Dim memory The Lyric puts Williams’s Menagerie under glass BY IRIS FANGER
	The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Eric C. Engel. Set by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Rafael Jaen. Lighting by Scott Pinkney. Sound by Jeremy Wilson. With Nancy E. Carroll, Emily Sophia Knapp, Vincent Ernest Siders, and Lewis Wheeler. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through February 5.

Tennessee Williams’s great play of memory and regret, The Glass Menagerie, remains one of the icons of 20th-century drama, revered for the way the playwright wrapped the dissolution of the American dream in a poetic evocation of hopes that never would be realized. The play’s characters are etched in the mind’s eye, especially Amanda, the ruthless matriarch ruling over a kingdom reduced to her two wounded children, Laura and Tom. The one outsider, known as the Gentleman Caller, is locked in a deluded mode of his own. And over the whole of this quartet’s encounters hangs the aura of the Depression, which caught the nation in a paralysis of thwarted expectations as families struggled to provide for their basic needs.

Under the direction of Eric C. Engel, the current revival by the Lyric Stage Company is recast in the gritty naturalistic tones of Elmer Rice’s Street Scene or one of Clifford Odets’s 1930s dramas — and firmly trapped in the tenement apartment in St. Louis instead of in the dream-like atmosphere specified by Williams in the play’s stage directions. The dominant feature of Janie E. Howland’s set is a massive iron fire escape that pulls down into a living space that’s bare of everything except an empty candelabra and Laura’s high-school yearbook and is seen against a photo montage of more tangled fire escapes in the neighboring alleys. We’re made to imagine the other props, including the shelf of tiny glass animals that make up Laura’s world. The lights are kept so dim that it’s hard to discern Tom in the shadows above as he looks down at his past.

Engel cast Vincent Ernest Siders as Tom; he’s an admirable, Elliot Norton Award–winning actor, but he’s also a black man, and that jolts the scenario into a multi-racial consideration beyond Williams’s intentions, since we’re told that Amanda was a Southern belle from Blue Mountain, Mississippi. This ethnic mix is, however, the least of Engel’s problematic decisions. He inserts a frenzied jazz dance for Tom and Laura near the beginning of the play, as if to suggest an incestuous relationship buried in their psyches, and an echo effect for the women’s voices that suggests a time spiral but then is quickly dropped.

A poet nicknamed Shakespeare by his friend in the shoe warehouse where he works to support his mother and sister, Tom is meant to be a mirror image of Williams, who also held menial jobs until he could earn a living as a writer. But Siders is too edgy an actor, too intensely physical a presence, to suggest a man lost in his imagination. His energy coupled with Carroll’s technically assured but oddly realistic portrayal of Amanda robs the play of its center, which lies in the collision of their dreams. Carroll, who is also an Elliot Norton Award winner (along with Engel and Howland), is detailed in her portrait of a bitter woman who refuses to hear the bugle call for retreat. What’s missing is Amanda’s flamboyance, her spirit of gaiety and optimism in the face of the life she’s leading.

The production takes wing only at the end of the second act, when Laura and her Gentleman Caller are seated on the floor in the glow of the candelabra (here the stage lights finally come up to a decent wattage) and find they are connected to each other’s needs. Emily Sophia Knapp conveys Laura’s fragile spirit as well as her physical disability, particularly when she huddles in a fetal position as if protecting herself from her mother’s onslaughts or clutches her skirt in her fist for support. It’s a performance that moves from self-depreciation to a glowing transcendence. And Lewis Wheeler catches the essence of the high-school hero who never scored after graduation but is returned to those glory days by Laura’s admiration.

That scene apart, Engel’s production seems preserved under glass, in an airless time and place. Classic dramas have to be pulled up, dusted off, and rethought, but with a vigor and a purpose that relate both to the play and to the present. It’s no use discarding the fervor that burned in Williams when he wrote this work to remind us of the people left behind as the engine of American progress chugged toward the middle of the 20th century.