The play is about a dysfunctional family, abandoned 16 years ago by a husband and father, struggling to survive during a time of economic turmoil. [break]
The desperation of these individuals, and the tension between people who love each other but drive each other to madness, is staged beautifully in this play.
Director Eelum Dixit and cast present a powerful rendition of Tennessee Williams’ heart-wrenching classic ‘The Glass Menagerie’ that holds strong from its melancholy beginning to its tragic end.
Dixit himself is in the role of the play’s narrator Tom Wingfield, a writer haunted by the memory of the family that as a younger man he could not help but abandon (as his father did before him).
At the time during which this “dimly lit memory play” is set – the Great Depression era of the 1930s American South – Tom is an aspiring poet of 22 who feels trapped in the warehouse job that he holds to support his overbearing mother and fragile sister.
Dixit’s rendition of Tom is agonizing. He performs brilliantly the conflicting interests and the perhaps unavoidable escapism of a young man who loves his sister deeply, but who cannot bear the life that would keep him faithful to her.
In the role of Tom’s mother Amanda is Riva Thapa, who makes her theatrical debut with this production.
Thapa conveys well the tension between Amanda’s flamboyance and her instincts of a survivor. Raised as a member of the American South’s plantation aristocracy, Amanda falls on hard times because of the husband she chooses: a man who drinks and gambles, and then abandons her and their children completely.
Amanda feels her family’s current situation, compounded by its experience of the Great Depression, as a painful indignity, and schemes and struggles in vain to secure better lives for her children.
Thapa’s Amanda flits tempestuously between anger, joyousness and desperation.
While her rapid-fire speech helps conjure Amanda’s tiresome and incessant chatter, one sometimes wants for Thapa to slow down, as this may better convince the audience that her words are indeed coming to her in the moment in which they are neurotically spoken.
Shristi Ghimire plays the shy, fragile, and potentially mentally-unstable Laura, who cannot bear to do anything that brings her in contact with unfamiliar people and who lives instead in a dream world populated by the glass animal figurines that she collects.
Ghimire has an incredibly expressive face, body and voice, whether her character is speaking affectionately of her glass collection, is petrified at the idea of facing her high school crush, or is trembling with fear as her mother and brother scream at each other over her head.
The final character in this play is Jim, the childhood crush who appears unwittingly in the Wingfields’ living room when Amanda finally convinces Tom to bring home a young man from the factory to meet Laura, hoping that the meeting might develop into a romantic involvement, and then finally the financial security of marriage.
Arpan Sharma as Jim is easy to like but not overwhelmingly charming, and thus befitting of this arbitrary “emissary from the world of reality” who has, through no qualities of his own, become an object of obsession for the Wingfields.
Given certain clues in Jim’s lines, however, (his power-hungriness; the coarse way in which he speaks of his ex-girlfriend; his declaration that he always spits out his gum when the flavor runs out, implying a similar way with women) one is left feeling that Sharma’s character would have benefitted from being played with a bit of a harsh edge.
While Laura’s fragility is both emblematic of and dramatizes the Wingfields’ precarious situation, and Jim provides the crucial turn to the plot in the penultimate scene, when both Amanda’s and Laura’s dreams seem to lie shattered like the glass unicorn that he breaks, it is the tension between Amanda and Tom that propels the play forward.
Amanda’s constant nagging, her hawkish watch over her children’s every move, and the delusional optimism that she smothers them with, make the Wingfield apartment (represented here by a split-level stage) palpably claustrophobic.
As much as does the need to provide for his mother and sister in hard times, this apartment, dominated by an overbearing mother, comprises the “two by four situation” in which Tom feels trapped.
The fight scenes between Tom and Amanda are incredibly charged, and the moments of tender understanding that they share are all the more sweet because of the bitter violence of the rest of their interactions.
We are thus able to see in these characters people who care for each other but--given the circumstances, given the people they are, given how insurmountable the tragedy in which they are immersed seems to be--are unable to do what is right by the other.
The personal failings of Amanda and Tom, of whom their situations asks just too much, are perhaps the most poignant in this play full of failures.
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