After nearly 50 years, a Tennessee Williams classic is making its way back to the Saskatoon stage thanks to a new theatre collective.
The Broken Glass Collective, a newly-established theatre company in Saskatoon, is producing The Glass Menagerie as its first-ever production. The play was written by Williams and premiered in 1944, and was last staged in Saskatoon in the 1977-78 theatre season.
The debut performance for the new collective runs on select dates from Oct. 1st to the 10th at the Henry Woolf Theatre at the University of Saskatchewan.
“This show hasn’t been produced in Saskatoon since the 70s, and there hasn’t been a Tennessee Williams play produced in Saskatoon since the 80s,” said Lisa Bayliss, one of the performers in the Broken Glass Collective. “It’s really an opportunity to bring three generations together to see an actual production onstage.”
Bayliss said the prospect of producing The Glass Menagerie was one of the reasons the collective came together. She and director Skye Brandon (the current artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan) had discussed ideas for how they would want to take on this show, and the idea never really left their minds.
Based on that goal of putting on the play in exactly the style and image they wanted, the Broken Glass Collective was formed — an intergenerational group of theatre artists who wanted to explore this show and more classic North American theatre in the future.
“We’ve almost all worked together before, and we all trust each other,” Bayliss said. “The people we are working with, including all of the designers and the creative team, are very experienced, so it’s exciting to be at this level in our careers and doing it this way.”
The Glass Menagerie is a play about a deeply dysfunctional family during the Great Depression. A memory play, the show is meant to play on ideas of what is real and what is fake, based on the recollections of the narrator. Tom, one of the main characters and the narrator, recalls life with his family and the struggles of supporting his troubled family members while also hoping to find his own way in the world.
It also contains autobiographical elements, with many parts of Williams’ own life reflected in one of the characters. Williams, considered one of the great playwrights of 20th-century America, suffered financial hardships with his family as a child and struggled to make ends meet as a professional before breaking through as a writer — and The Glass Menagerie was his first big hit.
Bayliss said the dreamlike uncertainty of the show is something they wanted to reflect in their staging and design, though she noted there will still be period costumes.
As Bayliss puts it, with such a rich artistic community that often looks to produce newer plays, the Broken Glass Collective fills a niche of exploring some of the classics of North American theatre. She said her hope was they would be able to explore other classics in the future.
While not all older plays still work in the modern day, Bayliss said there were a number of plays with rich characters and thoughtful stories – like The Glass Menagerie – that had meaningful messages and themes for today.
“We know how good Tennessee Williams is as a writer, so poetic,” she said. “We really felt that the messaging, the storytelling, the poetry of his writing, particularly in The Glass Menagerie, was something that we wanted to share because it’s so beautifully written and it’s such a lovely, heartbreaking story.”
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the inaugural production of the Broken Glass Collective, runs select nights from Oct. 1-10 at the Henry Woolf Theatre in the John Mitchell Building at the University of Saskatchewan. Tickets can be purchased online at app.ticketowl.io/brokenglass-glassmenagerie.
