"The gauzy draping that usually trims productions of “The Glass Menagerie” has been packed up and put away. Do not come to the Laura Pels Theater, where the Roundabout Theater Company’s terrific new revival of Tennessee Williams’s career-igniting play opened on Wednesday night, looking for a standard dose of weepy Southern lyricism.Instead you’ll find something unexpected, namely the fiercely moving and seriously funny play Williams actually wrote, in a production directed by Gordon Edelstein that’s lightning-lit from within by the tough, compelling and first-rate Amanda Wingfield of Judith Ivey, giving what is surely the performance of her career. Ms. Ivey’s achingly real and often hilarious turn shares much in common with the shattering Blanche DuBois of Cate Blanchett seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last fall."
Isherwood really, really likes this, and he sounds well within his rights, but I wonder if the production, as he has described it, has gone too far in diminishing the elegiac tone. Williams is nothing if not sentimental and he is surely--and this may be a weakness; I've never been sure--invested in the very orientation to memory he critiques. But it has been a while since I have read the play...
I remember reading Isherwood--or maybe it was Brantley, I don't know--on the Blanchett DuBois and being electrified by the vision that that production offered. I was not terribly surprised, as the amazing Liv Ullman directed. Even there, though, I seem to remember a reservation expressed by the reviewer that, in an attempt to "reimagine" the warhorse, they did a little violence to its hooves.
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