Director Tina Parker has taken Williams' kitchen-sink staple from its claustrophobic apartment in St. Louis into the Big Top. At first, watching the clown makeup and the freak-show posters and the men and women cavorting on swings over you, you can scarcely believe how much Parker's vision not only makes sense, but enhances the absurd poignancy of the original script. And a part of you keeps on disbelieving throughout this marvelous production, right up until the death-defying finale--until you realize, as the actors take their bows, that all of you have cheated theatrical death, and in the process walked across some dizzying heights. Through it all, the cynical critic expects to be knocked down by a false note, a strained allusion, an uncomfortable fit. All involved maintain their balance admirably.
It's hard to exaggerate the risk that Kitchen Dog took with this kind of staging, although that's based more on a public perception of this particular play and its author. The fact is, Tennessee Williams was obsessed throughout his career with illusion--a circus standard--and how his characters cling to it. Produced in 1940, The Glass Menagerie was Williams' first critical and financial success and set the pattern for much of his career. We like to explain away addictions--of which Williams had several, notably alcohol and tranquilizers--as the product of genetics or family dysfunction. But he's an exemplary case study in the argument that Jean Cocteau once made--artists are people who mourn the loss of childhood imagination more vividly than most, and so many of them constantly try to get it back through artificial means.
Tennessee Williams wrote like an addict in the tragic and beautiful sense of that word. He was addicted to a romantic vision of the world, to a place where romantic disappointment and family treachery sailed away on waves of hopeful sentiment. He also wrote about addicts--Amanda, Blanche, and Brick, to name just three of his most famous--who gouged out their own eyes rather than face the harsh glare of their particular circumstances.
So, yanking The Glass Menagerie out of the cage and placing it tenderly inside a hallucinatory context shouldn't jar us. In 1953, Williams himself attempted--and suffered his first major failure with--a more experimental exercise called Camino Real, a logical evolution that allowed the caged birds that were his dreamers to take flight into pure symbolism. But the circus? That's a place of big smelly animals and riotous physical comedy. Subtlety gets swept up with the elephant shit. Yet because Williams' dialogue in this play boils over with references to spectacle and trickery and magic and escapism, and because his three central characters are very much clowns in that sad, scary way in which clowns have always disturbed me--trapped behind their own permanent, fake facial expressions--the circus motif as well as the chair-pulling, pie-throwing antics simply bring into sharper relief the plight of Williams' characters.
I'd love to take up half this newspaper giving away all the wonderful inventions in this play: for instance, how mother Amanda's interrogation of daughter Laura's daytime habits turns into a knife-throwing act. But because I was consistently surprised with each as it occurred, I'll restrain myself and let ticket-buyers discover these pleasures for themselves. Instead, let me gush like a knife wound to the heart over the actors, who temper their performances to achieve a most difficult theatrical challenge--the union of comedy and tragedy in the same breath.
Dan Day as Tom Wingfield is both the ringmaster and the escape artist, but as he tells us through Williams at the start of the play, he's no magician: Those particular artists deal with illusion as truth, while he's going to be spinning truth as illusion. Day is a handsome, courtly master of ceremonies, but that doesn't stop him from feeling the button-end of a hand-buzzer or getting his chair pulled out from underneath him; he is also, we learn, a tragicomically inept escape artist. Mary Tharp wears her wild, fire-engine-red wig and increasingly heavy clown makeup with the sinister aplomb of every clown from my nightmares. She blends those with a genuine, if manipulative, undercurrent of maternal concern for her adult children, and in the process triggers the kind of Freudian anxieties that supply therapists with cellular phones and second homes. As the club-footed Laura, Shelly Tharp starts out as the freak, then winds up suffering a series of indignities as the most reluctant of these circus performers. Wisely avoiding the outright comedy that works so well for the other characters, Tharp turns up the vulnerability a notch under costumes and makeup, anchoring this production in palpable pathos. A hilarious Bill Lengfelder plays the Gentleman Caller as an extremely smug circus strongman. Lengfelder has the body, the physical skills, and an appropriately corners-tweaked mustache to make his stage incarnation utterly convincing. He also has the comic timing to turn the Gentleman Caller's exhortations about self-esteem into sideshow boasts.
There's no bigger compliment I can pay Kitchen Dog Theater's smashing production than to say that the next time I see The Glass Menagerie on stage or screen again--and I will, because it's constantly revived and because the script is one of my favorites--I will be a little disappointed, no matter how talented the actors or how intuitive the direction. So much resonates in the marriage of Parker's audacious interpretation and Williams' "memory play," I'll probably always smell burnt popcorn and tiger dung when Laura's parade of glass animals comes by (that's a compliment, by the way). It would be stretching the point to say that Kitchen Dog's staging is definitive, but saying that would also shortchange the achievement of Tina Parker and her cast. Their show doesn't box the often overlooked imagination of Tennessee Williams into any kind of definition. It frees audiences to be thrilled again by a play and a playwright they thought they had down pat.
The Glass Menagerie runs through June 7. Call (214) 953-1055.
Banter
Theatre Three's rehearsal-space-turned-blackbox, Theatre Too, was christened with New Theatre Company's production of John Patrick Shanley's Psycopathia Sexualis. The results were a rousing success for all involved--sell-outs for most of the performances caused the show to be extended. The Lean Theatre, another company spawned from T3 talent, offers a second helping of Shanley with their new production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Lean co-founders Sharon Bunn and Thurman Moss hope that Dallas theatergoers clean their plates with as much enthusiasm for the second course.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is an early comic drama (with an emphasis on the drama part) by the still-young playwright, screenwriter, and erstwhile filmmaker. Without giving away what director Sharon Bunn says is a "shocking secret" that lies at the play's core, we can describe it as the story of a young man (Marc Hebert) and a young woman (Nance Watkins) who strike up a conversation in a New York City bar and are propelled into a relationship where the emotional extremes of their pasts take centerstage.
"These are two extremely talented young people, and we wanted to find a vehicle to display that before they make their way to Los Angeles and New York," says Bunn, a veteran of the Dallas stage (and not a few movies and TV shows) who has worked on both coasts with her professional and private partner Moss. Both of them eventually decided to return and make theater in their native Dallas, which she very correctly points out is "a town that needs it."
"While directing (Hebert and Watkins), I was shocked at how easily they could pull emotion from inside themselves," she says. "I don't know if it's a generation gap or what, but very often young actors are afraid to express themselves emotionally in front of an older director. Marc and Nance delivered the first time I asked them to."
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, she claims, is of atypical quality for an early work by a young male playwright.
"It's difficult to find scripts written by men early in their careers that feature rounded female characters. So often, the women that these beginning playwrights create are caricatures, or just a vessel to express some part of themselves or their feelings about women in general. Both of these characters felt very real on the page. And they're able to--forgive me for choosing this word, because it's so overused--redeem themselves through love. It's a very gritty play, something that I hope people will find useful."
"Useful" is not a word you usually hear applied to theater, but it modestly sums up the agenda that Bunn and Thurman Moss bring to the work they stage in Theatre Too. Both are pragmatic about what they believe is a very utilitarian role live performance can and should play in the lives of audience members.
"In many ways, I believe that place is a church," Bunn says of the Theatre Three Quadrangle space designed by Jac Alder. "But it's also a place where people come together to look at their lives through actors, to examine problems. Many people talk about their whole lives being the theater, but I have to have family and go out to eat with friends and all that. Theater is a place to reflect on all those other things."
The work of Lean Theatre harkens to a style that she hopes to revive, once their resources expand: "We would love to stage some of those social dramas from the 1930s, but the casts are just too big; we don't have the amount of actors to fill them right now."
As far as T3's very successful new blackbox Theatre Too, Bunn admits she's thrilled. "Upstairs, we get to stage the big productions that a lot of people like. Downstairs, we get to stage the smaller, darker plays that we love."
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea opens May 21 and runs through June 6. Call (214) 871-3300 .
