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Taking him at his word, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's haunting new production of The Glass Menagerie makes full use of Tennessee Williams' published production notes to remake this squarely mid-20th century American drama into a 21st century play, which is to say, almost a movie. Williams originally wrote the play for the camera, while working for MGM in Los Angeles, in the early 40's. He rewrote his short story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," as a screenplay titled The Gentleman Caller, and finally met with success as the play we know.  His writing here is so powerful (the monologues, especially) that other aspects which lead to the play's intensity, such as his elaborate lighting and design cues, are overlooked or somehow seen as secondary: one might think a simple staged reading, with the playwright supplying all the entangled truths, would still strip bare the play. But Williams understood The Glass Menagerie to be a "memory play," and the specific directions ("LIGHT upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early portraits of female saints or madonnas"), as evinced by the Rep's revival which opened January 16th, prove that the naturalistic quality we associate with Williams' dramas comes more from the well-known movie adaptations than the original plays. It is something of an event to have Williams as Tennessee Williams wanted.

The acclaimed Chicagoan director, David Cromer (whose unusual movie-like musical The Adding Machine used projection and other video elements to enhance a story set in the 1920's on its path to both regional and Off Broadway success, in 2008), has made the set and the lighting into an integral whole. The handsome new Copaken Stage in the H&R Block Building, in downtown Kansas City, is ideal for Cromer's exploded set, with the ceiling and one wall hanging up and away, giving the audience a view like that of a dollhouse sliced open; the ceiling is used, just enough, for video projection, for instance when a character stands in front of a mirror-by allowing the audience to see both the back and the front of a disembodied character, there is an eerie sense of seeing through the mirror (another sense of slicing open to see the inside of something). Williams was always a psychologically heavy writer; Cromer and his crew (Jeffrey Cady on lighting and projection, Collette Pollard on sets, and Janice Pytel on costumes) add to, but never add on, what makes The Glass Menagerie iconic even now. The play has fresh room to breathe.

At heart, it is the eternal story of a family living together physically but living individually in their own dream worlds. It could be played for laughs (Tracy Letts' blistering funny August: Osage County) or for the saturnine effect of Chekhov, but its starkness comes through the more Williams' autobiographical elements are brought to light: like the Wingfields in the play, the Williamses lived in St. Louis for a time as young Tom and his sister Rose were growing up. And like the absent father in the play, Williams' father, a traveling businessman, eventually made his travels permanent. Williams wrote himself into both the characters of Tom, the grown son who works at a warehouse by day (Williams worked in a shoe warehouse) and goes to the movies (and drinks) by night, and his younger sister, Laura, shy, withdrawn to her victrola and her tiny glass figurine collection. Laura's impediment-her bad foot, which causes her to clomp-was actually Tennessee Williams' own problem; when Laura speaks of the self-conscious humiliation of walking into high school singing class after everyone was seated (and walking up all those steps), the playwright's bitterness feels immediate. Something of Laura's mystery is also derived, no doubt, from Rose's schizophrenia; the play's pin-drop moments occur whenever Laura turns quiet or begins to shake uncontrollably: the audience is with her onstage, but (like the other characters) forever shut out of her inner self, as much as everyone wishes to help her.

The adult Wingfield children are nurtured (or tortured) by their mother Amanda; she dominates the stage much like the mother in the Sondheim musical Gypsy. Played by Annalee Jefferies-to Derek Hasenstab's Tom and Susan Bennett's Laura-Amanda is a volatile well-meaning matriarch, of the sort that launched a thousand artists and neurotic grownups. She is precisely the mother figure who provoked Portnoy's complaint in the 1960's, and whose variation will play out as long as good intentions backfire. Torn between living in the past when she entertained gentleman callers in absurdly ornate gowns, and the present, with a husband-ghost and two half-there children, Amanda pivots from guardian angel to prison guard in a turn of a moment. Her insistence on the children making something of themselves-an immigrant desire already hackneyed by the 1930's, but still essential to the American Dream-is undone by her iron-handed loving. By play's end, Tom, who intermittently turns to the audience to narrate a bit of the past or of the future, will leave home (like Tennessee Williams did): how many children leave because of a parent's wrongly-directed affection?

The whole play is set up for the second act, when a coworker of Tom's is invited to dinner, at Amanda's urging, so that Laura will be able to entertain her own gentleman caller. The mother is blind to her daughter's protestations but Tom is not, and yet he does nothing to stop the coming train-wreck when Laura's would-be suitor, Jim O'Connor (Kyle Hatley), turns out to be the same Jim of their high school years, and especially of Laura's: she still keeps her yearbook out, with the pages with his photographs bookmarked. Williams never presses the issue. Events unfold hesitantly, delicately, yet inexorably. In his description of Tom in the published play, Williams notes simply, "His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity." Williams' sentimentality is pitiless; it makes Laura's breakdown all the more piercing, and focuses a grimmer spotlight on Amanda. The four actors never push their characters' motivations to make sure the person in the last row follows along. Like an intricately threaded quilt, with the lighting accentuating now Laura, now Amanda, now Laura and Jim, the play's depth of pain emerges, naturally. (Asked once what brought him to New Orleans, Williams replied, "St. Louis.")

Acting in revivals is supposed to be liberating but it is always treacherous: setting oneself up against expectations can be a path to failure. Amanda was originally played by Laurette Taylor, then in London in 1948 by Helen Hayes, and subsequent film, stage and television versions have engaged the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, Jessica Lange, and Sally Field. Tom has been portrayed by Kirk Douglas, Rip Torn, even Christian Slater. The Wingfield family are such elemental roles that one can see why so many actors put their imprints on the characters: yet as written by Williams, these three, each crippled emotionally, demand wholly immersing oneself in the character. Lange's performance, for example, was criticized as too sensuous and beguiling to properly make Amanda the 'Mommie Dearest' that Williams envisioned her as. Ms. Jefferies makes Amanda into part Lady Macbeth, part Our Lady of Sorrow (or really, of Self-Pity). Her flirting with Jim, assigning her children to the sideline, increases her monstrousness, even as it makes Amanda memorable for her (self-) destructiveness.

Laura's part, the easiest to overplay, is realized by Susan Bennett with grace and attention to her character's inability to be herself, rather than an idealized, infantilized child in her mother's and brother's-and therefore her-eyes. Ms. Bennett's greatest moment comes toward the end, after the lights have gone out at dinner and Tom and Amanda have moved into the kitchen, leaving Jim to talk with Laura and discover that she is the same girl he used to call Blue Roses, mishearing her explain of an illness that kept her home from school. They sit together on the floor, try to dance, and-before Jim ruins her night and possibly her life with a surprise announcement-even kiss, briefly. The lights contract to Laura, and at one point Jim leans back onto the floor so that all we see is Laura, listening. The way that she begins to light up, as it were, talking more than ever, showing humor and intelligence that the withdrawn sister and daughter never revealed to her brother or mother, makes the sudden ending still overwhelming after sixty-three years, as the lights go out on the Wingfield family. Think twice before looking too closely into your own mirror.

REVIEW
The Kansas City Repertory Theatre
The Glass Menagerie
Runs through February 8
Copaken Stage
13th and Walnut, in the H&R Block Building.
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online to www.kcrep.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.