By design in Diversionary Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ weighty 1944 play “The Glass Menagerie,” neither softly echoing music nor flickering candlelight can keep the crushing disappointment at bay in the Wingfield home. Nor can the tortured family residing there hide themselves behind the sheer curtains draped across the stage.
Williams’ first genuinely successful play, based on one of his own short stories, hinges on an admittedly unreliable narrator, son Tom Wingfield (Luke Harvey Jacobs), who begins by telling the audience directly: “I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
At Diversionary under the direction of Lisa Berger, the illusion is a slow, sometimes genteel trance that never becomes a full-on fever dream. The Wingfield family’s repressions are bound to boil over, but they are lulled into stasis by Williams’ poetical eloquence. Until they no longer can be.
Matriarch Amanda Wingfield is the faded Southern belle from Blue Mountain, Miss., abandoned by a wayward husband, helicopter-parenting both son Tom and crippled daughter Laura. And as to the latter, Amanda is determined to live out her own dreams of romance and achievement through the painfully shy girl. Actor Shana Wride also brings out the codependency of Amanda and the shameless, deluded egoism masquerading as motherly love. When Laura’s hopes are shattered, so are her own.
“The Glass Menagerie” is believed to be highly autobiographical and surely Williams’ fragile Laura is an incarnation of his own tragic older sister Rose. (The play’s Gentleman Caller, Jim O’Connor, had given Laura in their school days the nickname of “Blue Roses,” a play on the sickly girl’s explanation of her “pleurosis.”) Julia Belanova couldn’t be more withdrawn and stricken as Laura, looking and moving tentatively about the stage like a little bird with a broken wing.
The second act of the play, focused on O’Connor’s visit to the Wingfield house as an Amanda-decreed setup for Laura, proves devastating. The way things turn out, the charming young man (played with warmth by Kirk Brown) just has to be the Gentleman Caller of disillusioned Tom’s illusions, though he can make no magic from them.
In this “Glass Menagerie,” it is hinted that Tom, who is aching to be who and what he wants to be, is a closeted gay man. His escapes to the movies and his long private nights away from the St. Louis house are a mystery to his prying, domineering mother but not to himself.
Jacobs brings many layers to his portrayal, from reflective to pained and furiously frustrated. Always there is the longing for escape, and Tom is the only one in the house who truly can escape if he dares to. Amanda is unimpressed when Tom tells her, facetiously but with an undercurrent, “I’m leading a double life — a simple, honesty warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic czar of the underworld, Mother.”
What Jacobs conveys in the character most affectingly of all is the love that Tom will never let go of for his sister, she whose own world is as breakable as her little glass animal figurines.
Michael Wogulis’ set design, Vida Huang’s lighting and the sound design team of Remus Harrington and Eliza Vedar combine to create this broken-heart-shaped world in intimate confines where the tinny music swoons and each silence is unsettling.
“The Glass Menagerie” is Diversionary Theatre’s first ever production of a play by Tennessee Williams. Performed with sensitivity by a committed cast and directed with respect for its language and no small understanding of its pain, it is worthy of him and of his courage to tell this story.
‘The Glass Menagerie’
When: 7 p.m. Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 23
Where: Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd., University Heights
Tickets: $20-$65
Phone: (619) 220-0097
Online: diversionary.org
Coddon is a freelance writer.