A wonderful thing, fantasy. When reality becomes too difficult, when Being Here Now would only produce despair and despondency, the imagination comes along and allows us to reside in friendlier climes. For instance, the Wingfields of St. Louis, Mo. Abandoned by husband and father, living near poverty, mother Amanda, son Tom and disabled daughter Laura all have an imaginary world to keep themselves warm. Amanda has memories that she plays and replays: of being a young girl in "Blue Mountain," where she once had 17 gentleman callers, "some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi delta." Tom, stuck in a warehouse job that he loathes, has the movies, where he goes as if to a well of relief: "Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse."
As for Laura — shy, fragile Laura — it's her collection of glass animals that gives her comfort and company. She especially favors the glass unicorn that "stays on a shelf with some horses that don't have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together." Laura is that unicorn, an outsider who can't even take a typing test without getting ill, but who, in fantasy, can imagine herself "at home with the other horses." Whether in the past, the future, or up on a living-room shelf, the Wingfields have found the fantasies that make reality bearable. And call it denial or self-defense, it's a strategy that they depend on, and that helps them stay sane.
Such is the picture of humanity offered by Tennessee Williams in his quietly beautiful The Glass Menagerie, currently on stage at Gorilla Theatre in a flawed, merely adequate production. Like all classics, Menagerie speaks to something fundamental in human experience, something that links us to the Wingfields as much as to other fictional first families like Arthur Miller's Lomans, Faulkner's Compsons and Salinger's Glasses. Williams' play isn't the only drama to examine the vital role of imagination in our mental economy — Ibsen's Wild Duck, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? also manage that task. But Menagerie does so with so much poetry, humor and humanity, one can miss its deeper meanings and still be utterly charmed and satisfied by it. This is simply a marvelous work of art, and in a good production can be among the most moving of theatrical experiences.
Alas, the Gorilla production only shines in Julia Flood's portrayal of Amanda Wingfield and Carl Donovan's depiction of Tom. Best of all is Flood's Amanda, a meddling chatterbox who seems to think it her duty to hold the Wingfield family together through sheer force of will. This is an Amanda who has a vision of normalcy and almost enough pushy energy to make normalcy happen. If Laura is too tender to survive in the business world, Amanda will demand that Tom find her a husband. If Tom repeatedly spends evenings away from the family, Amanda will nag at him till he confesses and repudiates his delinquencies. This is terrific (and credibly Southern) acting.
Donovan's Tom is almost as good. He takes an approach nearly opposite to the one offered by John Malkovich in the film version of the play, and it's an interesting interpretation. Malkovich played Tom as slightly haunted and slightly cruel, a poet and dreamer being constantly distracted by a tedious, dreary reality. Donovan, on the other hand, is Tom the All-American, a natural free spirit whose endangered attribute is his native vitality. Malkovich was too deep for the shallow life of St. Louis; but Donovan is too vibrant. Even the Merchant Marine doesn't seem physical enough for his tastes, and one understands why director Jan Sycz puts him in combat gear at the play's start and end.
The other two characters are far from persuasive. Matthew Lunsford as Laura's Gentleman Caller is all surface, without the hint of an interior life, emotional range or intellectual capacity. Yes, Williams writes the part for a small-time, well-meaning egotist, but Lunsford never suggests the ironies of the character, its unsuspected pathos, its contradictions.
Joanna Sycz as Laura is even more disturbingly wrong. Sycz is Polish by birth, and continues to speak English with a slight accent — a fact that wouldn't matter in many plays, but matters a lot when one is supposed to be the homebody daughter of a former Southern belle. Furthermore, this actress overacts Laura's shyness to the point of near-psychosis. Sycz does make some telling choices, it's true, in her duet with the Gentleman Caller; particularly pleasing is how she demonstrates a real, even aggressive craving for love. But Laura is much too abnormal here, too far from the humanity Williams wrote into the part. We should be able to look at Laura and see our own embarrassment at our own defects — not the bizarre behavior of a mental oddity.
There's one more notable problem with the Gorilla Menagerie, and that's Lino Toyos' uncharacteristically inappropriate set. Toyos is one of the area's best scenic designers, and one I've praised many times. But his set for this Menagerie couldn't be less enlightening. It's neither realistic nor metaphorical: It's just a sparsely furnished, shallow space dominated by an oversize white panel on which hang, asymmetrically, a portrait of father Wingfield and a small area of shelving. This is a set without depth, without an upstage and downstage. Everything seems to happen on a horizontal axis, in two and not three dimensions. I've complained in the past about reflexive realism in set design, but I found myself yearning for a "real" St. Louis apartment as I watched this Menagerie.
And, to be honest, I found myself yearning for a different Menagerie, with a more human, Southern Laura, a more paradoxical Gentleman Caller, and more respect for the whole poetic environment in which these doomed, yearning characters live. The Wingfields deserve a better production, one as lyrical as Tom's love for Laura, as hopeful as Amanda's memories of Blue Mountain, as fine as the Gentleman Caller's distinction between "discouragement" and "disappointment."
And as fragile as shy Laura's unicorn.
Contact Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 305.
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2002.