Playwright: Tennessee Williams
At: The Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee
( 773 ) 283-7071; $20-$25
www.thegifttheatre.org
Runs through: Dec. 4
By Catey Sullivan
A Tom lacking desperation, a Laura defined by facial tics rather than a core of tears, and an Amanda who is less smothering gorgon and more of an eccentric old lady.
It's a recipe for a problematic Glass Menagerie, and that's what we get in the Gift Theatre Company's production of Tennessee Williams' emotional tragedy.
The Wingfield family, like so many of the people that populate Williams' richly poetic dramas, is made up of creatures trapped in rapidly evaporating dreams and desires being extinguished by sorrow. The characters are indelible portraits in the literature of dying hopes.
Laura is the young woman crippled by pleurosis and as a result, is also crippled by shyness so dehabilitating that she becomes physically ill when faced with unfamiliar situations. Tom is her restless, deeply conflicted older brother, a young man who has to decide whether to sacrifice his sister in order to save himself. Finally, there is the matriarch Amanda, a presence as overpowering as a thousand week-old jonquils, cut and forgotten, left out to rot and die.
But instead of giving us portraits of haunting, hunted anguish, director Sheldon Patinkin guides the cast to little more than cardboard cutouts of the Wingfield family.
The strongest in the cast is Mary Ann Thebus as Amanda, the impoverished, overbearing woman who lives in delusions of her glory days as a southern belle. She's got a strong sense for a character of great pretension and butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth airs, a false queen who sneers at rude commoners even as she free-falls toward indigence. Thebus is best when Amanda flounces and flirts with the arrival of a Gentleman Caller. It's a display of macabre, ghoulish girlishness, the specter of a mature woman utterly blinded by her own delusions.
Mostly, however, Thebus gives a familiar performance. Her prim, uncompromising persona evokes her performance in Keeley and Du about a decade ago.
As Laura, Dina Connolly displays none of the spun-glass fragility the character calls for. Patinkin hasn't done her any favors by having her indulge in all manner of bizarre facial contortions.
And there's just no way around the wooden, angst-free affect of Brendan Donaldson's Tom Wingfield, whose tortured memories provide the framework for the play,
When he says, 'I'm starting to boil inside,' it carries all the emotional heft of 'I had a cheese sandwich for lunch.'
That leaves Jayce Ryan, who does fine work exuding kindness and sincerity in his brief but crucial scene as the Gentleman Caller.
The production does have an outstanding element in Yousif Mohamed's moody, dream-like lighting design. Whether bathing the stage in the rosy glow of a dance hall, the sunset colors of nostalgia or painting pictures with shadows, his lights are a perfect complement to Williams' story.