Tricks and trauma: IRT's 'The Glass Menagerie' feels the burn of memory

We have seen productions of "The Glass Menagerie" in which Tom Wingfield as

Tom regales his mother and sister with made-up tales of his dissolute ways

character/narrator presents himself in the reflective manner of the Stage Manager in "Our Town." He looks back at familiar events and people in a sharing, confiding  mode. He knows everything.

That can be effective, as long as the right sparks are struck in scenes where Tom is fully a character, embedded in the pain of a three-member family and desperate to escape that pain. Indiana Repertory Theatre''s current production, directed by James Still, goes in a fiercer direction. At  his first appearance, Felipe Carrasco makes Tom's declaration that "the play is memory" electrifying, bitter and insistent, far from a soft-spoken guide to what the audience is about to witness. 

What happened long ago is still at issue for him, because Tom's memories themselves are still an unsettled issue. The audience is never allowed to forget that Tom here imposes creative control upon what happened to his fragile family over a couple of days in their Depression-era working-class St. Louis apartment. The play enjoins stagecraft that suggests it is being perpetually workshopped.

Studies have shown that we inadvertently revise our memories each time we recount them. Disturbing events may be consolidated in our recall, yet they are subject to revision over time. "The Glass Menagerie" engages this difficult truth head-on, and we're invited to consider how we can't trust what our minds  bring back from our most embedded experiences.

As seen in its second weekend Friday night, the production daringly shifts some of the initial dialogue to an antiphonal mode, with Tom responding to his exuberantly florid mother's talk as if in demonstration rather than actual conversation. The creative juices of a poet determined to escape his domestic and work milieus are flowing before our eyes and ears. Of course, the play soon moves into a style of direct, intimate confrontation, of which Tennessee Williams was a master. Tom's intention to leave a dead-end warehouse job for the merchant marine may be a mirage, but so is the network of remembered sorrows generating his flight. The flight is foreshadowed in the wealth of movement about the Janet Allen Stage in this production.

Crucially, Tom the observer is never far from the action, most boldly when he overhears the heart-melting dialogue between his sister, Laura, and the much heralded Gentleman Caller in the second act. A common technical problem in making plays is to get a character plausibly offstage to allow other characters the chance for crucial interaction. In this case, Tom is purportedly helping Amanda, his mother, clean up in the kitchen after a fraught dinner party she designed to introduce her shy, disabled daughter to a potential beau has fizzled. Still's way of getting around this device and bringing forward Tom as a creative force is to leave the brother in view off to the side.

Gentleman Caller imparts life lessons to Laura.

Even more winningly, the staging of that scene between Laura and Tom's co-worker, of whom she was a secret admirer in high school, feels suspended in time. It has magnificent breadth and poignancy, thanks to the performances  of Delaney Feener as Laura and Sam Bell-Gurwitz as Jim O'Connor (the Gentleman Caller). Inarguably, this part of the play comes across as one of the great love scenes in modern theater. It's far from the wooing that Amanda Wingfield imagines will take place, but its lessons in love are indelible and carried out with an ineffable tenderness and insight.

The Gentleman Caller is sometimes portrayed as mostly an exemplar of good manners, giving Laura a pep talk that might come across as genuine but also lingers on the threshold of performative pity.  Bell-Gurwitz's portrayal has an expansive boisterousness that reflects Jim O'Connor's career ambitions and burgeoning education in radio engineering and public speaking, but also bursts out of a deep-seated need to help someone folded in upon herself, brooding upon failures and buoyed up only by her collection of miniature glass animals. The devastating secret he reveals came across with the force of an abject apology in the performance I saw. Jim had crossed a boundary of intimacy he hadn't foreseen.

Amanda invites her daughter into her dream world.

Casting an actor with a genuine disability as Laura brings the viewer up short at first, as Feener has a deformed right arm. We are accustomed to assuming that embodying a character sets aside anything specific the actor has to deal with in his or her personal life. In the case of this Laura, we are forced to question our views of disability even as we admire a performance as assured and inviting as Feener's was last night. When the Gentleman Caller leads Laura in a waltz, with the conventional dance embrace beautifully compromised and adapted, we are challenged to keep our composure. 

Still's focus on the poetic force of memory gets further confirmation in Julie Fishell's Amanda. The mother's attempts to process a lifetime of disappointments range from crestfallen facial expressions to angry outbursts. Fishell's portrayal covered this landscape splendidly, with Amanda's delusions and constant badgering of her son and daughter unrelenting. 

You might be tempted to see this as overacting until you remember that Tom is exercising control over his mother through his vivid, unsettled memories of her behavior. That's why even her amusing sales pitches over the phone to get magazine subscription renewals are so loud and urgent. Both her family love and her instinct for survival gasp in a struggle to emerge, as they do in Tom's mind.

Williams was explicit and perhaps overdetailed in the production values he wanted, and any design team has to decide how literal to be. I was impressed by all aspects of this production, but especially by Melanie Chen Cole's original music and sound design. It was cleverly fragmentary and precise to each dramatic moment to which it was applied, the way the scenarios we call up in our minds from the past have bright spots (a gesture, a phrase) of illumination and insight. 

But again, we need to remind ourselves that just like Tom, we may be restaging episodes every time we allow them to resurface. Whatever we get close to in recollection remains evasive as to its core truth. That's why our memories can have the fragility of Laura's glass menagerie. We are lucky to have a tiny whole figure to take away with us as a souvenir.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]