JESSICA ONI
Staff Writer
In an age hypnotized by all things big, bold and bright, encounters with simplicity are becoming increasingly rare.
Beginning Tuesday, Pepperdine’s Fine Arts Division will offer a weeklong escape to the simplicity of the past, as they present Tennessee Williams’ classic drama “The Glass Menagerie.”
“It’s a classic of the American theater,” said Dr. Bradley Griffin, the play’s director and a professor in the Fine Arts Division. “We hadn’t done this show in 25 years.”
Following a widely successful premiere at Chicago’s Civic Theatre in 1944, “Menagerie” moved to New York’s Playhouse Theatre, where it ran for a remarkable 563 shows. Since its opening, the play has been adapted for screen and reinvented on stage countless times. The stripped simplicity of Williams’ style can best be described using the words of the man himself.
“I visualize it as a reduced mobility on the stage … motions honed down to only the essential or significant,” he once wrote.
Williams’ goal of minimalism can also be seen in the bare list of the play’s. The cast has four characters: Amanda Wingfield (the mother), Laura Wingfield (the daughter), Tom Wingfield (the son and narrator), and Jim O’Connor (the gentleman caller).
“It’s a classic examination of a dysfunctional family,” Griffin said. “They’re all wanting to escape, but they’re all looking in the wrong places.”
The play begins casually, as Tom offers the audience a direct, informal synopsis of the plot. He lives in a small apartment with a mother who is afraid to lose the romanticized vitality of her youth and a sister who uses a supposed physical disability to hide from the world around her. Junior Brooks Smith plays Tom in the
production.
“He’s kind of a romantic,” Smith said. “He has a very liberal imagination, which makes him dissatisfied with his life.”
The role of Amanda, Tom’s mother, is played by junior Jesse DuBois.
“Amanda used to be a Southern belle,” DuBois said. “She’s the opposite of what a Southern belle would be; it’s difficult for her,” she said.
Senior Nina Brissey plays Laura in the production, and senior Zac Hoogendyk plays Jim, the gentleman caller.
Each member of the Wingfield family fights for the unachievable acceptance of the other two. Unable to find any meaningful recognition from each other, the three attempt to give meaning to their lives via outside sources: Amanda lives through exaggerated memories of her long-lost youth. Laura creates imaginary lives for the various pieces of her glass menagerie, and Tom escapes reality through the constructed lives he encounters at the movies.
The Wingfield’s redundant lives are set spinning one night when Tom brings Jim O’Connor, a friend from the warehouse where he works, home for dinner. Amanda dreams him up to be a “gentleman caller” and aims to urge on a relationship between him and her toxically timid daughter. What follows is a drawn out night filled with delight, disappointment and wasted drudgery.
“The play is Tom’s memory,” Smith said. “(It’s) the story of responsibility versus freedom.”
Though the theater department intends to stick true to the original script, Griffin said he didn’t want to merely replicate past versions of the classic drama.
“I knew I didn’t want to do a production that looked like every other production of ‘The Glass Menagerie,’” he said.
Rather, Griffin’s version of the play intends to offer the perspective of “looking through windows,” something he said each of the play’s characters is doing to a certain extent.
“It’s not like any of the movie (versions) I’ve seen,” DuBois said. “It’s a theatrical piece.”
Both DuBois and Smith agreed that they preferred a small cast to a large one.
“It’s a tightly knit ensemble,” Griffin said. “We’ve done one-on-one rehearsals. The cast is phenomenal.”
Part of the appeal of the Wingfield family is that they could represent any family.
Griffin said the characters and subjects dealt with in “Menagerie” are “something the college audience can identify with.”
“It’s kind of like looking through a dirty window,” Griffin said.
“Menagerie” will run Jan. 31 though Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. in Lindhurst Theatre, with a matinee at 2 p.m. on Saturday.
As the cast and crew prepare for next week’s opening, DuBois offers the public a glimpse into her favorite aspect of the play:
“Everything changes from beginning to end,” she said.
01-26-2006
