Arguably, Ensemble Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie deserves a better audience than it got on opening night.
At a key point in the play, well-meaning faded golden boy Jim O’Connor (Tom Rodgers) accidentally breaks a tiny glass unicorn, part of the titular collection of knick-knacks that shy, anxious Laura Wingfield (Bridie McKim) is obsessed with.
It’s a moment laden with meaning and pathos. Laura – who was left with a limp by a childhood illness, and is so shy and awkward that she dropped out of secretary school rather than face day after day of simply sitting in class with other people – is finally, tentatively, making a connection with Jim, her high school crush. Unbeknownst to her, the future of her family depends on this connection. The meeting has been engineered by her younger brother, Tom (Danny Ball), and mother, Amanda (Blazey Best). Marrying off Laura will free Tom, who works in a shoe warehouse to support the family, to run off and find the adventure he craves in the merchant marines. It will also elevate Amanda from the crushing poverty she’s endured since her estranged husband, whose faded photo dominates the stark set, ran off years ago.
But Laura is far too fragile for such a burden – she’s as delicate as the glass unicorn that Jim so carelessly crushes. And the quiet, crystal moment in the aftermath of that tiny, terrible accident was itself shattered when some halfwit in the first few rows stage-whispered, clear as a bell in the intimate theatre: “Superglue!”
Yes, yes, very droll. There was a smattering of laughter, and why not? The characters of Williams’ memory play are exaggerated caricatures – at least, on the surface. They were caricatures when the play was first staged in 1944, Williams reworking his own formative experiences and two earlier efforts – the short story Portrait of a Girl in Glass and the screenplay The Gentleman Caller – and they’re even more so now. If audiences weren’t familiar with the trope of the faded southern belle before, The Simpsons cemented the figure as an object of ridicule in 1992 when Marge played Blanche DuBois in a gauche musical interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Menagerie itself forefronts its metatextual nature, with nascent poet Tom (Williams’ self-insert character) directly addressing the audience, and reminding us that this is both a fiction and a memoir, a true thing and a construction.
Williams’ main trick with Menagerie is to demonstrate the artifice of theatre and make us care for it anyway...
As a construction, this production is carefully considered, bending the text and staging it in interesting ways. The open stage, dressed by Set and Costume Designer Grace Deacon with a few pieces of worn antique furnishing, bounded on one side by a raised fire escape where Tom retreats to smoke and brood, and on the other by the auditorium staircase, bears little resemblance to Williams’ meticulous stage directions – but those directions manifest in pre-recorded expository narration by Ball’s Tom. As the histrionic Amanda, Blazey Best is over-the-top, self-aggrandising, flouncy and flirty, but she’s also controlling and hectoring and ultimately tragic. Bridie McKim’s Laura is almost too tragic a figure – so delicate, so cloistered, so spun-sugar fragile and doomed to suffer – to be taken seriously.
But that, I think, is the challenge of The Glass Menagerie, and director Liesel Badorrek seems to understand it: to take in all the cliches and stereotypes of the form and the characters, all the trappings of this archetypal gothic melodrama, with its sweaty St Louis setting and wilting flowers of southern femininity and queer-coded and conflicted men (we can’t say for sure how the character was viewed in the 1940s, but given what we now know about Williams, it’s impossible not to view Tom as closeted, and his nightly excursions to “the cinema” as a tentative exploration of his queerness), and to cut through the exaggerations and simplifications of both memory and staging to see the essential humanity at its heart.
The director must also be able to see Laura’s barely-contained panic at the sheer titanic cruelty of the world (beautifully captured here by McKim). To see both Amanda’s overwhelming fear of abandonment and her resentment of her own neediness (occasionally bleeding through Best’s performance) and the way that, by dint of her gender and class, she has been denied the ability to fend for herself. To see past the obvious trappings of Ball’s performance, the meticulous mustache and elongated, drawling vowels, the high-waisted strut, and grasp that the character’s key tenor is crushing guilt over wanting a bigger life for himself, over thinking himself better than the place and people that both nurtured and tortured him, over, ultimately, failing them. If there’s an artist of working class stock that doesn’t wrestle with that, I’ve never met them.
Williams’ own guilt was more pointed. His older sister Rose, the model for Laura, was afflicted with schizophrenia and lobotomized in 1943, and Williams never forgave himself for failing to protect her. Rose recurs throughout his work in many guises – Laura, Blanche, Suddenly Last Summer’s Catherine – and he paid for her care up until her death and, in fact, beyond his own (his estate supported her after he died in 1983, until her own passing in 1996).
Rose’s affliction, while horrifically mistreated, was still real. Laura’s isn’t exactly imaginary, although it is ill-defined. But at least according to Jim, it was never the social affliction she thinks it is; he tells her that he never noticed the stomping, clomping leg brace that so embarrassed her at school.
Badorrek doesn’t shy from subjectivity to give us insight into her characters’ lives. Verity Hampson’s largely invisible lighting goes sultry and fever-dreamy during one of Amanda’s reveries, but remains static when Laura recounts her own shame, refusing to give it that subjective weight. However, there was a tangibly mean edge to the laughter from the opening night audience, and a sense that the crowd’s gaze ended at the surface, not bothering to look deeper than Tom’s “pleasant guise of illusion” to find truth.
Williams’ play supposes that Laura’s tormentors were all in her head; and the crowd for this production, I’d argue, made them real. Not deliberately, mind you; not intentionally. There was a warm and genuine standing ovation after Tom’s final, tortured farewell to his lost sister, and I doubt that anyone there thought the production was actually bad – but I would say that they held it at a safe distance.
Right at the start, Tom tells us directly that he has “tricks in his pockets” – and Williams’ main trick with Menagerie is to demonstrate the artifice of theatre and make us care for it anyway; to seal real tragedy in an envelope of fiction and ask us to open it.
As such, Menagerie is a post-modern work, but perhaps now it’s a post-modern work that's laid low by post-modernity. Perhaps we, as audiences, are too savvy, too literate, too used to parsing signifier upon signifier, and reference upon reference, that it’s now turtles and blue roses all the way down. A game of pass-the-parcel with no prize inside, except the knowledge that you’re sharp enough to get it and not enough of a sucker to get got. And if that careless affect shatters a fragile moment? Well, there’s always superglue.
The Glass Menagerie is playing at Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, until April 26. Tickets are on sale for $43-$90, over here.
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