Many, many years ago, I had my first taste of The Glass Menagerie, the foundational memory play by Tennessee Williams. My high school staged it. So as I entered Shaking the Tree Theatre’s performance space, the gleeful words of our drama student aide rang in my ears: “Let’s get DEPRESSED!”
It’s always a crapshoot how close any given staging will adhere to Williams’ intended tone; the sorrow contained within his memory play can be so potent that many have swung for something lighter, funnier, more self-aware.
However, this work’s director, Samantha Van Der Merwe, chose the nuclear option—leaning directly into the darkness that surrounds and threatens to consume the Wingfield family and, where appropriate, allowing the thin shards of light that shine through, like sunshine through a glass figurine.
Our window into their world is Tom Wingfield (Kai Hynes), a 1930s shoe warehouse worker who shares a small St. Louis apartment with his loudmouthed, deeply overcritical mother, Amanda (Maria Porter), and his disabled, shut-in sister, Laura (Sammy Rat Rios).
The Wingham women, much like Tom, are stuck in place. Amanda is forever waxing rhapsodic about her youth as a Southern belle and spitting venom at their runaway patriarch (whose photo still hangs on the wall)—when she’s not trying to manipulate women into keeping magazine subscriptions over the phone. Laura, on the other hand, allows her slight limp to keep her infantilized, spending her days listening to records and examining her menagerie of glass animals, unable to get a job or go to school because of her crushing anxiety.
Any production of Glass Menagerie lives or dies on how much you believe you’re watching an actual family. Many things about Menagerie work well, but the chemistry between Hynes, Porter, and Rios feels like a magic trick.
Hynes is a natural as a miserable, exhausted man, making it look easy to embody all of the physicality that it entails. He oscillates between tender affection for Laura and roiling frustration with his mother, who nitpicks the way he eats and how he spends his nights. When he finally erupts and shouts her down—his body contracting and curling inward—the rage feels like it comes from decades of stratified resentment.
Rios meets him in physicality; when she discovers the identity of her gentleman caller, a rigor mortis of anxiety sets in that can be felt from anywhere in the room. The cast’s only weak link is its sole non-Wingfield, gentleman caller Jim O’Connor (Jon Bolden), whose lack of immediate chemistry is by design and baked into a character stuck in his own rut, preaching self-help mantras to Laura that he verifiably does not practice.
Shaking the Tree’s production of The Glass Menagerie doesn’t reinvent the Williams wheel, but Van Der Merwe and her players are a potent reminder of why the dour classic is worth returning to, almost a century removed from the world the Wingfields lived in. Society and social dynamics have changed, but these characters’ struggles still feel potent, especially to anyone who perceives their desperation and feels seen by it. Not everyone is going to want to feel as low as Menagerie can take you, but on the right night, it might just feel like a hug from a friend who’s stuck in the same hole.
The Glass Menagerie runs at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 2136 SE 8th, through May 16, $12-$48, shaking-the-tree.com, 135 minutes, 12 and up
