By Adam Rafferty
After staging A Streetcar Named Desire in 2024, MTC have returned to American author Tennessee Williams’ work again, this time producing his breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie (not for the first time). It’s known for being a ‘memory play’ with autobiographical parallels to Williams’ own life and is often studied for its themes and symbology.
This production, directed by Mark Wilson certainly leans hard into the subtext of the story in some ways but pulls back on other implications, instead relying heavily on the charm and beguiling performances of the actors to pull the messages through.
For those unfamiliar, this is the story of the Wingfield family, as narrated by eldest child Tom (Tim Draxl) who lives in St Louis, in a cramped tenement apartment with his overbearing mother – a former southern belle – Amanda (Alison Whyte), and his painfully shy sister Laura (Millie Donaldson), who due to a childhood illness wears a supportive leg brace. Their father is absent, having abandoned them many years before, but remains ever present in a picture frame that looms large over the family living room.
After discovering Laura has dropped out of a secretarial course, Amanda is desperate to find a ‘gentleman caller’ to marry her off to and pressures Tom to help find her a suitor. But Tom, a writer at heart, trapped in a factory job, is suffocating in this environment and escapes the pressure cooker of his home life by going out to the movies every night until the early hours. Eventually though, he invites his work colleague Jim (Harry McGee) to be The Gentleman Caller, bringing all their desires to the boiling point.
The overbearing matriarch Amanda is always the starring role of this play, and the ever-bewitching Whyte demonstrates her virtuosity once again. The fraught, flailing nature of this character, holding on pathetically to her own youth is beautifully portrayed, bleeding tension and comedy into the character in equal measure. Wilson pushes hard for the comedy in this production, exaggerating meanings and having his cast play for the bigger moments, which will upset some purists, but is frankly probably the only way to portray the melodrama that this era of plays are known for to a modern audience.
What is difficult to reconcile is the heavy-handed way in which Wilson has Draxl play the subtext of Tom’s obviously coded homosexuality. Dressing him like a Jeal Paul Gaultier ‘Le Male’ advertisement – or its inspiration Querelle – the hypersexualised sailor complete with tight fitting singlet under high-waisted pants and an anchor tattoo is an unmistakably homoerotic aesthetic on its own. Having Draxl pose like a vintage bodybuilder and lasciviously invade the personal space of the Gentleman Caller really over eggs the pudding to the point of insulting the audience’s intelligence. Despite this direction Draxl gives a solid performance and his portrayal of a man tormented by a situation he feels he can’t escape is visceral in its strength.
Making her professional theatre debut Donaldson eloquently delivers a performance full of self-pity and loathing that perfectly pictures a young woman who doesn’t know how to operate in the world in which she lives. Laura’s awkward conversations with her Gentleman Caller are beautifully balanced by McGee, in his MTC debut. McGee’s polished, placed performance feels effortlessly 1940s and contrasts well, in its ‘matter-of-factness’ with the histrionics of the Wingfield family.
This sort of period drama offers great opportunities for designers, which seem to have gone astray here. Kat Chan’s set design incorporates a highly structural fire escape which has barely any essential function, while neglecting the core playing spaces, which don’t even use all of the expansive Sumner Theatre stage space, in an effort to feel cramped that doesn’t pay off. The walls and floor that could have been as reflective of the era as the furniture is, are instead simply bare mottled flats, left at uneven heights like a theatre company without the skill or manpower to do better had built them. Characters talk of cooking and serving a meal while a stove in clear view sits unused and never incorporated into the action. Wilson has his cast mime eating invisible meals, but reading real newspapers, he has them smoking unseen cigarettes but still bothers to have his cast ‘light’ them with real lighters. Why some props are invisible and others not, is beyond comprehension, let alone why the glass menagerie of the title, which is so important to Laura and symbolic to her psyche, is barely able to be seen in this production. It’s a frustrating loss.
Matilda Woodroofe’s costume designs are not only heavy-handed in her dressing of Tom, Laura’s dress for meeting the Gentlman Caller is beyond gaudy, while Amanda’s debutante ball gown looks like a Project Runway camping gear challenge.
Paul Lim’s lighting is elegantly executed however, navigating candlelight craftily and making great use of the shadows cast by the fire escape. Sound Design by Marco Cher is balanced deftly.
The works of Tennessee Williams, while classic, certainly shouldn’t be trapped in amber as though there is only one way for them to be performed. But it is important to know what value you’re adding through your interpretation and not to assume too little of your audience. Although the performances in this production are excellent, Wilson seems to be playing with various ideas that don’t have much cohesion and don’t feel like they shine new light on this enduring story.
