"The Glass Menagerie" is the American theater's most exquisite mea culpa.
When it appeared on Broadway in 1945, it established Tennessee Williams as one of the country's foremost playwrights. You do not have to probe too deeply, however, to find a brother who believes he let his sister down badly, or a son who admits he was driven to distraction by his mother and devoutly wishes it weren't so.
Williams called " Menagerie" a memory play, and memory invariably distorts facts and reshapes events. Still, all the love, fury and frustration he felt toward Rose, his troubled sister, and Miss Edwina, his formidable mother, worked their way into the script. In emotional terms, it is almost pure autobiography.
Other Williams dramas are more exotic. None are quite this heartbreaking, although you'll have to bide your time for a while at the Criterion Center before the play, staged by the Roundabout Theater Company, exerts its considerable pull. This worthy but imperfect production stars the ever-welcome Julie Harris as Amanda Wingfield, that most infuriating of gracious Southern mothers. In the role of her son, Tom (read Williams himself), an aspiring writer trapped in a dead-end warehouse job, Zeljko Ivanek takes some getting used to, however.
So does the decision by Frank Galati, the Tony-winning director of "The Grapes of Wrath," to hold an old-fashioned magic lantern show on the back wall of the Wingfields' dingy St. Louis apartment. Crucial lines of dialogue, nostalgic black-and-white photos, even stage directions come into focus periodically, then fade away.
"The sky falls," announces one projection, just before it does, metaphorically speaking. A bouquet of white roses keeps reappearing, then like a sudden prophecy, turns blood red. Mr. Galati has not come upon this idea by himself. Williams's script calls for "slides bearing images or titles," although they were omitted from the original Broadway production and most productions since then have followed suit.
It's easy to understand why. The projections (designed in this instance by John Boesche) are mostly a distraction, causing you to look away from the actors but telling you nothing that the actors can't tell you just as easily on their own. " Love? " asks one slide repeatedly, as if the very point of the play could possibly slip by us.
What makes "The Glass Menagerie" so wrenching is that characters who have no intention of hurting one another end up doing so anyway. Their concern somehow backfires. Their caresses leave scratch marks.
In that respect, the play's most poignant scene takes place in the second act, and it is perfectly rendered here. Amanda, fearful that her pathologically shy daughter, Laura (Calista Flockhart), will become an old maid, has badgered Tom into bringing home a prospective beau from the warehouse. The dinner has gone awkwardly. The electric company has even switched off the lights before the meal is over. But finally, Laura and her gentleman caller (Kevin Kilner) are seated on the living-room floor, side by side, alone in the flickering candlelight.
Ms. Flockhart has a face as round and radiant as a summer moon, eyes that glisten with expectation and tears, and the overexcited manner of a child allowed to stay up beyond her bedtime. Mr. Kilner, the real discovery of this production, is tall and strapping, and looks like the glossy male models in 1940's magazines. It's almost as if Laura's high school memories have magnified him, made him handsomer than he ever was.
Touched by her timidity, he draws her out of her shell, just as her worshipful manner reawakens the golden boy he was back in senior class. Before long, the two are embarked on a collision course. It's nothing, really, just a romantic encounter that was never meant to be. Yet so resonant is Williams's writing and so beautifully meshed are the performances, that the world itself might as well be collapsing.
Ms. Harris has always had a rasp in her voice, breathiness wrapped in barbed wire, and a habit of underscoring the unexpected word in a line of dialogue. She is the most eccentric of leading ladies, if the theater can be said to have leading ladies these days. A certain madness suits her. (Some of her most memorable roles, after all, have been Emily Dickinson, Sally Bowles and Mary Todd Lincoln.)
Without forgoing Amanda's gentility, she emphasizes the woman's feverishness, her tendency to spin silvery dreams out of straws of hope and, similarly, to inflate momentary disappointments into catastrophes for the ages. "My devotion has made me a witch, and so I make myself hateful to my children," she sobs at one point with breast-beating fervor. Is Ms. Harris slyly reminding us that Williams, the supreme dramatist, had, in fact, a supremely self-dramatizing mother?
The performance that doesn't entirely work -- even in this household where exacerbated emotions are the rule -- is Mr. Ivanek's. He's a volcanic, lurching Tom, acutely aware of the coffin walls closing in on him. Sometimes when anger seizes him, he has as much difficulty wriggling free of his jacket as he does spitting out his words. That's half of it, of course, but only half. You get little sense of the incipient artist, the dreamer who scribbles verse on the lids of shoe boxes. Since he is also the play's narrator, looking back in sorrow, a vital poetic element is missing.
I suspect that's where the projections come in. Loy Arcenas's set, scrim and scaffolding, is purposefully on the drab side, and Mimi Jordan Sherin's lighting does it no favors. Far upstage, though, on a blank, gray wall, you'll see a tumble of storm-tossed clouds lighted by a flash of sun, or an open book, its empty pages waiting for someone to inscribe truths on them, or a pair of dark, seductive eyes staring intensely at the audience, as Amanda's peripatetic husband once stared at her.
The images are lovely expressions of themes in "The Glass Menagerie, " but they're redundant. The poetry is already in the text. The Roundabout cast just hasn't coaxed all of it to the surface.
THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams; directed by Frank Galati; sets by Loy Arcenas; costumes by Noel Taylor; lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin; sound by Richard R. Dunning; projection design by John Boesche; original music by Miriam Sturm; production stage manager, Jay Adler; founding director, Gene Feist; general manager, Ellen Richard. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director. At the Criterion Center Stage Right, 1530 Broadway, at 45th Street.
WITH: Zeljko Ivanek (Tom), Julie Harris (Amanda), Calista Flockhart (Laura) and Kevin Kilner (Jim).
