The life of a theatre critic can be awkward and embarrassing. Consider that I only recently saw Soulpepper’s latest stab at delivering to us one of the finest, most moving American plays of the 20th century: Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. It closes this coming Tuesday, Sept. 6, unless Soulpepper chooses to extend it. The superlative company now presents up to a half-dozen plays or more per month throughout the season, an admirable and wonderful thing.
All I can do is urge you — no, beg you — to see this one.
If you didn’t study Williams’ first theatrical success (and most heartfelt, heartbreaking, autobiographical, poetic play) in high school, or never saw the decent movie and fairly good number of TV versions of it, you have missed a powerful, meaningful, exquisitely constructed piece of theatre. Nearly 70 years after it was written, it still kicks you in the ear with its beautiful monologues and dialogues, and in the stomach with its portrait of an impoverished family crumbling before your very eyes.
The Soulpepper production has some problems, I reluctantly admit. While Ted Dykstra‘s direction is near-perfect, I wonder about the blustering interpretation of the playwright’s alter ego, Tom Wingfield, played by the usually superb Stuart Hughes. Is this not a man who longs to be a poet, feeling hemmed in by having to support his pathetic, former southern belle mother (performed hilariously and brilliantly by Nancy Palk) and his “crippled,” painfully shy younger sister?
Why would he rant and rave so much, almost yelling some of his lines? Still, Hughes delivers some of the very witty lines wonderfully, including the famous, “My father was a telephone repairman who fell in love with long distance” — in other words, he walked out on his wife, son and daughter; never has such a tragic image been worded so humourously.
It takes a while to warm up to Gemma James-Smith‘s tragic Laura, who is usually presented as near-anorexic, almost vanishing before our eyes. This actress is large and awkward, but her physicality somehow works, and when she is told to “blow out the candles” in the last moments of the play by her off-stage brother, she does so one by one, leaving the audience in total darkness. You would need a heart of stone to not vocally cry out in pain and sorrow.
The Glass Menagerie is inarguably Tennessee’s most beautiful play, lacking all of the pretentions and over-writing of some of his more celebrated ones (like the still-powerful but potentially silly A Streetcar Named Desire). And if you appear about an hour before the 7:30 curtain-rise, there are nearly always rush seats for just a dollar or two over $20.
Find me any movie of the past few years that can cleanse your mind and drench your handkerchief like this Soulpepper presentation will. I pray that this great company will bring it back within the next year or two, as they have done with such gorgeous productions as Thornton Wilder‘s Our Town. Catch it if you can. My eyes are still welling up every time I think of it.
Nancy Palk, Gemma James-Smith and Stuart Hughes
The Glass Menagerie, Yonge Centre for the Performing Arts, 416-203-6264. Runs until Sept. 6.
Allan Gould is Post City’s theatre critic
