Sunday, November 1, 1998

SMT offers version of American classic

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — When Derrick Peterson steps onto the Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center stage Friday and explains himself, he'll be up against one of his biggest acting challenges so far.

That's because Peterson, to play Tom in the Seaside Music Theater production of Tennessee Williams' drama, "The Glass Menagerie," will have to step in and out of the set and in and out of time itself.

"One of my first lines is `I'm the narrator of the play, and also a character in it,'" he said several days ago, at the beginning of rehearsals for the show that runs through Nov. 15.

"Tom is undeniably Tennessee. I'm reading his biography now, and just stumbled upon a memoir that I'm going to read, too," said the actor, 26, who appeared in Seaside's "Camelot" and "Romeo and Juliet," as well as in Civic Theatre of Central Florida's recent run of "Angels in America."

" 'The Glass Menagerie' is undoubtedly autobiographical when you get into it, and it's very much a memory play," he said. Tom talks directly to the audience, then steps back into the action of the play and into his past. That way he can literally show what's in his mind, revealing his life with a crippled sister, Laura (Jennifer Johns), and the mother who ruled the roost, Amanda Wingfield (Barbara Bradshaw).

Along the way, Tom also will introduce the Gentleman Caller, Jim O'Connor (Matt Wolfe), whom he describes at one point as "the most realistic character in the play." The others are all so poetically drawn from memory, from the regret that haunts Tom and that, in actuality, haunted Williams that they're different from anything found in the real world.

Williams used his own southern family to create the characters and tensions of "The Glass Menagerie": his domineering mother, and his sister Rose, whose schizophrenia was changed by writer's magic into a problem with her legs, Peterson said. At the heart of the play, which is directed by Lester Malizia, is Tom's love for his sister, whom he believes he has doomed by leaving home to pursue a career and other, more intimate relationships.

"For Tom, the play shows what he remembers of his family life and his break from it," Peterson said. "He isn't IN love with Laura, but he feels such an intense family love for her that, in a sense, when he abandons her he's haunted by her image. In the play, she's crippled, she's very homely and very shy she doesn't go to the business college her mother put her in because she was sick on the first day and is too embarrassed to go back."

Instead, when she's not caring for the fragile glass figures that gave the play its title her crystalline animals Laura wanders around town, to the parks and to the zoo," Peterson said. Tom's emotions, and his look back to his family life in the 1930s, casts Laura's situation in a peculiar light, particularly when the Gentleman Caller comes to call on her.

His job, as Tom, to frame the past even as he takes part in it, won't be easy, said the actor, a New Orleans native who moved often in childhood to Houston and Dallas, Chicago, even the Netherlands, to The Hague, where he attended an American high school and took his first steps into the theater. His major at the University of North Carolina was international economics, but he acted on the side. In the end, Peterson went back for another undergraduate degree, this one in theater, from Florida Atlantic University.

Those studies led to acting stints in South Florida theaters, two years of summer stock in New Hampshire, outdoor dramas in North Carolina, and Seaside.

Tom is a challenge, Peterson repeated. But a welcome challenge so far, his greatest efforts have gone into bringing Louis Ironstone, his "Angels in America" character, to life.

Tom, though more subtle, will be just as sensitive a character to express in all its layers, he said. That's partly because of the complex blending of past and present, of Williams' original vision of the 1930s and early 1940s, but also because of the poetic nature of the playwright's backward look at his own life. Most challenging will be to capture the meaning of all that, of a play that's "just beautiful," Peterson said.

"It's all very poetic actually, one of Tom's lines is that everyone and everything is symbolic `since I have a poet's weakness for symbolism.' And, you know, Tennessee's real name was Tom."

"The Glass Menagerie" will be performed at 8 p.m. Nov. 6-7 and 12-14 and 2 p.m. Nov. 8 and 15 at the Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center, 399 North U.S. 1, Ormond Beach. Tickets, $20-$22, are available at the SMT box office, 454 S. Yonge St., Suite B, Ormond Beach, or by calling (904) 252-6200 or (800) 854-5592.