Fragile ‘Menagerie’ refracts light, memory at SF Playhouse
Jim (William Thomas Hodgson, left), the gentleman caller, and Amanda (Susi Damilano, center) are concerned as an ailing Laura (Nicole Javier, second from right) is supported by her brother Tom (Jomar Tagatac) in San Francisco Playhouse’s The Glass Menagerie. Photo Credit: Jessica Palopoli
At the top of The Glass Menagerie, playwright Tennessee Williams has his stand-in narrator, Tom (also Tennessee’s real name), set the tone for what’s about to unfold. “I am the opposite of a stage magician,” Tom says. “He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
In San Francisco Playhouse’s production of Menagerie, director Jeffrey Lo strips the stage of much illusion by taking what is often an insular, almost claustrophobic family drama and giving it some space in a sort of purgatory of memory that flouts theatrical convention. In the vast, open design of Christopher Fitzer’s set, there’s no proscenium to confine the action (though the theater’s original gold proscenium is visible behind the performance area, just above the low walls that gave the stage some shape). There’s a platform in the center of a stage (on a turntable) that represents the Wingfield’s rather dingy St. Louis apartment circa 1937. Above that space is a filmy, curtained window, pieces of a fire escape, a faceless portrait and neon sign belonging to the Paradise dance hall.
There’s no backstage in this production. All props and costume elements are visible at the far sides of the stage, and when actors are not involved in a scene, they sit in chairs and watch the central action. Lo’s impressionistic approach feels well suited to a memory play, and Wen-Ling Liao’s lighting follows suit. Some plays lend themselves more than others to attention-grabbing lighting, and this is one of them. Tom describes the play as “dim and poetic,” and a key scene does, in fact, take place by candlelight. But Liao surrounds the stage with visible lighting instruments, further heightening the contrast between the real emotion being experienced within the world of the characters and the stark, visible theatricality surrounding them.
Depending on how a director calibrates The Glass Menagerie, the play’s emotional center can shift. In this production, thanks to a deeply rooted, emotional performance from Jomar Tagatac, Tom is the play’s narrator as well as its heart. In this story, everyone wants something they don’t have. Tom’s mother, Amanda (Susi Damilano), a faded Southern belle, wants the glory that was her past to be her present and her future. She wants to have made better choices and to be living the lush life she was reared for. For Tom’s sister, Laura (Nicole Javier), there’s a need more than a desire to be someone else entirely – someone whose childhood illness hasn’t left her with a limp that shames her, someone who has the confidence not to vomit from stress during a typing speed test, someone who can confidently tell the boy she fancies how she really feels.
For Tom, the man of the family since his father’s abrupt departure 16 years earlier, the needs of his mother and his sister are the weights that keep him from getting what he wants. Rather than spending days in a shoe warehouse and nights drinking and going to movies, Tom is a writer who wants to experience a life worth writing about. As he says, “People go to the movies instead of moving.” He wants to move, but he feels a responsibility to his overbearing mother, who tells him how to chew his food, how to sit and how to make something of himself, and to his sister, whom he wants to protect and bring some modicum of happiness. His frustration is about to push him to a crucial life decision.
Laura (Javier, left) watches as Tom (Tagatac, center) is confronted by Amanda (Damilano). Photo Credit: Jessica Palopoli
Before that happens, he agrees to be part of his mother’s plot to snag a gentleman caller for Laura under the assumption that the two will meet and marry. No other possible outcome. So Tom ensnares Jim (William Thomas Hodgson), his only friend from the warehouse, an amiable guy both he and Laura went to high school with (and who, unbeknownst to just about everyone, is the one boy Laura has ever really liked).
The scene between Laura and Jim is kind of a play within the play as Jim, a tarnished golden boy trying to find his way through education and self-improvement, tries to be the hero Laura needs even if he isn’t willing to be the provider Laura’s mother so desperately needs him to be. For her part, Laura gets a little taste of what it might be like to be a person who can experience intimacy – a dance, a kiss – before reverting back to the play’s rather harsh reality where hopes and dreams, desires and needs, are squashed and challenged at every turn.
Even 80 years after its debut, Williams’ writing in Menagerie retains the power of poetry rooted in heartfelt emotion. He sets out a road map for his actors, and the cast here stays true to his route. Director Lo sometimes feels like he’s trying to make his own impression on the play and impose some of his own ideas on the text. For instance, when Tom and Amanda have a blow-out fight, Lo has Tagatac jump off the central platform as if he’s exiting the reality of the scene and existing in some liminal space that’s part in the play, part of out it. The lights shift, and the conflict between the two characters is somehow presented rather than felt – a bold theatrical choice calling attention to itself rather than to the characters.
The actors are sturdy enough to weather some of the flashier theatrics here. Damilano has some powerful moments as Amanda, with her Southern graciousness growing ever more brittle such that when she lashes out or casts a scathing look, it really registers. Her anger – with her children, with her fate – is formidable. Javier has more vitality than many Lauras I’ve seen, more external than internal. But then when she crumbles, that gives her even further to fall. Her extended duet with Hodgson’s Jim is heartbreakingly tender.
It all comes back to Tagatac’s Toms bearing the weight of the play, resenting the “tyranny of women,” his mother and sister, and yet loving them ferociously. He’s an artist in conflict – does he stay or does he go? Whatever his choice, it’s clear that either way, Amanda and Laura will rule his heart and mind (and his art) until, as Amanda might put it, “the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie continues through June 15 at the San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30-$125. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes (including intermission). Call 415-677-9596 or visit sfplayhouse.org.
