What’s real? What’s fake? And is it ever possible to escape from the cage that is our own memories?
The inaugural production of the Broken Glass Collective, The Glass Menagerie showcases a few hit-and-miss ideas to add a new spin to the Tennessee Williams classic but is ultimately buoyed by some top-notch acting.
The Glass Menagerie is a “memory play,” a genre where we witness the events of the show through a person’s memory or particular point of view. Narrator Tom (Mitchell Larsen), a misanthrope stuck in a dead-end job, yearns to escape from his domineering once-a-Southern-belle mother Amanda (Lisa Bayliss) and his shy, sickly sister Laura (Emily Rempel).
The family’s dysfunction and disparate perceptions of reality come to a head when “gentleman caller” Jim (Braden Butler) is invited over for an uncomfortable dinner.
Now, The Glass Menagerie is very much a character-driven play, so it’s fortunate to have strong performers leading the charge. This is not the first time Bayliss has played a domineering mother on a Saskatoon stage, but it might be the best. Bayliss plays the unflappable, near-manic Amanda with an authority and authenticity that will make you both squirm and applaud.
And Larsen’s turn as the disaffected Tom was equally intriguing. It felt like specific pains were taken to make Tom more sympathetic, but Larsen really shines when Tom cuts loose and lets his anger and feverish desperation for change spring forward. It’s a charged, emotionally-swinging and tense performance by Larsen — not an easy feat, and definitely enjoyable.
It’s especially elevated when the duo is on stage together — I could quite cheerfully watch Bayliss and Larsen bicker and scream at each other for the full two-hour runtime and walk away thoroughly entertained.
The challenge with staging any classic show tends to be “what can we do differently or better or uniquely,” and it’s never an easy question to answer. The set was simple, but the “glass” chairs inside a large black frame around the dining room created an intriguing visual connection between Tom’s recollection of his life and the little glass animals on the shelf that made up sister Laura’s personal escape from the harshness of reality.
The costume design was also solid, sprinkling in slick period costumes a la the 1930s. But some of the creative choices that modernized the play didn’t have the same easy fit. Projections of lines from the script on the back of the stage were a little more distracting than additive, and the use of projections for the absentee father’s portrait on the wall – bringing the picture to life like magical portraits in some shall-not-be-named wizarding world – generated some chuckles rather than intrigue when it appeared at the start of the show on Friday night.
There were just a few little hiccups that held The Glass Menagerie back. Many of the physical moments of the show, like characters falling or glass “breaking,” felt clunky or just slightly mistimed with the sound effects that would accompany them (specifically, for the breaking glass). Lighting cues that occasionally left characters literally in the dark, small trips over words, occasional stiff delivery – small things that added up over the course of the full show.
It could almost all be forgotten thanks to the powerful way the show concludes. A masterful soliloquy from Larsen and some slick lighting cues leaves the audience feeling the full weight of the themes the show has been building on since the start.
Broken Glass Collective should be applauded for bringing a classic like The Glass Menagerie back to the Saskatoon stage, but it also highlights the hurdles that come with doing something fresh with a script from decades ago.
If you’re going to see The Glass Menagerie, be patient – the intriguing characters and tense moments build slowly and carefully, but the final moments are a deft and haunting payoff for your time.
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.
