Good Play But The Directing? Meh by Lisa LI

Unfortunately, The Glass Menagerie is not a fairytale about a collection of glass animal figurines. The Glass Menagerie is a story of a broken family narrated by an ambitious young man, whose mother doesn’t give him enough attention and whose sister is disabled, under extreme pressure of family responsibility. It is a memory play originally written by Tennessee Williams. A recent production of this play was presented by the Trinity Repertory Company and shown from Feb. 26^th to Mar. 29^th in the Trinity Repertory Theatre Chase Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island.

            The storyline of the play is very simple. It involves four major characters, Amanda Wingfield, her daughter Laura, her son Tom and Tom’s friend/Laura’s old crush, Jim O’Connor. After Amanda’s husband has left her to persuade his big dreams, she alone raises her son and her daughter, who is physically disabled. She focuses on letting Laura live a normal life, have a decent job and marry a rich and responsible man. Meanwhile, she tends to neglect Tom, who is constantly drunk because he is so stressed from the family pressure that is put upon him. Tom introduces his friend, Jim O’Connor to Amanda and Laura, and Amanda really wishes that Jim would marry Laura. However, Jim is already engaged to another girl. The play ends in a sorrowful tone, with Laura reserving herself in her obsession with her glass menagerie, Tom leaving home for his own ambitious dreams, and Amanda agonizing for her son’s disloyalty and her daughter’s disability.

What make the story interesting are conflicts within the characters between their own idealistic desires and reality. Amanda wants her son to be successful and reliable, but in reality he is a drunk. She also creates a false image in her mind that Laura is normal and will marry a rich and responsible man, but in reality Laura is unconfident and unloved, and communicates with no one but her Glass Menagerie. Laura is stuck in her old crush on her high school classmate, Jim O’Connor, but in reality she is too timid about expressing her love, and when she finally has enough courage to do so it is too late because Jim is already engaged with another girl. She ultimately returns to her reserved self, obsessed with her glass menagerie. Tom has ambitious desires for his career, just like his father, but in fact he is an unskilled worker, who feels bad leaving his beloved sister behind and whose mother puts the entire family responsibility on him. These conflicts in characters make the audience wonder what is going to come next, and whether dreams can eventually defeat reality. With this constant wonders in audience, the play is never boring.

            Despite an interesting plot, it is not well executed by the Trinity Repertory’s production. The set design of the production was very unique, which makes it appealing, yet it can also distract the audience from paying attention to the plot of the play. A wooden stage was in the middle of the front of the theatre, with all the props and instruments surrounding it. The stage crew and musicians also worked directly on stage. This kind of set was transparent to the audience, letting them see what would normally be the backstage operations. However, it can be very distracting. The visibility of music and stage crew working on stage sometimes took away the audience’s focus on the monologue or dialogue between characters. There is a piano put in front of the stage that served as a patio of the house, which is rather pointless because it was almost never played and also, when the characters stand on it, the audience worried about them falling off rather than the dialogue between characters. Putting props around the stage, also, can pull the audience’s attention from stage, leave them wondering what the props are for.

            The actors for this production were all very talented and committed. They interpreted their characters in their own way and engaged themselves fully into the performance. The director, however, inserted many distracting elements into the production, and wasted the actor’s talents and hard work. In one scene, Tom is having an intense conversation with Amanda, and Laura is singing in the background in a booth on stage where the violinist occasionally plays. Laura has an amazing voice that the audience really wanted to hear, but they can hardly hear it. As the audience tried to focus on Laura’s voice, the important conversation between Tom and Amanda was missed. As a result, the audience heard neither Laura’s voice in a comfortable volume, nor understood the conversation between Tom and Amanda. The director should have separated these two events to make them both clear to the audience. In another moment, when the four actors line up on stage and sing “let’s go to the movies,” Laura comes in with an inflatable plastic giraffe. The giraffe makes an appearance and never comes back again. We learned in the Q & A session between the audience and Mia Ellis, the actor who plays Laura that the giraffe is supposed to represent Laura’s glass menagerie.  The director could not decide whether to use real glass animals or inflatable plastic animals as the glass menagerie, so he decided to keep both. Bad mistake, director, because now the audience are just wondering about the meaning of the giraffe instead of focusing on the scene!

            The directing made the characters confusing, especially Tom. Tom first appears with red nail polish on both his finger and toenails, and talks in a non-sense manner, which makes me think that he was insane. My assumption was proven even more by his constant talking about movies and his unrealistic ambitions. However, Tom is not supposed to be insane, he is just drunk and stressed out. Nevertheless, in this production, Tom speaks in a manner that makes him seem mentally ill, and dresses in pajama styled clothing that makes him seem like a loafer. He appears to be the disabled one in his household, more ill than Laura, who is actually physically disabled. Such confusion can make the audience misinterpret the play.

            This production definitely does not present the best and most classic version of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. I would suggest not wasting your money on it, unless you really have nothing better to do. However, if you are a theatre teacher of a middle school or high school, please bring your students to see the show. It will incite an intense class discussion about the quality of the production. It will also allow students to practice criticizing set design, character interpretation and directing. Such activities would make theatre students better actors and directors.