Sally Field & Joe Mantello star in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.
Two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field and two-time Tony Award winner Joe Mantello star in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Also starring Finn Wittrock and Madison Ferris. Tony winner Sam Gold directs.
The Glass Menagerie is the play that brought a brilliant young writer named Tennessee Williams to national attention when it premiered on Broadway in 1945. More than seventy years later, Williams' most personal work for the stage continues to captivate and overwhelm audiences around the world.
Sam Gold is the latest to pick up the next-to-nothing-is-more approach to Tennessee Williams. The American director's 'Glass Menagerie' opened Thursday at the Belasco Theatre, and it is pure Gold in every sense of the word. Has there ever been a barer stage on Broadway? The four actors enter from a side door on the orchestra level, with Sally Field pushing newcomer Madison Ferris in a wheelchair. What follows is one of the evening's many silent longueurs as Ferris, a woman with muscular dystrophy, negotiates the small staircase to the stage to take her place there. Occasionally, she walks by pushing her buttocks in the air and taking steps on her feet and hands. But for most of the production, this Laura sits on the floor or in the wheelchair. It's odd to begin a review by concentrating on an actor's physical challenges, but that first long ascent to the stage pretty much establishes Field's tortured Amanda Wingfield and, in essence, Gold's take on 'The Glass Menagerie.' It's a daring, masterful stroke, and one that redefines the Williams classic, and will influence every 'Menagerie' to come in the next few years.
That shattering sound you hear coming from the Belasco Theater is the celebrated director Sam Gold taking a hammer to everything that's delicate in 'The Glass Menagerie.' The jagged, glistening shards of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough play are available for inspection in the revival that opened on Thursday night. Don't expect these pieces to be reassembled into an illuminating portrait of the anguished Wingfield family from this 1944 drama. Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it back together again...On occasion, Mr. Gold's interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you see your past at its distorted worst. But even that vision is not sustained. When a plot turn plunges the theater into abject darkness late in the play, it only gives literal life to what you've been feeling all along.
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