In the stunning revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theater, Sally Field’s smothering St. Louis Depression era mom Amanda Wingfield, exudes the nervous energy of a woman in compulsive command. Her son Tom, Joe Mantello, our narrator, is the butt of verbal abuse. We can see why her husband left this family high and dry sometime before the events of this memory play, abandoning not only this mother and son, but a girl, Laura, crippled with a limp in Williams’ script, but here played by newcomer Madison Ferris, mostly in a wheelchair, and when not, moving about bravely on hands and knees. This choice of actress is a reason that this Glass Menagerie makes you rethink a play you thought you knew. Stretched to abstract extreme by director Sam Gold whose vision this production realizes, the play’s traditional sitting room is gone, replaced by a bare cavernous stage; the whole, including a visit by an affable gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, a perfect Finn Whittrock, is left to the imagination.

At the penultimate dinner scene, the lights go out. Tom has failed to pay the electric bill, and candelabras, among the few props, are put to good use, illuminating the intimacy of Jim and Laura’s brief, cataclysmic courtship against a waterfall backdrop. You could hear the proverbial pin drop against the shower sound and Williams’ poetry, the candles playing against faces, especially when Field’s Amanda comically clad in prom queen pink tulle, interrupts offering refreshing lemonade. For her, Jim is the hope, “the long delayed but always expected something that we live for,” in Tom’s words. She crashes upon hearing the news that Jim is otherwise engaged, even when Laura makes her way steadily on all fours, taking life in her own stride. This is quite simply an unforgettable theater moment.

Regina Weinreich

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