The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams's first success, "The Glass Menagerie," based loosely on his own life, has endured for 70 years due to universal themes of family and lost opportunity. Beautifully written, the play offers some of the most poetic dialogue in American theater.

Set in the Depression, pre World War II, Tom Wingfield (Brian Foyster), the narrator and protagonist, works in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda (Lisa Richards), a fading Southern belle, and his sister, Laura (Kerry Knuppe), who has a bum leg due to a childhood bout with pleurosy.

Amanda lives in the past, consistently telling her children about her glory days as a debutante, while Laura is her polar opposite, so painfully shy she dropped out of both high school and a secretarial course. When Tom brings home a buddy, Jim (Patrick Joseph Rieger), from the warehouse, the gentleman caller throws the Wingfields' lives spiraling in opposite directions.

Directed by Jack Heller, this "Menagerie" is both tragic, humorous and, at times, through Amanda, borderline campy. Richards imbues the Wingfield matriarch's fluttery fripperies with a tinge of histrionics, which is only a cover, of course, whether she knows it or not, for her delusions of grandeur. When Jim comes to call, she hovers and flirts, dressed in her finest, almost as though he's come to call on her. When heartbreak ensues, she is both steely and frail, a woman who knows her halcyon days are long gone and is realizing her daughter's may be as well.

Foyster has the trickiest role, as he's the narrator, yet the main action of the story doesn't revolve around him. He's a dreamer as much as Laura is and he likes to escape the suffocating confines of the tenement he shares with his mother and sister by slipping out to movies and to bars. When he brings Jim home, there's a subtle homosexual subtext emanating from both men, though Jim later claims to be engaged to be married, and whether that's to spare Laura's feelings because he's not into her in general or because she's a woman is left ambiguous.

Knuppe, as awkward, hesitant Laura, has the most internal role, which she acquits with aplomb. She's as fragile as the animals in her glass menagerie, though instead of being desperate, she has accepted her lot in life and made peace with it.

Rieger's Jim is a shot of energy in the second act, bringing hope to the Wingfields' desolate lives, though, like Amanda, he is also living on past glories. Jim is broad and larger than life, but Rieger brings a tenderness to him, so that when breaking Laura's (and Amanda's, and possibly Tom's) heart, he's not played like a villain. There's a chivalry to his forthrightness.

Williams paints an innate bleakness to the story with the three Wingfields appearing to be stuck, in their lives, in their tenement, with each other. Laura has no desire to ever leave, and the ghosts of Amanda's past keep her company. Only Tom yearns for more, and when he escapes, seemingly to another city, he isn't abandoning his family so much as saving himself. There's a creeping, cumulative power, an emotional devastation, to the words and the melancholy of the story, and Williams breaks hearts without manipulating them.

The production design and costumes perfectly set the scene, the shabby apartment filled with items from Amanda's past. The entire stage seems to have been steeped in sepia, like a faded photograph. Director Heller allows his actors room to breathe, while also downplaying their actions, making the emotional denouement all the more moving in its quietness.

"The Glass Menagerie" runs through June 14 at the Greenway Court Theatre, 544 N. Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. For information or tickets, visit greenwaycourt.org.