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by Tennessee Williams, directed by Ted Dykstra

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

July 6-September 6, 2011

Soulpepper’s new production of The Glass Menagerie takes a fresh look at the Tennessee Williams classic and highlights many aspects of the play that other productions neglect.  Director Ted Dykstra has simply read the text closely and realized that certain traditions that most directors follow do not actually accord with what Williams wrote. 

Dykstra’s principal innovation is to cast Stuart Hughes as Tom Wingfield.  Most productions cast someone who is close in age to the actor playing Tom’s sister Laura, who, as many forget, is actually older than Tom.  Hughes, however, is closer in age to Nancy Palk, who plays his mother Amanda.  What this casting emphasizes is the whole notion of the play as a memory play, and as Tom says, “Being a memory play, ... it is sentimental, it is not realistic”.  Thus, if Tom has been haunted for years, as he says, by the memory of abandoning his mother and sister, it makes much more sense that the actor should be as old perhaps as the actor playing Amanda.  Tom states, “I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it”.  Therefore, when this older Tom interacts with the others on stage we are constantly reminded that the action is “not realistic”.  While most productions treat Tom’s narrations merely as ways to bridge changes of time in the action, Dykstra reinforces the non-realistic aspect of the play by adding an echo to the first lines spoken after each narration to keep us aware that all we see is what Tom recalls from the past.

A common flaw in productions of the play is to ignore that the action we see is already over and fixed in the past and to catch us up in the irrationally high expectations that Amanda places on Laura’s meeting with her first “gentleman caller”.  Dykstra follows Williams’ stage directions by having Tom deliver all of his narrations dressed as a merchant sailor, thus showing that the escape he threatens his mother with has already been acted upon.  Dykstra also has the grinning portrait of Amanda’s husband, who abandoned the family sixteen years earlier, look exactly like Stuart Hughes, thus underlines the inevitability of her fate. 

Dykstra presents the “Gentleman Caller” in quite a different light.  Amanda notes this from his full name, James Delaney O’Connor, “Irish on both sides! Gracious! And doesn’t drink?”  After Tom, Amanda and Jim say grace at the dinner table, Dykstra has Jim turn aside briefly to cross himself, to emphasize one aspect of Jim’s Irishness, his religion, that Amanda didn’t think of and that marks Jim’s suitability as a suitor for Laura as hopeless.  Further, when Amanda and Tom leave to do the dishes to force Jim to speak to Laura, Dykstra has Jeff Lillico as Jim show quite clearly that he is not pleased with the situation.  Dykstra has Jim drink several glasses of dandelion wine to steel himself to speak to the Tom’s peculiar sister who was too nervous to sit with them at the table.  He even has Jim drink off the glass he gives to Laura to calm her nerves when he sees she hasn’t finished it.  Throughout the scene between them, Dykstra makes it clear that Jim feels awkward and is using every technique he can think of to make conversation with this oddly monosyllabic girl.  Only when Laura reveals that they knew each other in high school does he perk up and begin to treat her more kindly.  Many productions try to suggest that Jim is actually attracted by Laura, but here Dykstra makes it clear that all his positive advice about how to improve self-esteem is only that.  Even when Jim kisses Laura, it is not a romantic gesture but a ploy to help her improve her sense of self-worth. 

The cast is excellent.  Hughes is tougher, more hard-bitten Tom than usual suggesting that his the life of adventure he has sought has worn him down.  Inside the action, he shows that despite their numerous arguments, that Tom’s closest relationship is with his mother.  He is her main confidant and support and functions in that way as her surrogate husband.  Emphasis on this point only shows how necessary it is for Tom to leave this suffocating relationship behind. 

Nancy Palk is a great Amanda, a woman who despite all her practical, “scientific” advice to her children, lives so much in the past before she married that she is almost as out of touch with the present as Laura.  Palk lends Amanda a vivacity which helps explain why she should have married a man who worked for a telephone company instead of the son of a planter as she had expected.

As Laura, Gemma James-Smith seems more than pathologically shy.  She never can look anyone in the eye and speaks in a high baby-like voice as if she lived in constant fear of other people.  When she speaks of her glass menagerie to Jim, her eyes glaze over as she enters a world where her animals are actually alive and talk to her.  Tom tries to have Amanda admit that Laura is “peculiar” and it is just this mental disorder, much like Asperger syndrome, that James-Smith portrays so convincingly.

Jeff Lillico is an excellent choice as the “Gentleman Caller”.  His genuine, outgoing nature contrasts completely with all of the Wingfields, including Amanda, who have to force themselves to be friendly.  His scene alone with Laura is a masterpiece of fine acting as he tries one approach after another to get some response from the incommunicative girl.

Designer Patrick Clark’s set captures the genteel decay of the Wingfield’s lodgings, though the Mission-style sofa is a mistake precisely because it suggests the Midwest which the Wingfields have not at all embraced. His costumes show that the Wingfields are doing the best with the little money they have.  Amanda’s party outfit, which designers often make far to ornate, here suggests exactly the kind of simple, youthful summer frock that would have been popular in the 1910s.  Lorenzo Savoini’s lighting is especially noteworthy in giving the stage picture the glow of memory that Tom speaks of rather than a fully naturalistic look.  He manages to make the final scene actually look as if it were really played only by candlelight.

If something is missing from this Glass Menagerie, it is a tug at the heart at the end.  Strangely, we feel none of Tom’s pain for condemning his mother and sister to a life of poverty.  Partly, this is because Dykstra directs Hughes to banish the family from his mind like the bad recurring dream it is.  Tom’s statement, “Blow out your candles, Laura”, is abrupt and harsh, not racked with guilt and regret.  What also works against a sense of tragedy is that Dykstra has never shown Tom and Laura to be as close (or too close) as Tom is with Amanda.  As James-Smith plays her, Laura repels all familiarity, even from her own family.

The ending aside, Dykstra has created a satisfying Glass Menagerie that sweeps aside many performance conventions and, one hopes, will encourage others to go even farther.  If the play is intended not to be realistic, then at some point the realistic set that Dykstra still uses will also have to go.            

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Gemma James-Smith. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For Tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.