NEW YORK -- Psst! Remember Laura, the one with the bad leg? Well, she and her brother have some kind of strange touchy-feely thing going on. I kid you not. Gives you the heebie-jeebies. When he tries to get some shut-eye on the sofa, she goes over and sleeps -- on top of him.
And that Amanda woman! Looks suspiciously alluring for a Tennessee Williams lady worn down by penury and care. She win a shopping spree at Saks or something? She's positively dreamy when she appears, all sexy-like, in a frilly-sparkly man-trap of a party dress! Ruff! Ruff!
Odd touches throughout: Sarah Paulson as Laura and Jessica Lange as mother Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie."
(Paul Kolnik)
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What? Not the Wingfields you remember? Me neither. There's mystery aswirl in David Leveaux's egregiously eccentric "The Glass Menagerie," which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. And much of it has to do with directorial choices that should have been discarded in the rehearsal room. For a drama that so forthrightly examines the way family bonds become shackles, the intimations in this production at times put you more in mind of "Kinsey" than of Williams.
The result is a leaden revival that squanders the talents of some fine actors, chief among them Jessica Lange, making her first appearance on Broadway since "A Streetcar Named Desire" 13 years ago. In her latest attempt at playing one of Williams's indelible women, Lange is Amanda Wingfield, the single-minded mother who oppressively focuses her hopes on crippled Laura, embodied by a misused Sarah Paulson, and her bitterness on her son, Tom, played by the miscast Christian Slater.
Lange is still movie-star beautiful, but her performance is pitched at the casting directors of "Hallmark Hall of Fame." You certainly are allowed to feel for Amanda's plight. She is one of those clueless people who don't understand the nature of the toxins they release into the atmosphere. Deserted by her husband, she's stuck in a dreary St. Louis apartment, lost in faded Southern debutante memories and saddled with an obsessively shy daughter who has inherited none of her mother's spunk -- or narcissism.
But Lange makes the fatal mistake of feeling sorry for Amanda, too. From the first scene to the last, her Amanda is always on the verge of tears. Not the more dangerous, concocted tears of a manipulator: Lange's waterworks are meant to show us a compassionate if neurotic nature. She telegraphs Amanda's heroism in even the tiniest bits of business, as when, standing behind Laura, Lange takes the younger woman's tresses in her hands, brings them to her face and breathes in, as if besotted with maternal love.
Bo-ring! Who is she, Mother Courage? If we don't hate Amanda a little, then how big a jerk is Tom, the family's sole support, for leaving her and Laura? To ignore Amanda's more suffocating qualities is to take her down too many pegs, to reduce her to headliner in a middling melodrama.
It's not close to Sally Field's revealing portrait in Gregory Mosher's wonderful "Glass Menagerie" at the Kennedy Center last summer. Field didn't play her as a monster either, but Amanda's desperation was much more vivid, and as a result, you could despise what she was doing to her hapless daughter, forcing her into a clownishly overdone dinner party outfit. It suggested overdressing Laura as a hostile act, one that grew not only out of devotion but also from a subconscious loathing. Paulson, by contrast, is costumed in a sweetly becoming prom dress, delicate, off-the-shoulder and another reflection of Mom's big heart.
The satisfaction sparked last year by Mosher's production and the exemplary work of Field and her colleagues, Jason Butler Harner, Jennifer Dundas and Corey Brill, are confirmed now after an evening enduring Leveaux's inferior version. Leveaux has done sterling work in the past: He's responsible for a striking "Electra" with Zoe Wanamaker and a playful "Jumpers" with Simon Russell Beale. Then again, he's also the perpetrator of the dreary Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof." His "Menagerie" is in this more stagnant vein.
The sterile elements include Tom Pye's odd basement-apartment set, dominated by a ring of lacy draperies that are intended, it seems, to draw a curtain around the memories Tom summons. Lange, Slater and Paulson are constantly yanking the curtains this way and that, and for no clear reason some of the scenes are played behind the drawn drapes or completely offstage. When we're deprived, for example, of the actress's expressions as she makes one of Amanda's funny-frantic phone solicitations, the impact is nil.
Even odder are the suggestions of an unnaturalness in Laura and Tom's closeness. (Slater, playing the younger sibling, looks a dozen years too old). They stroke and kiss and exchange soulful glances. Tom, who just can't keep his hands off his family, even gives Amanda a warm, consoling embrace.
The talented Paulson, terrific as Renee Zellweger's sidekick in the underappreciated Doris Day movie spoof "Down With Love," offers a garden-variety Laura, a bundle of demure glances. The scene with the Gentleman Caller (Josh Lucas) feels long under most circumstances; here it feels endless. As for Slater, a last-minute replacement in the cast, his performance lacks anything poetic. His Tom is more stevedore than budding scribe.
It should be difficult to go wildly awry on a work as formidable as "The Glass Menagerie." Sadly, this production makes it look easy.
The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. Directed by David Leveaux. Sets and costumes, Tom Pye; lighting, Natasha Katz; sound, Jon Weston; hair and wigs, David Brian Brown; music, Dan Moses Schreier. Approximately 2 hours 30 minutes. At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. Call 212-239-6200 or visit www.telecharge.com.
