The Glass Menagerie
Man, when this first opened, it must have hit like a thunderclap. Tennessee Williams, who would go on to become our reigning king of hothouse family drama, just sending himself up onstage as the narrator of a memory play and opening wide the spigot of self-loathing over…well, there’s a reason he wrote a lot of family dramas about people trapped in desperate circumstances and their even more desperate efforts to escape them. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, when we run into a young man who doesn’t like his job and would rather spend all his time staring at a screen and dreaming of adventures he doesn’t get to have, we’re less likely to be moved to pity for the eternally frustrated artist. Get in line, pal. Did I say self-loathing? Yes, but there’s a healthy dollop of self-pity there, too, one that drags the spotlight off the story’s alleged victim and back onto its author — even as he absents himself from great swaths of the second act. Perhaps as a result, it’s Mom who commands the stage, our attention, and even our sympathies here, thanks in no small part to a command performance from Shana Wride — and this despite her tendency to let her ravenous regret and overwhelming fear drive her to awful efforts at control and coercion when it comes to her sorry son and disabled daughter. Oh, for a gentleman caller! The caller, when he comes, is played with huge decency and tenderness by Kirk Brown; it’s not his fault that he is, as Williams tells us a the outset, a symbol and not a character. And symbols…well, what can they do but signify? Diversionary’s production plays it straight, and lets faded hopes and bygone eras do their sad work.