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.
Throughout, the production swirls realistic gestures with more expressionist ones. The theatricality is self-conscious, at times self-congratulatory. It estranges spectators from the characters and the situations - in ways more and less productive - yet still allows much of the language to be heard clearly and anew. (Gold's staging is often at odds with the script, but he only rarely has his actors play against the lines themselves.) As the play continues, it marshals a stealthy emotional force, designed to make Tom's departure that much more wrenching. Field portrays Amanda with sympathy and genteel bluster. In some scenes she and Mantello's sardonic Tom have a teasing rapport. This Laura's real physical impairment deepens and complicates her relationship with Tom, although as Ferris is far younger and less practiced than her castmates, the production asks her body to do too much of the work of the role.
If it's more of an inquest than a definitive statement, it's an inquest at a very high level; Sally Field, who plays Amanda, does not appear in basement black-box theaters. So Gold is performing a tricky balancing act: narrowing the scope of the representation and maintaining his cutting-edge cred while selling the story to an audience of 1,000. One of the casualties of this approach is what Tom calls 'the social background' of the play. We lose not just the particular St. Louisness of it (the accents are nearly nil) but also the world-on-edge tension that Tom describes at the start: Guernica exploding in Europe, and, in America, 'the fiery braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.' Instead Gold focuses on a novel and largely convincing interpretation of the family's warfare as a symptom of the powerful but constraining love they share, and on the way both things shape Tom's character deep into the future from which he narrates.
1945 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
1965 | Broadway |
The Twentieth Anniversary Production Broadway |
1975 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1983 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1994 | Broadway |
Roundabout Revival Broadway |
2005 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2010 | Off-Broadway |
Roundabout Revival Off-Broadway |
2013 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2017 | West End |
West End Revival West End |
2017 | Broadway |
2017 Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
2018 | Regional (US) |
Barrington Stage Company Production Regional (US) |
2022 | West End |
London Production West End |
West End |
West End |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2017 | BroadwayWorld Awards | Best Leading Actress in a Play | Sally Field |
2017 | BroadwayWorld Awards | Best Revival of a Play | The Glass Menagerie |
2017 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Sally Field |
2017 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actress in a Play | Sally Field |
2017 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play | Sally Field |
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