Sunday, November 8, 1998

Seaside Music Theater's 'The Glass Menagerie' sparkles

By MORRIS SULLIVAN
NEWS-JOURNAL CORRESPONDENT

ORMOND BEACH — I am the opposite of the stage magician," announces the narrator of "The Glass Menagerie," addressing his audience in its opening scene.

"He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."

Seaside Music Theater's production of "The Glass Menagerie," which continues through Nov. 15, wonderfully captures the essence of Tennessee Williams' self-described "memory-play."

In the script, Williams' expansive stage directions call for the play to be "nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license," he stated. "It omits some details; others are exaggerated ... for memory is seated predominately in the heart."

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams. Although born in Mississippi, he adopted his professional name to pay tribute to his ancestors who helped settle and tame Tennessee. While Tom's character most obviously represents Williams' own, the playwright speaks through the family members, each of whom symbolize some aspect of his own makeup.

After moving to St. Louis as a small boy, Williams felt isolated by his southern character, and the clash between his family's former glory and the drop in social status the move brought them cast him adrift in a gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

Tom's mother, Amanda, reflects that sense of isolation. Played by Barbara Bradshaw, she seeks relief from her dismal present by revisiting the past and reliving her former glory as an ingenue with legions of "gentleman callers." Bradshaw plays the role impeccably. Her performance moves seamlessly from the realistic portrayal of the mother's care for and misguided overprotection of her children to the embellished, exaggerated gestures called up in Tom's memory of his mother.

Williams responded defensively to his alienation from his peers by withdrawing, even to the point of refusing to speak aloud in classes. Tom's sister, Laura, represents that aspect of his personality. As Laura, Jennifer Johns brings to light both Williams' sympathetic understanding of the uniqueness of this young woman and the strangeness that sets her apart.

In the final scenes, as her fragile hope shatters like glass, Johns' Laura tugs directly at the hearts of the people who have come to care about her both those on stage and in the seats.

Williams himself probably suffered from bipolar disorder, and Tom Wingfield, the most biographical character in the play, mirrors Williams' manic-depressive nature. As Tom, Derrick Peterson has some wonderfully animated moments on stage and captures the witty, expansive side of Tom Wingfield. At times, however, his transitions from the Wildean poet to the bitterly incisive young man bent on escape from his prosaic surroundings fail to reveal the character's darker side.

Matt Wolfe plays the gentleman caller, Jim the "long delayed but always expected something that we live for." His character contrasts sharply with those of the family. While their isolation from their community has each of them living in worlds of their own making, his disappointment and disillusionment has driven him further into reality.

Wolfe's mannerisms are well- suited to the role. In a scene in which Jim adopts the role of armchair psychologist and tries to force Laura from her "inferiority complex," he repeats Amanda's words from a previous scene almost verbatim, yet his character's presentation of the lines chillingly demonstrates the radical difference between his world and theirs. One is called to wonder if, when Williams conceived the character, he had in mind those "ordinary" people that he later wrote were "insulated against monotony by a corresponding monotony in their own souls."

The staging of the play beautifully supports this "memory" quality. In Elizabeth McCraven's set, the apartment in which the drama unfolds is built of framework and scrim which becomes transparent to reveal other rooms. The alleyway through which the characters must enter their tiny apartment is represented by a series of impressionistic buildings that have turned their backs on the Wingfields.

Lighting designer Brian O'Keefe has chosen to create a dreamlike lighting of the stage with unrealistic, surreal colors. Intense reds, blues and yellows climb the walls that line the alleyway and play upon the furniture, shifting and changing with the moods of the play. The music selected by sound designer Jason Hoffman manages to convey a sense of the period without seeming dated. The overall effect of light, set and sound create an effect that is somehow, in spite of its vividness, strangely black- and-white in its impression, perhaps in the way, upon waking, a monochromatic dream is embellished by memory.

The performances, combined with the design of the show, richly convey the text of Williams script, which while never flowery is imbued with starkly southern poetry, such as when Amanda cautions her daughter against becoming "one of those pitiful ... barely tolerated spinsters" of the South, "stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room little birdlike women without any nest, eating the crust of humility all their life."

At the end, after the director, cast and staff have finished recreating Williams' stark, poetic memories and after all their glass hopes have shattered Tom finally steps forward to remind us that "time is the longest distance between two places."