“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve…I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” How many students have read these opening words from Tennessee Williams’ 1944 legendary play “The Glass Menagerie,” currently on view at Theatrical Outfit? Far more, I fear, than have seen the play, especially a production as poetic and powerful as this one.
Artistic Director Matt Torney’s shimmering, magnetic version of the play will run through Nov. 23, with a couple of added two-a-day performances; check the schedule carefully at theatricaloutfit.org.
That’s the thing about “masterpieces,” when they’re done well by an inspired, gifted cast: You have a sense of discovery as though you had never seen it before, never heard the familiar words, or been mesmerized by Laura’s little glass animals—and you’re charmed.
While “Menagerie” is a play of almost ineffable delicacy, poignance, and intimacy, it can also knock the breath out of you; you may have forgotten this. I’m going to assume you have some degree of familiarity with the work.
Do you remember the Wingfields? The play is largely autobiographical: There’s Tom (the playwright’s real name, and played here beautifully by Stephen Ruffin), the would-be writer caught in a soul-corroding job in a shoe warehouse; his slightly crippled, painfully shy sister Laura (a touching performance by Devon Hales). Tom tells us up front that “the play is memory.”
And there is Amanda, their well-meaning yet unintentionally selfish mother, based on “Miss Edwina,” Williams’ own mother, whom the playwright’s erstwhile pal Gore Vidal called “one of Tennessee’s monster women.” Veteran Atlanta/ Broadway actress Terry Burrell does the honors here, beautifully, with subtlety, wit and power. The play, incidentally, is set in pre-World War II St. Louis, when “the world was lit by lightning.”
Amanda raised her children in a nice home in the Mississippi delta. But her husband’s departure (“a telephone man who fell in love with long distance,” says Tom) has forced her to move with her children to a small apartment in St. Louis. But she loves nothing more than to regale her captive audience with bygone times, when she was the queen of the cotillion, inundated with beaucoups of gentlemen callers.
Laura’s aforementioned physical infirmity and painful shyness worry Amanda, and she asks Tom to ask some nice young man at the factory to come for dinner so that he may be Laura’s date, or “gentleman caller,” as she would say.
Williams, through Tom, calls him “the long delayed but always expected something that we live for,” and here his name is Jim (Matt Mercurio, in a touching, delicate performance).
During dinner, the lights go out (Tom has not paid the lighting bill); and we are suddenly in the midst of the most tender, exquisite scene in American drama, as Laura and Jim have a charming, heartbreaking colloquy. I can’t watch it without tearing up. Even the playwright is moved: At one point his stage directions say, “The holy candles in the altar of Laura’s face have been snuffed out.”
My one quibble with the entire evening happens in the scene between Laura and Jim. I beg lighting designer Ben Rawson to “cheat” a bit so the audience can see their faces better. Yes, we have candles, but they’re not enough. In the author’s production notes, he implies that a slight modification of lighting is possible. Doing so would make this powerful moment even more so.
Ladies and gentlemen, you need to see Theatrical Outfit’s production of “The Glass Menagerie.” It is a cornerstone of American drama. You’ll thank me, and yourself.