Sally Field & Joe Mantello star in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.
Two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field and two-time Tony Award winner Joe Mantello star in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Also starring Finn Wittrock and Madison Ferris. Tony winner Sam Gold directs.
The Glass Menagerie is the play that brought a brilliant young writer named Tennessee Williams to national attention when it premiered on Broadway in 1945. More than seventy years later, Williams' most personal work for the stage continues to captivate and overwhelm audiences around the world.
If it's more of an inquest than a definitive statement, it's an inquest at a very high level; Sally Field, who plays Amanda, does not appear in basement black-box theaters. So Gold is performing a tricky balancing act: narrowing the scope of the representation and maintaining his cutting-edge cred while selling the story to an audience of 1,000. One of the casualties of this approach is what Tom calls 'the social background' of the play. We lose not just the particular St. Louisness of it (the accents are nearly nil) but also the world-on-edge tension that Tom describes at the start: Guernica exploding in Europe, and, in America, 'the fiery braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.' Instead Gold focuses on a novel and largely convincing interpretation of the family's warfare as a symptom of the powerful but constraining love they share, and on the way both things shape Tom's character deep into the future from which he narrates.
That shattering sound you hear coming from the Belasco Theater is the celebrated director Sam Gold taking a hammer to everything that's delicate in 'The Glass Menagerie.' The jagged, glistening shards of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough play are available for inspection in the revival that opened on Thursday night. Don't expect these pieces to be reassembled into an illuminating portrait of the anguished Wingfield family from this 1944 drama. Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it back together again...On occasion, Mr. Gold's interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you see your past at its distorted worst. But even that vision is not sustained. When a plot turn plunges the theater into abject darkness late in the play, it only gives literal life to what you've been feeling all along.
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