Most are familiar with Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. In honor of this prolific playwright, this March the Davis Performing Arts Center is presenting the Tenn Cent Fest, a month-long celebration and exploration of Williams’ work and legacy. The first component of this festival, The Glass Menagerie—a play that characterizes Williams’s southern-gothic tone—opens this week. It’s a big, complex undertaking, and the Department of Performing Arts manages to pull it off with impressive skill and execution.
Williams’s most autobiographical show, Menagerie is set in St. Louis during the Great Depression. It is a “memory play,” that depicts the story of Tom Wingfield, a young man who works in a warehouse to support his mother and sister but dreams of bigger things. His mother promises him that he can leave home once he finds a husband for Laura, his sensitive and painfully shy sister who spends most of her days playing with her glass animal collection. As the story moves and refocuses, each character’s disappointment with his or her situation unfolds, highlighting the difficult era in which the play takes place.
Professor Sarah Marshall plays the overbearing, passive-aggressive Amanda Wingfield, a desperate woman clinging to her children and memories of her youth. Marshall’s southern accent is well-practiced, and perfectly complements Williams’s charming dialogue. In addition, Marshall’s skilled comedic timing adds some unexpected moments of humor to an otherwise grave show. The rest of the ensemble is similarly talented, and all of them represent their characters’ dire situations very well—each wants something more than he or she has, and the audience feels the struggle of each one. The pitting of Tom Wingfield, played by Clark Young (COL ’09), against his mother is particularly striking. The two spar against each other both jokingly and fiercely.
The lighting, sound, set, and projection aspects of this production add to the show’s impressiveness. The detail of the apartment where the Wingates live is captivating, and facilitates a personal connection for the audience with the play’s setting. The set, which is partially deconstructed, has projections of light and film cast upon various parts of it as well as screens above the stage during different parts of dialogue. These cues add surprising poignancy to different scenes, and makes for one of the most interesting aspects of the show. Although the physical set remains the same throughout the entire show, effective use of lighting directs the attention of the audience so that changes in scenes are clear-cut.
The sound is similarly well-engineered, with natural starts and stops in the music. The large role that light and sound play in the show creates a dramatic, dreamlike atmosphere that effectively communicates Tom’s hazy, traumatic memories.
For a play that could easily come across as boring and dialogue-heavy, this was a compelling production that was both moving and wholeheartedly enjoyable. It would prove a successful piece on its own, but as the opening act of Tenn Cent Fest, it will also leave the Georgetown community excited for the productions that follow.
