Reviews: The Glass Menagerie

(me and Zachary Quinto after the performance - and, of course, the camera caught me with my eyes closed)

I end my tour of Broadway with The Glass Menagerie, playing at the Booth (where Lauri is house manager, so we spent a great deal of the pre-show time saying hi to staff and fielding multiple repetitions of “Wait, aren’t you on vacation this week?”) Unlike the previous two shows, this is one I’ve seen multiple times before, so I was focusing more on the specific staging and performances.

When Lauri first described the set to me (a sort of island surrounded by a moat filled with inky black liquid -- evidently something of an annoyance to stage) I had a hard time imagining what the purpose might be, but in context it creates a visual metaphor for the isolation of the people and action from society. Tom comes and goes to the larger outside world via the fire escape stairs but the family’s conversations and activities take place suspended outside time, surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. (It also serves to mark the passage of time by becoming a night sky with moon periodically.) The set -- while not being minimalist -- is properly claustrophobic.

Cherry Jones excels at the smothering, demanding, disfunctional Amanda. You can see the genuine love and concern underneath her terrifying attempts to control and direct her children’s futures. But this is a tragedy so there’s nothing to do but watch the train wreck take its course. Zachary Quinto is Tom, the authorial self-insertion, who walks a fine line between eliciting audience sympathy (“Run while you can!”) and disapproval (“How could you abandon your sister?”) For some reason, my recollection of previous encounters with this play had given the character of Laura a larger part overall, no doubt because of her prominence in the last act. But my recollection of the character had also seen her as simply paralyzingly shy (something I can relate to!) in addition to her limp, whereas Celia Keenan-Bolger’s performance clearly brings out her deeper psychological problems (schizophrenia in the character’s real-world model) which make Tom’s eventual escape more sympathetic. The fourth role of the Gentleman Caller (played by Brian J. Smith) comes across as boisterously outgoing with an odd mixture of consideration and obliviousness. (He takes in stride Laura’s oddness but takes entirely too long to clue in to the fact that he’s been set up as a potential suitor.)

In keeping with the distancing, isolating staging, the performance style worked to create separation with a somewhat mannered presentation that came across as the characters being self-aware of the theatrical nature of their lives. (Of course, the framing narrative within the script sets this up as well, creating multiple layers between the action at the heart of the play and the audience’s ability to inhabit the story.) Taken together these factors created a consistent “feel” to the intent of the performance that worked very well for me.

(And, as demonstrated above, after the performance, I got to meet several of the performers and even got permission for a picture. So this doesn’t quite count as a “typical” NYC tourist experience.)

ETA: almost forgot: Bechdel Test Score = pass (because Amanda and Laura discuss Laura's failed enrollment in business school, which I believe is only slightly tainted by "because if you can't get a man you'll need to support yourself").