The Glass Menagerie

David Crane as Tom and Janis Stevens as Amanda perform in Sacramento Theatre Company's
production of “The Glass Menagerie,” on stage through April 30.
Charr Crail Photography/Courtesy photo

“The Glass Menagerie,” now at Sacramento Theatre Company’s Pollock Stage, was the play that made Tennessee Williams a name in modern theater. The play was loosely based on his own life, his melodramatic mother, his emotionally and physically fragile sister, and himself as the would-be poet brother.

Purists who love this play may not be happy with the vision of director Casey McClellan, who has played rather loosely with the original stage directions.

This is described as a “memory play,” meaning that the action takes place in brother Tom’s mind, so important pieces of furniture and props are used, such as a table on which to eat and a couch, as well as a small table with four or five glass ornaments.

But most of the set and props, things that would not have been foremost in Tom’s memory, are mimed (designers Jarrod Bodensteiner and Renee DeGarmo). Lighting cigarettes, for example, involves an exaggerated match-lighting movement and an accompanying lighting effect (design by Jessica Bertine).

The mixture of set and no set, props and no props is a bit off-putting, though Tom warns “it is sentimental, it is not realistic.”

When an actor takes on a role, it is understood that he or she makes that role his or her own, under the direction from the director, and so David Crane’s overpowering, somewhat brittle Tom seems at odds with the wanna be writer/poet that the playwright described. But there is no denying that the performance is riveting, even though he approaches the role of the narrator of the story with the charisma of a snake-oil salesman.

It is the story of the Wingfield family forever affected by the unseen father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long-distance.” His departure left behind a mother and two children, one of whom is crippled (a word not allowed to be spoken) following a bout of polio.

There can’t have been a better choice than Janis Stevens to play the faded Southern belle, Amanda Wingfield, a woman rooted in the days of the “gentleman caller,” a cross between a strong matriarch and a flighty debutante. There is no doubt that Stevens knows who she is and gives a memorable, beautiful performance. She shines in her belle-of-the-ball finery, dressing up to meet a real gentleman caller, exuding all of the Southern charm she remembers from her youth.

Amanda wants only the best for her children — though her ideas of what they need are based on her own life, not the reality of the children in front of her.

Tom’s older sister, Laura (Katherine Stroller) is painfully shy and insecure, made even more so by the slight limp, which is barely noticeable in this production, but which bothers her a lot. Stroller fades into the woodwork, until her “gentleman caller” Jim (Eric Craig) shows up and there is a sweet scene between the two of them that shows the potential for Laura.

Jim is the gentleman caller Amanda has browbeat Tom into bringing home to meet Laura. She is unaware that he was Laura’s high school crush and the thought of his showing up in her apartment terrifies Laura. Jim was the high school star, but life has not treated him well. Still, Craig provides the one note of normalcy in this odd family dynamic.

The real “glass menagerie” of glass equine figures in this production seems to take on a very small role, but at the end of the play, one realizes more that it is, instead, the Wingfield family who are the glass menagerie, with their fragile, easily damaged egos.