The Harvard Radcliffe Drama Club’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in the Loeb Ex has its last show tonight @ 7:30.
Seated in the one of only a few chairs inside the Loeb Experimental Theater’s plain black walls, I had to concentrate on the characters to absorb Williams’ world. It takes awhile to get to know them, but in the meantime, we get a strong sense of their motivations and disappointments. They live in a world where freedom is blocked by guilt. Tom, for example, needs to provide for his sister Laura (Rachel Stark), before his mother will allow him to leave home. He is forced into making up for his father, until he inevitably becomes him.
Tom (DJ Smolinsky) speaks clearly but with multiple pauses that distract the audience from the sincerity of his monologues. He lights his cigarette and rubs his jaw, but he fails to convey his fundamental discontent. He does have a few moments of brilliance; when he stands on the fire escape and bites his lip as he tells his mother that he will bring home a gentleman caller, he is at his most genuine.
Amanda, Tom’s mother, (Caroline Giuliani) is absolutely captivating in her reminiscences of streams of suitors courting her in her days as a young girl, but her actions are too careful. When she finds out that Laura has dropped out of night school, she tears up Laura’s homework in a painstakingly slow and careful way. She captures the image of the nagging mother, who is a failure if her children fail. She is the fading embodiment of southern charm, with her lectures on mastication hiding her bitterness at life’s injustice.
And Laura, weak and defenseless and always the victim, only looks on as the other characters reveal their dreams and disappointments. She watches as her mother dresses her in a frilly, blue dress. She looks pained as her mother holds up a fading blue silk dress to her chest and gleefully recounts the past: malaria fever and parties. When Jim arrives, Laura grips her hands to her chest as her mother dons a brimming smile and southern accent as she chatters about warm weather and light suppers.
Jim (Tony Sterle) is the perfect example of the guy we all knew in high school: jovial, dynamic, captain of the baseball team. Sterle’s high strung, jittery energy pervades the stage as he expounds on his passion for taking night school courses in public speaking. Stark responds in an equally genuine manner, coyly titling her head as she presents Jim with an example of her glass menagerie. And for a second, they are both lost in Laura’s world, watching the lamplight filter through the glass. And then, the glass breaks, and the shield falls, and Jim announces with brutal honesty that he is not the guy for Laura. And as he talks Laura retreats back into her world of glass, her world of clarity and consistency.
The scene is one of the most memorable, because it is relatable and emotional and finally makes us understand Tom’s belief that “I realize now how lucky dead people are.” The play ends with Tom’s anger with the shaking tears in his voice, Amanda’s anger as her failures are brought to light, and Laura’s silence.
