Even if you’ve seen Tennessee Williams’ lyrical, poignant early masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie” (it was first produced in 1945), differing approaches to stagecraft and especially to the four characters can make every new viewing feel fresh.
In San Francisco Playhouse’s current production, helmed by local director and playwright Jeffrey Lo, the non-realistic, memory-play aspects of the production stand out—dance segments, sound designer James Ard’s jazzy, sometimes melancholic score and Wen-Ling Liao’s dream-like lights — without interfering with the dynamics among the very real Wingfield family and the Gentleman Caller.
Even before the lights dim, actor Jomar Tagatac as Tom, the restless, unhappy narrator of this nostalgic dream play, wanders the stage—a wonderful two-tiered set on a moving platform (set design by Christopher Fitzer)—as though memorizing details of his long-ago life with his mother Amanda and his sister Laura in a shabby St. Louis tenement.
When the action officially begins, he presides as each character enters, is embraced by him, is given a sheet torn from a notebook (Tom is an aspiring writer) and goes off to sit on the side when not participating onstage. It’s clear that Tom is remembering all this many years later, far from home.
The Wingfield family—former Southern belle, now anxious single mother Amanda; desperate-to-leave-home son Tom; and painfully shy daughter Laura, who calls herself a cripple because of a bad leg—are struggling to make ends meet.
The photo of the rakish man that Amanda married hangs on the wall; a drunk, a “telephone man who fell in love with long distances,” he left the family long ago. Laura is too phobic to attend the secretarial college that Amanda paid for, and Tom, with a low-level job, thinks running away and joining the Merchant Marines might be his best bet for a feasible life. Amanda, who dreams of her former glory days and now sells magazine subscriptions over the phone, wonders what will become of them.
When Tom, goaded by Amanda, invites a co-worker home for dinner as a prospective suitor, a “gentleman caller” for Laura, things don’t go as planned.
This is really Tom’s play. He’s a stand-in for Williams, whose sister was disabled (mentally, not physically), and director Lo foregrounds him in a variety of ways. He emphasizes Tom’s homosexuality—his attraction to the Gentleman Caller is blatant—and gives Tagatac much to work with, allowing him to rage, joke, tease and dig deep into all sorts of subtle emotions. Tagatac is well equipped for the job, although he leans a little too heavily on sentimentality at the very end.
Amanda, played by Susi Damilano in a carefully modulated performance, is more anxious than overbearing. “I’m just bewildered by life,” she says, less a comic cyclone of a controlling mother than one who obsesses about her children’s futures and escapes into rapturous memories of her debutante days. If she doesn’t rage, nag and scold enough to really justify Tom’s desperate need to leave home, she brings a vulnerability and, at the end, an inner steeliness to the role.
Nicole Javier’s Laura, a rather one-dimensional shrinking violet in Act 1 (wouldn’t even an agoraphobe whine or laugh at home with her loving mother and brother?) finally comes to fragile life in the second act when she and the Gentleman Caller, Jim (William Thomas Hodgson) are alone together. It’s a lovely, delicate scene, and Hodgson is particularly sensitive as the star that dazzled both Laura and Tom back in high school, and still does.
“I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion,” Tom says early on. The play is just about foolproof.
“The Glass Menagerie” runs through June 15 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30 to $125 at (415) 677-9596 or sfplayhouse.org.