PTP’s ‘Glass Menagerie’ a tale of fragile lives, dreams

Saturday, May 5, 2007

The fact that, to that end, she is destructive, dysfunctional and domineering — in a word, pushy – is irrelevant.

Port Tobacco Players’ production of ‘‘The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, highlights the characters in his play about dreamers and self-illusion.

Lisa Kay Morton, as Amanda, pulls out all the stops to portray a transplanted Southern belle whose own dreams have been swept away by the vagaries and foibles of life and her husband — a telephone man who ‘‘loved long-distance” and went.

She spends some of her time trying to raise money by selling subscriptions to a ladies’ magazine and by attending meetings for the DAR, to which she has recently been elected a vice president.

The rest of the time spends ensuring that her son, Tom, played by David Timmermann, eats slowly, sits up straight and isn’t drinking whisky while he is out half the night.

Timmermann portrays Tom as a fairly sound but unambitious warehouse worker for a shoe company, a job that offers no promise of thrills, fulfillment or desire for a career.

Tom would rather write and has earned the nickname Shakespeare from an old school chum who happens to be a clerk in the same company. He drags himself home as readily as he drags himself to work each morning. He is out of the house each evening to ‘‘go to the movies.”

At the movies, he explains to his mother, he can at least see lives of great adventure, while his own suffocates in a meaningless job. He would join the Merchant Marine for adventure, but Amanda admonishes him. He cannot do that – not yet. He is the anchor for their family, the wage-earner, and until his sister, Laura, is married, his responsibility is to her.

Laura.

Perfectly played by Jodie Mueller, she is shy in the extreme, pretty as a picture, self-conscious of and therefore somewhat graceless from a permanent limp. With all of her inherent insecurities, Laura has no hope of a future in business or even as a social butterfly. Her singular interest is her collection of tiny glass animals. And the old worn-out collection of phonograph records her father left behind when he walked out.

That is, until her brother brings home a ‘‘young gentleman caller.”

Jim O’Connor is portrayed by Kyle Tusing as a rollicking, easy-going young man of Irish descent who, after having rousing success in high school, has found life to be a little more difficult in the adult world.

Unfazed by the challenges, however, he sees a way to improve his future by taking night classes in electrical engineering — so he can get in on ground floor of what he sees as the future of the television industry – and by taking public speaking. He deems it important to be able to talk on any level to anyone.

All of this he tells Tom before they sit down to dinner. Tom, on the other hand, has ideas of his own and it does not involve his family.

Laura, for whom this has all been arranged, promptly falls ill as she does when under stress and spends the dinner hour on the settee in the living room. When Jim is shooed into the room by Amanda while she and Tom clear up, he discovers that they knew each other, too.

As one might then predict, the conversation then takes its desired natural course and the end is in sight. But this is Tennessee Williams and nothing has a desired natural course in his world.

There is a fifth character on stage throughout the play and it is not, as Tom states early on, the photograph of his father which is quite prominent in the set. The last performer is the set itself, a wondrous spectacle of engineering which will take your breath away and to which I will leave you to see for yourself.

There is cigarette smoking and a little bad language.

Rated PG13LIACTPFAR: Life is a Carousel. Take This Play for a Ride.