Theater Review - Lesson in fragility

PushPush handles unconventional Menagerie with care

The Glass Menagerie may be Tennessee Williams’ most canonized play, but in its new production PushPush Theater doesn’t genuflect before it. Instead, the playhouse draws a multiplicity of fresh ideas from Williams’ impeccable memory play. But while the central conceit, to have an all African-American cast, succeeds marvelously, some of the smaller notions prove more problematic.

The Wingfields of the play are closely based on Williams’ own family during his youth in St. Louis, and PushPush’s casting rarely contradicts the characterizations. When mother Amanda (Carol Mitchell-Leon) recalls her younger days as a popular Southern belle in the Mississippi delta, what you envision no doubt differs from the playwright’s intention, but it is equally vivid.

Menagerie’s theme of the absent father seems even stronger with the cast’s racial make-up (despite the overly comical grin in the hanging photograph of the father). And when restless son Tom (M. Sahr Ngaujah) says of handicapped, introverted sister Laura (Michele McCullough), “Maybe she’s the type people call ‘home girls,’” it becomes a pun to a contemporary audience.

Through Tom as a surrogate, Williams emphasizes that Glass is a memory play, perhaps as a means of distancing himself from the autobiographical elements. While the characters may have the symbolic value he suggests, they’re also fully dimensioned as people, with highly naturalistic dialogue and interactions. The show adds texture by playing jaunty string music as a counterpoint to several speeches.

PushPush’s production has the engaging device of introducing Tom not as a poet but as a painter, literally applying words to the environment with a paintbrush: The theater is decorated with terms from the play such as “Blue Roses,” “Plans and Provisions,” “The Accent of a Coming Foot,” etc. In performance, though, Ngaujah may take the non-realistic cue too much to heart, at times awkwardly emoting with strange, broad gestures. Tom, of course, is meant to seem angry and frustrated, and at moments Ngaujah suggests a bird beating against the bars of its cage.

His performance grows more grounded as the play continues, especially in scenes with Mitchell-Leon, who provides a complex combination of Southern gentility, bitter nostalgia and steely determination. Concerned that Laura will never find a husband, Amanda guilts Tom into bringing home a “gentleman caller,” and the visit proves the crux of the second act. Throughout, it’s fascinating simply to watch Mitchell-Leon’s eyes and how they regard the other characters, something you couldn’t enjoy in a space bigger than PushPush.

Like most plays at PushPush, Menagerie is performed in the round, but unlike most shows at the theater, it proves troublesome here. The group of seats directly opposite the entrance seem the ideal ones, being closest to the “parlor” part of the space and probably giving the best vantage of Mitchell-Leon’s face. (My seat had too many obstructed views and backs of heads.)

There’s a power failure during the second act, Tom having failed to pay the electric bill, and the extended scene with Laura and Jim (Jahi Kearse), the gentleman caller, unfolds as a lovely duet lit with two candles. It’s a touch that’s marvelous in its intimacy, but causes drawbacks as well. With only a single candle nearby and their faces so much in shadow, you simply can’t see McCullough or Kearse act as much as you’d want, making the sequence seem like one notch above radio. It especially detracts from the sad turn their time together takes, when you really need to see the play of emotions and evasions.

McCullough effectively shows the way Laura is sad, shy and scared, but she’s also the kind of actress who seems to have both feet on the ground, and Laura, obsessed with her collection of glass animals, is described as being more dreamy and peculiar than that. It’s a tribute to Williams’ powers as a playwright that Jim proves not just a foil for the Wingfields but an intriguing character in his own right, and Kearse gives him a solid portrayal.

PushPush Theater chooses not to handle Glass Menagerie with the excessive care of an antique. Both evocative and obscure, the production is probably better for its imaginative approach, but it reveals how Glass can be both fragile and resilient.

The Glass Menagerie plays through April 8 at PushPush Theater, 1123 Zonolite Road, Suite 3, with performances at 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 7 p.m. Sun. $10-15. 404-892-7876.??