The gentleman caller (Thomas Keegan) meets with Laura (Jenna Sokolowski) in Ford’s The Glass Menagerie
Ford’s Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie is a play that lingers in the ear, but doesn’t capture the heart with the same intensity. Southern giant Tennessee Williams’ languid, evocative phrasing (“slim, tapering waists, rich, creamy thighs, eyes like wood-smoke in autumn) allows the audience to float along with his lovely words. But it’s still hard find someone to root for in this bleak study of the struggling Wingfield family.
Our choices: Tom (Tom Story), the dreamy and selfish stand-in for the playwright himself; Amanda (Madeline Potter), his grating and clingy mother; Laura (Jenna Sokolowski), the more-than-meek, socially-challenged sister; and Jim (Thomas Keegan), a mansplaining former high school superstar. The domineering Amanda is clearly way too invested in her children’s lives, hysterically chiding her son that he had better not succumb to the alcoholism and wanderlust of his father (her clinginess, naturally, has the opposite effect of what she intends). She places the majority of her energies, though, in trying to choreograph a future for Laura, her introverted daughter (limping from a childhood injury), who is ill at ease both with men and with any sort of career. At his mother’s relentless urging, Tom brings Jim, a coworker, to the house as a covert “gentleman caller” for Laura, and Amanda rests all her hopes on the prospect that he might take a fancy to her daughter.
Part of the challenge in fully connecting with Williams’ characters could come from the 70+-year-old play’s datedness — the stark contrast between the future prospects the world offers men and women, its reliance on guilt and obligation as motivators, and in particular, its conceit that one must feel a hopeless pity for Laura because she is painfully shy, mildly crippled, unmarried, and a bit strange. Setting her nature up as such an insurmountable obstacle (Jim, for his part, argues otherwise, but his future actions end up tainting his words with suspicion) is perhaps the hardest part of The Glass Menagerie to swallow in contemporary times.
But get past that, and it’s easier to connect with Sokolowski and Keegan’s natural, nuanced performances. Jim is inherently a tricky character to pin down— he’s often right, but also a bit insufferable. Kegan is able to contrast the man’s evolution after high school with his still-fragile ego; the result is a certain disarming appeal. He and the luminous Sokolowski have an adorable, flitting chemistry, even as the audience senses it’s headed nowhere good.
Story’s take on Tom feels more practiced and deliberate, but he’s still successful in milking every laugh from Williams’ script, and is a force to watch during his explosive exchange with his mother. They spar over his tendency to escape into the world of motion pictures each evening (this character quirk is emphasized throughout Timothy Mackabee’s set design, most obviously by a film reel that provides starlet-style closeups of the characters’ emotional moments). Potter brings to the center Amanda’s desperation and demanding nature, while making her conspicuously short on the effortless “charm” she professes to value (and embody) so much.
The Glass Menagerie’s autobiographical elements and detached narrative style drive home Williams’ complicated relationship with his family and his divided feelings towards his decision to leave home. But the stifling, tragic atmosphere director Mark Ramont has captured in recreating this tiny world really drives home the fact that he probably had no real choice.
The Glass Menagerie plays at Ford’s Theatre through Feb. 21. Tickets ($17-$64) are available online.
