Theatre in Review: The Glass Menagerie (Belasco Theatre)

	Joe Mantello, Sally Field, Finn Wittrock. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The director Sam Gold has developed a subtractive approach to classic plays. His 2012 staging of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger unfolded on a narrow strip at the edge of the stage, with nothing much in the way of set design. A 2014 revival of The Real Thing, a work that seemingly demands many locations and styles, took place in a single, rather drably designed, living room. This season at New York Theatre Workshop, he staged Othello in a kind of ad hoc Army base, defined by cheap pine wood and featuring no identifying detail; half the time, it was so dimly lit that you could barely see the actors, let alone the set. The thinking behind this approach appears to be that the more specific detail you strip away, the more the playwright's words will be allowed to breathe. This is sometimes true, but as a generally applied rule, it is, to say the least, dubious.

Now comes Gold's production of The Glass Menagerie, which has proven to be controversial on several grounds. The idea of presenting the play on a bare stage, employing a rehearsal-room aesthetic, isn't really the issue -- many plays have thrived under such circumstances -- nor is the casting of the 54-year-old Joe Mantello as Tom, the youthful narrator. Eddie Dowling, who created the role, was even older, and, in any case, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play; Tom could be looking back at its events at any point in his life. What confounds about this production is the many seemingly arbitrary directorial decisions that are at odds with Tennessee Williams' text.

As Amanda Wingfield, the faded belle trapped in a cheap St. Louis apartment with adult children who do not conform to her ideals, Sally Field -- who, a decade ago, played the same role at the Kennedy Center to great acclaim -- has apparently been encouraged by Gold to play down any hint of a Southern accent or manner. She also works a very narrow vocal range, removing the music from Amanda's lines and growing ever more strident in moments of distress. At times, Gold seems determined to thwart her best efforts: The scene in which Amanda takes to the telephone, trying to raise money by selling magazine subscriptions, is a little comic gem ("You are a martyr, a Christian martyr," she consoles her suffering customers), but much of her dialogue is lost under the clatter of Tom's typewriter keys and the records being played on the phonograph by her daughter, Laura. The moment when Amanda appears dressed for an all-important dinner in a faded gown from her long-gone youth is killed off when Fields enters in a bubble-gum pink prom gown that looks like it was left over from her mid-'60s television sitcom, Gidget. The actress -- who has delivered unfailingly intelligent work for decades in television and film -- has her moments: She makes an especially incisive thing of Amanda's monologue about the horrors of "dependency," a fate that awaits unless she can find a suitable husband for the slightly crippled and cripplingly shy Laura, but there's little doubt that one of American drama's most colorful characters is here rendered in stark, often dreary, black-and-white.

The casting of Madison Ferris -- who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is largely confined to a wheelchair -- as Laura has been hailed as a breakthrough for disabled actors, but it raises a series of questions that the production never tries to answer. Williams conceived of Laura as possessing a limp, an outward sign of a fragile, childlike personality that leaves her unable to deal with life outside the family home. Here, Gold flips the concept, making Laura a rather sullen, mordant young lady who is all but deprived of mobility. Ferris' first entrance is through the auditorium, wheeled in by Field; reaching the stage, she gets out of the chair and, moving on all fours, crawls up the stairs to the stage; this is not the last time she will be made to move around the stage in such fashion. It is a deliberate attempt at making the audience uncomfortable, yet the actress' physical state directly contradicts the text: We are told that, rather than attend business college, she has spent day after day roaming the streets of St. Louis, an idea that is clearly impossible. Amanda's comment that Laura has a slight disability -- one of her more accurate observations -- is here made into the ravings of a delusional woman. None of this might matter if Ferris were delivering the character as written, but the actress, a recent college graduate, has apparently been encouraged to play against type, presenting a Laura who is more like a contemporary sullen teenager than anything Williams wrote.

Laura's scene with Jim, the gentleman caller -- here played in two-dimensional fashion by Finn Wittrock -- is the heart of the play, the moment when she is briefly drawn out of herself, only to have her hopes so brutally shattered. In Gold's hands, it is illuminated only by a candelabra, leaving the characters nearly impossible to make out for several minutes. (The stage lighting gradually comes up during the scene, but it takes quite a while.) In one particularly risible bit of business, Jim, staring into the inky blackness, notices Laura's high school yearbook; I can only assume it glows in the dark. At the same time, Gold has seen to it that the scene is played out in front of a rain effect, the likes of which has not been seen since Singin' in the Rain; it leaves the stage so covered with water that, during the climactic argument between Amanda and Tom, Mantello is left to splash about in a puddle.

Mantello gives by far the most successful performance -- more than most actors who have played the role, he makes clear that Tom is as attached to Amanda as he is exasperated by her -- yet even he gets upstaged when forced to stand in front of the neon sign that stands in for the ballroom next door to the Wingfields' apartment building; it isn't large, but is bright enough to make him hard to see.

The set designer, Andrew Lieberman, has delivered the stark, empty space that Gold ordered, and Adam Silverman, the lighting designer, supplies the wildly contrasting light levels -- and the extensive use of houselighting -- that seemingly completes the effect. Wojciech Dziedzic's costumes convey little or nothing about the characters. Bray Poor's sound design includes several musical selections played by Laura on the gramophone and the sound of music from the ballroom.

Gold has done stellar work with contemporary playwrights such as Annie Baker and Dan LeFranc; his staging of the musical Fun Home was deservedly praised for its deft handling of extraordinarily sensitive material. So, it's especially disheartening to see this approach to The Glass Menagerie, which leaves one wondering why he wanted to stage it at all. Coming so soon after John Tiffany's definitive production, with its brilliant scenic and lighting design, Gold may have decided to go in the opposite direction in a deliberate attempt at considering it with fresh eyes. But in trying to strip away decades' worth of assumptions about this classic work, he has stripped out its essential qualities. -- David Barbour