The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams
Los Altos Stage Company
Perched outside the apartment’s open window on the fire escape where he will spend much of the upcoming play, a young man smokes and comments with little emotion,
“The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted; it is sentimental; it is not realistic.”
We will soon learn that this is Tom, our narrator, who is caught up in a web of memories, himself appearing partly real and partly a hazy image of someone not currently present but an image of his own imagination. As he explains, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
In 1944, Tennessee Williams skyrocketed from near obscurity to wide-spread fame with the premiere of The Glass Menagerie, a play touted as a memory play both in the script and in its evident connections to the playwright and his family of an excessively attention-seeking mother, a mentally and physically fragile sister, and a long-absent father. In the decades since, many revivals of the 1930’s, St. Louis, middle-class setting have time and again been recreated on the stages on and off Broadway, in theatrical centers worldwide, and in thousands of towns where many of high-school-aged actors have cut their acting eye-teeth on the four, now iconic roles created by Williams.
Los Altos Stage Company now joins that long list of oft-local productions with a staging that impressively accentuates the memory aspects of Williams’ famous script through the other-worldly lighting design of Carsten Koester where deep blues, greens, purples, and reds dominate the otherwise dimly lit, shadowed atmosphere of the modest, 1930s apartment designed with authentic feel by Seafus Chatmon. Further enhancing the dream-like setting is the ongoing soundtrack of period jazz and big band music created by Gary Landis – tunes that sound both vaguely familiar but still distant and unrecognizable in one’s one memory bank. As the play progresses, Director Gary Landis’ unique sound and lighting decisions become part of the play’s dialogue and are particularly important in creating a sense that what we are seeing is in fact not totally real but recreated scenes from our narrator’s memory – some of which happened and some that maybe are how he wants to remember them happening.
For the rest of my review, please proceed to Talkin’Broadway.
Rating: 4 E
The Glass Menagerie continues through February 16, 2025, in a two-hour, fifteen-minute production (plus intermission) by Los Altos Stage Company, 97 Hillview Avenue, Los Altos, CA. Tickets are available online at https://losaltosstage.org/; in person Thursday and Friday, 3 – 6 p.m. at the theatre’s box office; or by phone at 650-941-0551.
Photo Credits: Scott Lasky
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