This 'Glass Menagerie' gleams with empathy
Last week, Carla Belver won the Lifetime Achievement prize at Philadelphia's Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theater. Meanwhile, at Act II Playhouse, she has unlocked another achievement: As Amanda Wingfield, the floundering matriarch of Tennessee Will
Last week, Carla Belver won the Lifetime Achievement prize at Philadelphia's Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theater. Meanwhile, at Act II Playhouse, she has unlocked another achievement: As Amanda Wingfield, the floundering matriarch of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, she's filled with "vivacity and charm," those man-catching qualities she hopes to instill in Laura, her shrinking violet of a daughter. Alongside this fantastic cast, Belver and director James J. Christy reclaim Amanda's humanity from those productions that would seek to portray her as a scheming harridan.
About that cast: Two Barrymore all-stars play Amanda's tortured offspring, Laura (Amanda Schoonover) and Tom (Charlie DelMarcelle), with relative newcomer Sean Bradley as Jim, the gentleman caller, and they get the balance just right.
Schoonover scurries around the Wingfields' shabby apartment (designed with attention to detail by Daniel Boylen, right down to a faded camelback couch's fraying edges) like a trembling Chihuahua avoiding errant boots. DelMarcelle sneers, snaps, and simmers, sheathed in self-defeat. Bradley's forceful, genial presence, a guy perpetually leading with his chin or chest, is a mustachioed mirror-image of dear old absent Dad, whose oversized portrait occasionally beams as if sainted (James Leitner's lighting also suffuses the room with an incandescent glow).
But Jim is as flawed in his way as the Wingfields, and this production does a great job of treating its characters kindly, allowing them to ebb and flow at a gentle, natural pace. Christy and company also find Williams' humor, and give it a proper airing. I imagine few have laughed at Laura's awkwardness before, but Schoonover's saucer eyes and oddball delivery make her into a sort of real live Keane painting, at once sorrowful and ridiculous.
Frankie Fehr's costumes help place the action, with their faded Depression-era patterns, shapeless waists, and Amanda's outrageously inappropriate and well-weathered baby-blue satin and lace cotillion gown. However, Belver's Amanda really controls the proceedings, and while I've always loved this play, I never, before Act II's production, identified with her. It could be a matter of age, or it could be that Belver makes a solid case for Amanda's frustrations and disappointments. Either way, she has a rare empathy for this woman, and that empathy makes for a subtle, beautiful, equalizing shift in the script's entire landscape.
THEATER REVIEW
The Glass Menagerie
Through Nov. 23 at Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler.
Tickets: $24-$35. Information: 215-654-0200, www.Act2.org.EndText