‘Glass Menagerie’ is centerpiece of Georgetown U’s tribute to Tennessee Williams

With “The Glass Menagerie,” the famous “memory play” about a budding writer, his overbearing mother, his fragile sister and a handsome gentleman caller, a young Tennessee Williams learned to break hearts by the hundreds nightly. Georgetown University is celebrating the stuffing out of Williams’s breakthrough drama at Arena Stage: It has not only fully staged the play but has added lobby installations and free short productions. It’s a mini-semester’s worth of attractions.

The university, which created an ambitious, celebrity-peppered Williams Centennial fest this past spring, has partnered with Arena for workshops and teaching in recent years, and that explains the current showcase in Arena’s Kogod Cradle. The full “Me­nag­erie” is the centerpiece, and Derek Goldman’s staging features three young performers with longtime local actress (and Georgetown professor) Sarah Marshall as the famously meddling mother, Amanda Wingfield.

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It’s a fussy show, too caught up in ideas and methods to capture the plain emotional blast of this close-to-the-bone autobiographical play. Technique abounds: At one point, a character holds up a newspaper to read, and moving images are projected with pinpoint accuracy straight onto the page. Fancy!

Of course, Williams called for a new “plastics” of the theater — not realism, but magic, as Blanche DuBois would later say — and he liked the idea of slide projections for this play. So video designer Jared Mezzocchi beams Depression-era footage onto the seven screens behind the stage and across Robbie Hayes’s set. The family’s St. Louis house is apparently already half-decayed in narrator Tom’s memory: In Hayes’s design, great hunks of wall plaster have fallen away from the wood lath. Hard, haunted times, done with extravagant style.

It’s a detached view of this intensely lyrical, inescapably emotional play, and that detachment is hard to sustain in the acting. The formidable Marshall is crystal clear with Amanda’s every niggling impulse, yet the full woman — abandoned by her husband, worried about her grown kids and money, seduced by nostalgia — never quite comes through. The family ties are amorphous here: The antagonism between Tom and Amanda is simply shrill, and the fretting over poor Laura, disabled and bashful, is vague. The long scene with the gentleman caller misses the mark entirely by dwelling on the character’s salesman style rather than on the brief shining effect he’s having on Laura.

Productions of “Menagerie” are always rather thick on the ground, so Georgetown might have picked a less frequently done Williams play for its centerpiece. It is an unbeatable springboard into Williams, though, which is why it’s a project, accompanied by such ancillary short productions as the nutty Christopher Durang parody “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,” a 30-minute knockoff that turns the gentleman caller into a hollering, near-deaf lesbian feminine caller. Something completely different to think about.

Pressley is a freelance writer.

The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Derek Goldman. Lighting, Colin K. Bills; costumes, Debra Kim Sevigny; sound design, Matt Nielson. With Rachel Caywood, Michael Mitchell and Clark Young. About 2¹ / ₂ hours. Through July 3 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. Call 202-488-3300 or visit www.arenastage.org.