THEATRE REVIEW:
THE GLASS MENAGERIE
8 JUL/11

JOHNCOULBOURN,
QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5


TORONTO - In all the world, it seems there are few things as durable as memory, fewer still more fragile than dreams. 
And the wonder is that years ago, a young playwright named Tennessee (or Thomas Lanier, as he was christened) Williams entwined the two with magical effect in a play that would launch his career and change the face of modern theatre. 
It's called The Glass Menagerie — and after an hiatus of a few years, Toronto audiences have a chance to see it yet again in a flawed, but still compelling, Soulpepper production that opened this week at the Young Centre.


In bringing it to the stage, director Ted Dykstra respects all the major conventions of the work — a memory play in which a melancholy narrator recalls his troubled youth, sharing a squalid St. Louis flat with his domineering mother and an older sister who is even more crippled by her shyness than by whatever defect that's left her with a pronounced limp. 
But while Dykstra respects the bones of the work, he fleshes it out in ways that are often surprising.


The narrator, Tom Wingfield, for instance, is often seen as Williams himself, for far more reason than the fact that the two share a given name — and as a result, he's often played by sensitive young men. Here, however, he's played by Stuart Hughes, who combines the character's poetic aspirations with the cockiness and swagger of a mature stevedore. 
As his mother Amanda, Nancy Palk forsakes the smothering Blanche Dubois-lite madness that infuses so many Amandas and gives us, instead, a mother driven to desperation by the weight of enforced poverty and the abiding love she bears her children. 
And as Laura, the troubled young woman who sits at the very centre of the tale, Dykstra forsakes the vision of Laura as a character as physically frail as the glass ornaments which give the play its title, and instead opts for a more physically vigorous presence in the person of Gemma James-Smith, creating a Laura who's tragically trapped inside her own mind. 
In fact, the only character who doesn't surprise here is Jeff Lillico, cast as the Gentleman Caller — a young man who inadvertently upsets the delicate menagerie that the Wingfield family has become. Although the pace is often off in his scenes with Laura, Lillico is nonetheless deeply if not surprisingly affecting here, having made such characters his stock in trade.


Often beautifully lit by Lorenzo Savoini, the production takes place on an often problematic set designed by Patrick Clark — a set which the production seems on the verge of overwhelming at times, when it should threaten to overwhelm the characters. But it is still fertile ground where Williams' characters come to life and bask in the warm glow of memory.

Hughes is often touchingly vulnerable as a tough guy trying to hide his heart, while James-Smith transforms Laura into a touchingly vulnerable child-woman frozen in glass. Palk has wonderful moments, particularly in the pivotal "jonquil scene," in which she transforms herself into a beautiful young woman before our eyes. 
In fact, it all works quite well - until it doesn't. 
Ultimately, in Dykstra's vision, Hughes is asked to play a character who, in inhabiting a memory of his youth, remains a man in his middle years, when memory, in fact, preserves everyone at his youthful best. And while there is merit in Palk's take on Amanda, the character proves too fragile to stand up to the rigours of a climax that reveals not only her selfishness but her desperation and madness as well. 
For all its strengths, Dykstra's production gives us a Menagerie where the dreams prove more durable than the memories.