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Jim Ireland* as Tom
Anne Hering* as Amanda and Katherine Michelle Tanner* as Laura
Katherine Michelle Tanner* as Laura and Brad Roller as Jim
Jim Ireland* as Tom and Anne Hering* as Amanda
In this American classic, a young son longs to escape hismother’s badgering while he worries about the future of his lame, shy sister. A wonder of poetry, William’s seminal work draws us into a floating state of memory, failed expectations, love, hope and heartrending desolation. The Glass Menagerie glitters and reflects with a haunting delicateness that will fix your gaze and move you to tears. Click here to purchase tickets now!
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Anne Hering*
. . . . . Amanda
Jim Ireland*
. . . . . Tom
Brad Roller
. . . . . Jim
Katherine Michelle Tanner*
. . . . . Laura
PRODUCTION TEAM
Director
. . . . . David Karl Lee
Scenic Design
. . . . . Bob Phillips**
Lighting Design
. . . . . Kevin Griffin
Costume Design
. . . . . Denise Warner
Sound Design
. . . . . Bruce Bowes
Stage Manager
. . . . . George Hamrah*
Assistant Stage Managers
. . . . . Alyssa Howard
. . . . . Annastacia Miller
Light Board Operator
. . . . . Lillian Huzway
Wardrobe
. . . . . Alison Braun
*Denotes a member of Actors’ Equity Association
**Denotes a member of United Scenic Artists
Review
"Orlando Shakespeare Theater's sensuous production...lives on in your ears and eyes and skin."
The delicate sound of rain falling on city streets slips into your consciousness as the melodies of 1930s jazz fade from your ears. In Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s sensuous production of The Glass Menagerie, the hint of a song and the cast of a shadow shape your view of the troubled Wingfield family of St. Louis, Mo. And the bond that ties together those haunted souls — a bond that you can nearly reach out and touch — makes this production one that lives on in your ears and eyes and skin.
Tennessee Williams’ 1944 drama, his first great success, has had countless productions over the years, and many of them have made much of the feel, both lush and spare, of his prose. Where this staging succeeds is in the way director David Lee and his actors have balanced the ripeness of the metaphors in Williams' “memory play” with their forceful depictions of four authentic people. Tom and Amanda, Laura and Jim don’t live in a metaphor; they move through a cramped apartment in the rain.
You see that in Jim Ireland’s idiosyncratic portrait of Tom, the play’s narrator (and semi-autobiographical stand-in for the playwright), the would-be poet serving his time in the back reaches of a shoe warehouse to support his mother and sister. With his corrosive voice and a sure manner, Ireland plays a more damaged, jaded Tom, a man who is clearly looking back at the family of his youth but one who still feels, with painful clarity, the anger and the frustration he faced.
You see it in Katherine Michelle Tanner’s sweetly self-involved Laura — both frail and as ferociously unshakable as any Wingfield would be — and in Brad Roller’s goofy, upbeat, oblivious Jim.
And you see it, most of all, in Anne Hering’s powerhouse of an Amanda, a woman who is laughable one minute and pitiable the next. Hering plays this archetype of the overbearing mother as a bully, yes, but also a raw nerve, a woman so anxious and tightly wound that she can’t help what she does.
This Amanda isn’t a monster: She’s a woman who loves her children beyond all else. And you feel that in the quiet moments between her and Tom, when they seem to put aside all the defenses they have built.
Williams’ play, of course, is about manufacturing illusions: Amanda is the one who uses those words as a weapon, but everyone here is living in a kind of a dream. The strength of Orlando Shakespeare’s production is in the way it immerses you in that illusion, but it never lets you succumb. The rain is pretty. But it’s still rain.
Tennessee Williams’ award-winning play The Glass Menagerie is an American classic, familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory high-school drama class over the last half-century. With its simple plot and small cast, it is a staple of community theaters all over the country, and because it offers plum roles, it likewise graces the stages of numerous professional regional companies each season. It has been revived a half-dozen times on Broadway since its 1945 premiere and sparked several movie and TV versions.
The melancholy “memory play” was Williams’ first theatrical success, and the story of the Wingfield family of St. Louis remains his most autobiographical rendering. The playwright speaks through the character of Tom Wingfield, the hard-working and dutiful son of Amanda, a faded flower of the Old South, who is desperately trying to hold her family together in the wake of the Depression. Tom’s father is an absent ne’er-do-well who abandoned his kin years ago – a telephone-company employee who “fell in love with long distances.”
Rounding out the familial dramatis personae is the character of Laura. Loosely based on Williams’ own beloved sister, Rose, Laura is a shy, crippled girl who shuns others, preferring to spend her time listening to old phonograph records and playing with her collection of delicate glass sculptures – her glass menagerie.
Tom and Amanda scrap and wrestle with one another’s conflicting desires – Tom desperately wants to leave his tedious warehouse job and strike out on the road to adventure; Amanda wants him to settle down and continue to provide for the family. Still, they do agree to help Laura meet a suitable young man, a “gentleman caller,” who might lift her out of herself, provide her with lifelong security, and assuage their own guilty feelings concerning her unhappiness and unsuitability for a normal life.
Eventually, Tom invites a fellow worker over for dinner. Jim is a sweet and friendly young man who was an acquaintance of Tom and Laura in high school. Most of the play’s second half follows the tender and fateful conversation between the shy girl and the former big man on campus. Although he’s attracted to Laura, when Jim reveals that he is unavailable as a suitor Amanda’s plans come crashing down, and the family’s tenuous dynamic is altered forever.
Director David Lee has assembled an excellent cast for this production, and the Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s version of Williams’ masterpiece is a touching and faithful rendition. Anne Hering is brilliant as Amanda, moving seamlessly from the sympathetic and loving mother to the screeching harridan who finally chases Tom, played sensitively by Jim Ireland, from the family fold. Katherine Michelle Tanner is a lovely and affecting Laura, and Brad Roller is charming and personable as Jim.
Handsomely staged on Bob Phillips’ intimate and ghostly set, Orlando Shakes’ Glass Menagerie evokes the play’s poignant portrait of a loving family searching for the “Spartan endurance” needed to overcome life’s sad disappointments.
Williams' 'Menagerie' Offers Great Range of Emotions
LAKELAND LEDGER(link)
Michael Freeman
Thursday, October 23, 2008
"The Glass Menagerie" is one of the great plays in theater history, and Tennessee Williams' wistful, nostalgic look at his upbringing with his mother, Edwina, and sister, Rose, offers so much charm, humor and sadness that you get completely swept up in the story within minutes.
Williams originally wrote the story as a screenplay for MGM, the movie studio he was contracted with, but later decided to turn it into a stage play. It premiered in Chicago in 1944, and a year later won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In fact, "The Glass Menagerie" became Williams' first hit play and helped launch the career of the man who went on to write such classics as "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."
The story is set in a small tenement in St. Louis in 1937; our narrator, Tom Wingfield, recalls the dreary life of an aspiring poet working in a shoe making plant to support himself and his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. It's the Great Depression and everyone is struggling. Amanda, who has ambitions to be a truly genteel Southern woman of high class, routinely bemoans the day her husband walked out on the family, and spends her days trying to talk friends and neighbors into renewing their magazine subscriptions - her own small contribution to the family budget.
Laura, who is painfully shy and walks with a limp, is attending typing school - or so it seems, until Amanda discovers that Laura never went back after the first class. When Amanda confronts her, Laura confesses how difficult it was to be among strangers, so she went for long walks in the park instead of to class.
Convinced that she won't be able to get Laura to take a second crack at business school, Amanda comes up with another scheme: find Laura a husband. She presses Tom to recruit someone from the shoe plant. But knowing that Laura constantly retreats into her own little world - she loves to sit and watch the menagerie of glass ornaments the family has collected over the years - Tom suspects this plan is destined to backfire, and badly.
I've seen "The Glass Menagerie" performed locally before, and as I watched the new production at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, it suddenly struck me how much those earlier versions played down Williams' humor and instead focused on the pathos of the family's plight. In fact, those past productions tended to view the play as a sad, melancholy look at a childhood that Williams was no doubt happy to leave behind as he rose to fame and success on Broadway and Hollywood. But this version, directed with infinite skill by David Karl Lee, beautifully re-enforces the rich vein of humor that Williams saw in these three people trapped together in that little apartment.
A great deal of credit for the show's success should go to the comedic skills of Jim Ireland as Tom and Anne Hering as Amanda. From the moment that Ireland first walks onto the stage and sets the scene for the audience - noting that the story is set in the late 1930s, during the start of a bad economic downtown, at which point he breaks with character and hilariously hints at the parallels to today - he has you right in his grip.
Ireland and Hering have some glorious funny scenes together, as the know-it-all mother tries a little too hard to control her exasperated, rebellious son. Watch as she insists that it's bad for Tom to drink black coffee or go to work on an empty stomach, when all he wants is a few sips and then, out the door. Or when Amanda confronts Tom about all the nights he spends outside the apartment, supposedly at the movies, and he launches into one of the play's funniest monologues about his dark adventures in opium dens. Amanda and Tom make up one of theater's great mother-son teams.
Hering plays Amanda in a way that manages to seem just a bit over the top, but at the same time never condescending - an interesting combination, and a difficult one to pull off. Her Amanda is constantly trying so desperately to live the southern way - coolly in control, always sticking by the rules of proper etiquette - but struggling with all that life throws at her. Watch as she tries to convince a friend to renew a magazine subscription that she clearly doesn't want. Hering is brilliant as the crushed, overwhelmed expression on her face contrats with a voice that remains confident and charming.
It's also impressive that Amanda can seem like such a scary version of the badgering, domineering mother at one point, and so sad and vulnerable a second later. It's a great character, and Hering is ideal for the role.
Lee also does an impressive job making the play's nostalgia a virtual character here, setting the scene with old Jazz music that plays in the background and lighting that gives us a clear sense of day shifting to night. You really feel like you're in that cramped tenement, that you can hear the cold winter wind outside; you understand that in the days long before television, cell phones, the Internet and IPods, your world truly could revolve around little things like the Victrola that plays scratchy records, the radio that brings the world into your living room ... or even something as simple as the menagerie of shiny glass ornaments.
In real life, Williams' sister Rose was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age, and as part of her treatment, her parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy that left her incapacitated for the rest of her life. I don't know if writing this play was a sad and emotionally wrenching experience for Williams.
But I do know that this version of the play is no downer, and finds a great deal of humor in the frustrating, sometimes exasperating situations that our narrator Tom finds himself in while he's trying to maintain his sanity when his tight world seems all too maddening at times.
