The Glass Menagerie (and Kinky Boots) on Broadway

Yesterday was our big Broadway day in NYC, with a matinee and evening performance. For the latter we chose Kinky Boots, a frothy confection that is hard to resist, featuring a fist-pumping, feel-good score by Cyndi Lauper, a star-making performance by Billy Porter as Lola, the drag queen-turned-shoe designer, and miles and miles of lace-up leather and latex. As Richard leaned over and said to me during the rousing final number, if Harvey Fierstein is writing the book, everyone is eventually going to end up in six-inch stiletto heels. This musical adaptation also goes a distance—though not as far as it could have—toward correcting some of the bizarre and frankly homophobic sexual politics of the British film upon which it is based (which I happened to watch on the plane to New York).

However, it is the afternoon production I wish to focus on in this post. For that we chose The Glass Menagerie, as apart from a mediocre staging of two of his later one-acts at the Kennedy Center several years ago, I had never seen a Williams play performed live. This production by John Tiffany (Once, Black Watch) received raves when it opened at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard earlier this year, and with the entire cast back—including the incomparable Cherry Jones as Amanda—for the Broadway transfer, it seemed like a good bet.

We weren’t disappointed. The first thing that stands out upon entering the theatre is Bob Crowley’s stunning set, with the Wingfields’ cramped living and dining rooms an island of wood floating just above a shiny pool of viscous black liquid—the wellsprings of Tom/Tennessee’s dark and unrepressable memories that also, famously, serve as the source of his creativity. For this is, as our narrator Tom (a subtle and suitably restless Zachary Quinto) reminds us at the top of the show—in a speech that I think it is fair to say helped change the course of modern American drama—a “memory play,” in which Williams counters the standard “tricks” of the “stage magician” by presenting not “illusion that has the appearance of truth” but “truth wrapped up in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Tiffany takes seriously this opening injunction, and builds a production that soars as a result of its symbolist effects, not in spite of them. From the stylized movement work and mimed gestures of longtime collaborator Steven Hoggett to the haunting music of Nico Muhly and the twinkling lighting by Natasha Katz that reappears throughout the two acts in that inky pool surrounding the stage: the design choices and stage effects all succeed in complementing and even elevating—rather than flattening, as if embarrassed by—the dream-like poetry of Williams’ text.

At the same time, in listening to that text spoken with such care yesterday afternoon I was reminded of just how much social commentary Williams does manage to weave into his play. In addition to the economic hardship of the depression that serves as the backdrop to single mother Amanda’s increasing desperation to see her children—and especially her fragile daughter Laura—financially settled, we are reminded more than once of the Spanish Civil War, and in a way that is meant as much as an indictment of America’s blinkered self-absorption as of Tom’s and Williams’. When, at the end of the play, Amanda issues her famous final dismissal of her son—“Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer”—it is hard not to read this as telegraphing in part Williams’ own self-doubts about the interiority that would become such a defining focus of his oeuvre.

As delivered by Jones, however, that line is filled with so much more than mere maternal disappointment: we also hear a rending womanly regret that conveys just how much she understands—and has internalized at great personal cost—the gendered divide that allows men like Tom and his father (the phone company man who “fell in love with long distances”) to succumb to wanderlust while she and Laura can only settle for so many forms of domestic confinement. And this, in addition to an incandescent performance by Celia Keenan-Bolger as Laura and a sterling turn by Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller, is the true revelation of this production: the way in which Jones resists playing Amanda as a one-note gorgon. In her speeches about her youth and her obsession about seeing her children securely launched into the world we see a mother not so much living through her children as living for them. This is a woman who knows more than most—and certainly as much as her son—how fine is the line between illusion-as-truth and truth-as-illusion. We see Jones walk that line with perfect precision over and over again in this production. It is a performance, like the play, for the ages.

P.