Playwright: Tennessee Williams. At: Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company at Angel Island, 935 W. Sheridan Rd. Tickets: 773-871-0442; www.maryarrchie.com; $25. Runs through: Jan. 20
The stage looks like the tasting room of an abandoned winery: everywhere we look is glassbottles, decanters, goblets, snifters, globes, mirrors, on the floor, on the stairs, on the boxes and other detritus of a subterranean basement refuge. It is our first clue that what we are about to see is no conventional Theater 101 interpretation of the popular Tennessee Williams drama. Our second is the bearded, shabby, probably homeless, man who enters to warn us that he brings "truth in the pleasant disguise of an illusion."
You won't find a single classroom cliché anywhere in Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company's astonishing production, which restores the expressionistic motifs incorporated into the text by the author to conjure romantic poignancy long neglected under small budgets and imaginations. A bare wall becomes the screen for our narrator's cinematic fantasies (accompanied by title cards and nickelodeon music), while a faded tobacco advertisement thereon supplies the portrait of the Wingfield family's absent father. What we most notice, though, is that in this play composed of "memories," characters appear in isolation, facing us full-front even as they speak to one another. Only in the final scene, with the entrance of the stranger who will disrupt their reclusive dynamic, can they be said to interact.
Grant Sabin's scenic design in the cozy Angel Island extends the play's environment out into the audience area to immerse us in our dramatic universe, as does Daniel Knox's score of ambient music, and Arianna Soloway's hypnotic glassware arrangements invoke a dreamlike dazzle. In the role of the shy Laura Wingfield, Joanna Dubach rejects the standard porcelain-barbie persona to convey an intensity bespeaking potential rendered all the more tragic by its impeded growth, while Maggie Cain endows the dominating Amanda Wingfield with wholly viable concerns beneath her absurd solutions, and Walter Briggs projects just the right level of dogged serenity as the optimistic Jim O'Conner.
The adhesive keeping the action cohesive and coherent for every second of the two-hour (with one intermission) running time, however, is expat Mary-Arrchie alumnus Hans Fleischmann, in the dual role of director and actor, delivering a vigorous performance as the restless Tom Wingfield. No matter how many times you may have seen this classic, no matter how familiar with its every nuance you may think yourself, you will never again view it as in this haunting and fully realized reconception.