It is, surely, heresy to compare Tennessee Williams to William Shakespeare. And yet every summer that Carrie Houk’s brainchild, Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis, comes to fruition, it’s hard to resist the urge. The range of human experience, American-style, is evoked in lovely and unlovely ways, the conflict between aspirational dreams and everyday necessity drawn in bold strokes.
In this year of struggle to return to live theatre, Houk and director Brian Hohlfeld had only 2 ½ weeks to rehearse the show they’d been dreaming and plotting and planning for this year. It’s Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. If there is such a thing as a classic St. Louis play, Meet Me in Saint Louis only wins in the musical category. Menagerie is surely the great St. Louis drama.
The venue is a parking lot behind one of the numerous addresses the Williams family had in the Central West End and University City, so that it’s easy to put to good use the fire escapes where Tom Wingfield, the narrator of the play who is clearly the young Williams himself, steps out of his mother’s apartment finding a relatively quiet place to dream.
For those unfamiliar with the story, which takes place during the Depression, Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle whose husband bolted some years ago, lives with her two adult children. Tom works in the warehouse of the International Shoe Company. (Why, yes, that is indeed the building now housing the City Museum and The Last Hotel.) Laura, his sister, is traditionally played with a limp – there’s discussion at one point of her having worn a brace in school, and Amanda will absolutely not hear the word “crippled”. She’s very shy, loves her long-gone daddy’s collection of old Victrola records and a small collection of little glass animals.
Amanda worries what will become of her children, particularly Laura. About the only possibilities for the young woman are an office job or marriage. Unknown to Amanda, she’s dropped out of a commercial business college. As to what Amanda refers to as gentleman callers, there have never been any. She considers Tom an impractical dreamer. While her motives are pure, she is constantly nattering at them. She is, to use a word none of them would probably recognize, a noodge. Can’t Tom, she pleads, find someone, the right sort of someone, of course, at the warehouse for Laura?
Hohlfeld and Houk have assembled a balanced team, which is what this script needs, four actors, each strong in a particular way. Brenda Currin is a petite, seemingly fragile and clearly aging Amanda. Unlike some portrayals of the character, hers is less acerbic, letting us understand her worries and fear. Tom Wingfield, played by Bradley James Tejada, holds his temper pretty well, considering his mother’s persistent imploring and demanding, but it’s obvious that he would rather be almost anywhere but in this situation. He’s mostly guarded in his responses to his mother, even to his sister, until he erupts at Amanda in a torrent of invective. Elizabeth Teeter’s Laura is docile enough except when she faces us instead of her mother. She clearly has what we’d now consider social anxiety disorder. When she deals with her mother’s encouragement that she, too, can be a social butterfly just like Amanda was in her youth, she looks just like a modern young woman, glaring and rolling her eyes out of her mother’s line of vision. All she’s missing is the iPhone.
Drumroll, please. Enter The Gentleman Caller. Well, okay, his names is James O’Connor, but that’s not how we know him, at least at first. Chauncey Thomas’ TGC is a charmer, self-assured, not overwhelming but warm and encouraging despite Laura’s near-terror at his arrival. It’s a particularly remarkable rendering of the character, bigger, more rounded and approachable than most. He delights Amanda, who’s hauled a remarkable dress out of a trunk for the evening. He keeps the dinner table conversation going despite the power going out. Is he a diamond that’s not so rough or a cubic zirconia?
It’s pretty amazing sitting in a parking lot watching a set that feels like a near-abstract dream, the product of scenic designer Dunsi Dai, with lighting punctuating the movement of both time and memory, courtesy of lighting designer Catherine Adams. Hooray for Kareem Deanes, whose has the sound near-perfect. That amazing gown of Amanda’s plus the more mundane late-Thirties clothes come from Michele Siler.
On my visit, one of The Caller’s big speeches was punctuated by fire trucks. The breeze was right. It was summer in St. Louis. And the Wingfield family lives on in memory – which is clearly what Williams intended in the play.
The Glass Menagerie
through August 29
Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis
various festival locations