Heart of Glass

Brown's masterful Menagerie

by Bill Rodriguez

THE GLASS MENAGERIE. By Tennessee Williams. Directed by John Warren. With Adam Arian, Christina Nicosia, McCaleb Burnett, and Anne Brady. At Brown Summer Theatre through June 27.

Theater classics that make their mark in a particular time and place are time capsules, fascinating for having awakened something in people then When the play is performed as incessantly as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, something else is going on. As the Brown Summer Theatre production is currently demonstrating, this self-described "memory play" bridges time only to bring us back to ourselves in whatever decade we live.

The Wingfield family of St. Louis, Missouri, is a curious sort of dysfunctional family: we are bemused by their exaggerated foibles when we step back, but we are moved if we get close enough to be touched. The latter perspective is that of son and brother Tom, the narrator who invites us into his recollections. Although reviews were mixed when the play opened on Broadway in 1945, Williams's career as a stage chronicler of the Southern soul and the human heart was assured. In this quasi-autobiographical story, Williams not only made the quaint seem familiar, but also characterized potential stereotypes with a fullness that renders them virtual archetypes.

Tom (Adam Arian) is the eternal seeker, the rover, destined to be ever dissatisfied with where he is because the irremediable past always trails along. He yearns to flee family and dead-end job in a shoe warehouse and join the Merchant Marines. Arian has a tricky balancing act to perform: he has to give us a person capable of abandoning his family to poverty, as Tom's father did, yet someone whose artistic sensitivity we don't dismiss as raw ego. The actor doesn't totter, doesn't fall.

Amanda (Christina Nicosia), his older sister by two years, is the Fear of Life in human form. She is so frightened of people that she ran away from secretarial school and has spent recent weeks roaming the winter city rather than go back. Her life is her dream world, populated by her glass ornament collection and minimally nudged into movement by the record collection left behind by the father that abandoned them all. Nicosia plays her with necessary vulnerability but also with an inner strength that minimizes the pathos.

And then there's mother. Or should I say Mother. Amanda Wingfield (Anne Brady), a faded Southern belle who brags of having had 17 gentleman callers one sweltering Mississippi afternoon in her charming youth, is a whirlwind of maternal duty. She also is fiercely controlling as only the abjectly powerless feel the need to be. Tom can't sip his coffee without her insisting that he do so "correctly." And as for Laura, it's a wonder that the woman can crawl, never mind limp, under the lifelong assault against her sense of self. Brady is delightful to watch as she gives Amanda a spunk that we can't help but admire and a giddiness that we see could pass for charm in less than onslaught doses.

As satisfyingly as the Wingfield triumvirate is portrayed, the most refreshing performance is by McCaleb Burnett as Laura's gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, especially for theater buffs familiar with the play. In the numerous productions I've seen, the temptation, usually unresisted, has been to play him as a blustery blowhard, however well-intended. After all, the young man has recently begun a public speaking night class and is all fired up with the power of Positive Thinking. But under the astute direction of John Warren, Burnett draws the character forth from a fact that Jim drops in passing about the inferiority complex he is trying to talk Laura out of: he used to have one, too. ("Although my case was not so aggravated as yours seems to be.")

So, with Burnett inhabiting him, Jim is not a loud-mouthed fool but rather a gentle, if overly earnest, recent convert to self-esteem, fortified by the courage of love of the fiancé he rushes off to. The fragile and probably temporary nature of such a spin on Jim ripples outward to make the play as a whole not just more poignant, but also more true to life and meaningful. The extroversive intensity remains, but a nervous "heh-heh" punctuates a background thrum of doubt. Marvelous.

If you are an admirer of Williams and his deft portrayals of the overwrought and the under-loved, you don't want to miss this production.