in the work of Field (“plays Amanda with
the passion and specificity of a woman who has been preparing for this role for
a lifetime”) and Mantello (“grounds the play in memory”). In the end, however, Stewart found the
production “an awfully contemptuous take on one of the most enduring dramas of
the American theater.”
“I have
to admit that I was at first deeply ambivalent about Sam Gold’s new staging of
the classic Tennessee Williams play,” began JK Clarke in his 95-scored review
on Theater Pizzazz. “On one hand,” Clarke explained, “the painful
accounting of a faded, woeful southern belle . . .,’ is minimally staged with
bold performances to great effect. On
the other,” the reviewer continued, “Gold has created a voyeuristic production
that alienates the players and makes the audience complicit in a social
sideshow.” Ultimately the TP writer decided, “I have to conclude
that both of those sentiments are the result of a thoughtful and creative
staging of an expertly written work that transcends time and place.” Clarke characterized both Field’s and
Wittrock’s performances as “stellar” and summed up the experience as, “We walk
away, like Tom, with heavy hearts.”
Michael
Giltz of the Huffington Post, which
scored a 90 on Show-Score, declared
unequivocally that Gold’s revival of Glass Menagerie “is the best I’ve
ever seen.” Giltz went on to say that “this
stripped-down presentation has an emotional truthfulness and clarity that turns
the play from a showcase for one actress into a work of drama unburdened by
Southern floridness.” The HP reviewer continued that “it’s shot
through with intelligence and nuance and is all the more powerful for it.” He lauded the performances and, specifically,
the realism brought to the production, otherwise starkly anti-realistic, by the
presence of Ferris. Giltz summed up his
assessment by asserting, “This isn’t a precious Menagerie or
an extreme one. It doesn’t scale the
mountaintops because it shouldn’t.”
[In both “Falsettos” and his earlier report, “A Note
About Hamilton” (6
December 2016), Kirk applies a term for misguided production concepts he
identifies as Eric Bentley’s: the “Bright Idea.” It seems to me that that’s what has governed
Sam Gold’s mounting of The Glass Menagerie, and I ought to say a few
more words on the subject. In a 1952
essay from the New Republic, “I Have a Bright Idea” (in What Is
Theatre?), Bentley introduces this term and defines it:
A
Bright Idea is an invalid idea which has more appeal to the semi-literate mind
than a valid one . . . . It is a thought
which can’t bear thinking about; but which is all the more influential on that account; it surprises or reassures, it
flatters or inflames; if it cannot earn the simple epithet “true” it frequently
receives the more characteristically modern eulogy “intriguing” or at least
“interesting.” At the very worst it is
praised as “cute.”
[Bentley provides what he considers “a miniature, but
perfect, example” of the Bright Idea from George Bernard Shaw’s correspondence
with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. After seeing
the actress in Macbeth, the
great dramatist wrote: “I
couldn’t understand the sleepwalking until D. D. [unidentified] told me someone
had told you that Lady Macbeth should be seen through a sheet of glass.”
[“That sheet of
glass,” explains Bentley, “is the very archetype of theatrical Bright Ideas,
and for every window-breaker, there are half a dozen glaziers, calling
themselves directors or teachers of acting.”
[A Bright Idea, says
Bentley, “may be a true idea: all that’s wrong is that it doesn’t apply to
matter at hand.” Kirk says it doesn’t
feel “organic,” which I think is what Bentley means here. “In context it is only a Bright Idea,” the renowned
critic and essayist concludes. This, to
me, is where Gold’s Glass
Menagerie sits. He had the Bright
Idea of making the play about “real people,” to “reflect the real world.” He followed through relentlessly, stripping
away everything that’s true and meaningful in the play for the sake of making a
statement the playwright never meant to make. The world of Glass Menagerie is no more
real than Laura’s unicorn.
[One last comment on this subject. Bentley asserts in his essay: “Ours is an age
of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon; instead of principles,
slogans; instead of genuine ideas, Bright Ideas. Bright Ideas win elections . . . .” I wonder if that thought makes anyone besides
me think of anyone in particular.]
On 10 May 2017, the New York Times reported that, despite a Tony nomination for Sally Field, the Broadway revival of 'The Glass Menagerie' will close on 21 May, six weeks before its originally-scheduled closing date of 2 July. Poor ticket sales is the explanation provided for the premature closing. Ten weeks after opening, the show will have played 31 previews and 85 regular performances. It's unusual for a production nominated for an award to close before the ceremony; the Tonys will be awarded on 11 June.
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