"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve," Tom Wingfield, played by Alex Grubbs, tells the audience in the very first line of the drama department's production of The Glass Menagerie. "But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, a series of domestic flashbacks told in soft lighting and divided by period jazz music. But although Tom, the narrator, warns that the characters have been exaggerated by his memories, they seem no less real to the audience.
The play centers around a struggling 1930s family - Amanda Wingfield, the mother, an impoverished former Southern belle whose husband abandoned her long ago; and her two adult children. Her daughter Laura is crippled and pathologically shy, and does nothing but listen to old records and play with her collection of little glass animals. Amanda's son Tom, the narrator, aspires to be a writer and wants nothing more than leave his claustrophobic family and his soul-killing warehouse job behind to pursue his own adventures. Unfortunately, he is forced to stay as the sole provider of the family. The action in the play is driven by Amanda's determination to find a "gentleman caller" for her daughter Laura, parodying the structure of the traditional courtship play that dates back to Shakespeare. But The Glass Menagerie is not a romantic comedy, nor is it a play of action. It's a play that focuses on characters, their yearnings, their weaknesses, their dilemmas, and the way each of their wants and needs intertwine and contradict with each other's. Their lives are played out in a set that looks like a perfectly detailed doll's house, cramped and dimly lit, which subtly emphasizes their entrapment within it. Alex Grubbs does a fantastic job in his portrayal of Tom, from his abstract narration of the play to his nonsensically eloquent drunken monologues. But it is Daria Okugawa's portrayal of Amanda that really steals the show. Her character loves but constantly smothers her children, and talks endlessly without listening. Throughout the play, she desperately tries to recreate the world of her youth - her distance from reality often reaches the point of absurdity, providing comic moments to relieve the overall seriousness of the play. She is both the most laughable and the most pitiable character. It is not until the masterful final scene of the play until we, the audience, realize how deeply we have identified with the characters as we cringe at everything that hurts them and understand all they do to hurt each other. It is then that Laura's collection of delicate glass animals, her "glass menagerie," becomes more than a detail, and we finally realize why it is the title of the play: It is a symbol for the fragility of the characters as they live out their lives in the small, harsh world they are trapped within.
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