I'm not a trained critic of theater and plays; I'm just an average member of the audience. What do I know about theatrical approaches and drama applications? Regardless of what I think about a show, a production team works hard to bring it to the stage and have it ticketed. The actors work long hours and put in tremendous efforts to match lines, cues and try to bring that world to the audiences. I thought long and hard if I wanted to vocalize my thoughts about Pangdemonium's adaption of Tennessee Williams's 1944 'The Glass Menagerie' to present-day terms. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the show at all.
The play is known for its gravitas. It's semi-biographical and we follow the fractured Wingfield family of Amanda and her adult children, Tom and painfully shy and awkward and emotionally fragile Laura. The father is absent as he had long left the wife and children for other relationships and traipsing the world. Amanda is described as a 'faded Southern belle', unyielding, mean and a 'force of nature'. She wants to marry off Laura to a good man, and hoped to have some money out of it too to improve the family situation. Tom plays dutiful son and brother, working days as a warehouse assistant. But he's grown tired of it and wishes to leave, and in all honesty, follow the father's footsteps. The play is intended to be seen through Tom's eyes, as both narrator looking through his memories, and also being part of the play that is taken from his memories.
Directed by Tracie Pang, the play sees Catherine Grace Gardner as Amanda, Jamil Schulze and Inch Chua as Tom and Laura, and Salif Hardie as Jim. If there's one American accent that I can't catch, it's the Southern drawl. In this play, the actors' adopted accents and the pitch of the voices totally put me off, as did the overall slightly campy feel to it. For a good half of the play, whenever Laura spoke, I didn't understand what the heck she was mumbling about. If that was the intended effect, okaaaaaay. Yeah, I know the family is supposed to be living in 1930s St. Louis, Missouri. BUT.
The gentleman caller is Jim O'Connor, who is Tom's colleague at the warehouse and also his high school mate. Back in the day, Jim was like the most popular boy in school, and all that jazz. But he didn't live up to expectations of being 'somebody' after graduation. Jim is someone whom Laura knows too, and she has had a crush on him back then as well. But today, in his normalcy, Jim refers to himself as 'stumblejohn', and that's utterly apt. And in this casting of Jim, he was definitely utterly annoying and very unlikeable. Acccccck. I feel that in this production, the actors didn't have the depth to carry off their complicated characters. I was completely not absorbed in this play.
I came home and re-read the play instead. It was a much better read than the play I just watched. I Theater's 2006 adaptation (directed by Paul Faizon and produced by Brian Seward, with Christina Sergeant as Amanda, and Timothy Nga and Emilie Oehlers in the roles of Tom and Laurie, and Paul Hannon as Jim) was just as unmemorable. What a pity I'm unable to catch Amy Adams in the titular role as Amanda Wingfield on West End during the play's run. Gender roles, nostalgia, and living in the past and an illusion of the future. Literally a glass menagerie, reflected in the dainty glass animals that are preciously collected by Laura. I guess that in 1944 America, women didn't seem to have many choices in deciding how to live independently...
“What are we going to do, what is going to become of us, what is the future?”
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