Nancy Palk, Gemma James-Smith, Stuart Hughes in Soulpepper's production of The Glass Menagerie.
Reviewed:
The Glass Menagerie, Soulpepper Theatre Company, until Sept. 1o
The Kreutzer Sonata, Soulpepper Theatre Company, until Aug. 11
Young Centre for the Performing Arts
Soulpepper is referring to The Glass Menagerie as the “first great memory play,” but Tennessee Williams’ work is as much about the future as it is about the past. From the youthfully optimistic gentleman caller to the ever-nostalgic Amanda Wingfield, Glass Menagerie pits the always distant and anticipated American dream against the fraught plight of its characters. Soulpepper’s fantastic first production of the play captures the mix of humour, sentimentality, and sorrow that has made it a classic.
Glass Menagerie centres on the Wingfield family—mother Amanda and children Tom and Laura. The father has been out of the picture for years; he was, as his wife and children describe him, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distance.” The play’s plot is driven by Amanda’s continuous attempts to find a husband for the shy and disabled Laura. More generally, Williams shows us one family’s attempts to get ahead in life with minimal resources.
The star of the show is Nancy Palk, who plays Amanda in all her well-meaning but overbearing glory. Amanda is the centre point of the play: the impetus behind most of what happens and the foil against which the other characters develop. Palk’s performance traverses the many layers and moods that characterize Amanda’s relationship to her children: the guilt, manipulation, and bossiness, but also, just often enough, the sincere adoration. Most importantly, Palk infuses the character with an energy that makes her endearing even as she drives Tom and Laura up the wall.
If Palk stands out, however, Gemma James-Smith’s performance as Laura is equally impressive for its understated excellence. Constantly upstaged by her mother and brother during the first half, Laura becomes the centre of attention in the second act during her long, pivotal scene with the gentleman caller. The manner in which Laura slowly opens up to him, only to retreat suddenly back into her shell, is a wonder to watch, one of those wonderful instances where you move and breathe with the character on stage.
Williams’ florid language is in full display in Glass Menagerie, especially in Tom’s opening and closing monologues. With such overt sentimentalism already present in the words, the addition of a melancholic score sometimes leaves Soulpepper’s production at risk of crossing over into schmaltz. Stuart Hughes’ performance as Tom, meanwhile, often gets too taken in by Palk’s energy, trying to match it punch for punch rather than playing against it.
But these are small tarnishes on an otherwise deeply moving production, one which captures the play’s timeless dilemma between what people hope for in life and what they eventually get. Williams had as high hopes as anyone about what a good life could be, but he was equally aware of the sacrifices that veer so many people away from it, of how past glories can deepen present disappointment, and of how, as Amanda tells Tom, “the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret.”
One person who surely would not have been a fan of the score in Glass Menagerie, especially of its most sentimental moments, is Yuri, the character in Soulpepper’s one-man show and Tolstoy adaptation, The Kreutzer Sonata. Yuri bemoans how music hypnotizes the listener and transports a person against his will into a foreign emotional state. Music, Yuri believes, is the opiate of the masses.
Ted Dykstra is the adapter and performer of Kreutzer. As he told us in a recent interview, his adaptation emphasizes Yuri’s views on music more than the story does, although ultimately the general themes of the two works coincide. Through Yuri, a bad-tempered and jealous man, Dykstra explores the firm control we tend to desire over our surroundings and ourselves, and the numerous things that can completely derail that from ever coming true.
As a performer, Dykstra has an unfortunate tendency to reach for overdrive at each emotional peak of the story. In fact, when the spirited passages from Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata play behind him, Dykstra falls prey to exactly what Yuri fears: he is raised to the same fervent emotional heights as the piece when a bit more control would have helped the performance as a whole. As it stands, Yuri’s story loses part of its force. Overblown as it is, it becomes an almost fantastical story that the audience can judge and sometimes snicker at from a safe distance, pleased to think that the story is too exaggerated to ever be true.
This very weakness, however, then plays into the performance’s main strength: its ending. Dykstra has reformatted Tolstoy’s story in order to provide a chilling twist, one which suddenly reveals the full heft of Yuri’s story and so leaves the audience with the weight of several ethical questions hanging over their heads. At the very least—and this is quite something for a performance that is nothing more than one man sitting in a chair talking for an hour—Kreutzer Sonata is far from boring and very close to riveting, especially if you come into it with little previous knowledge of the original novella’s plot. Kreutzer Sonata has its flaws, but it also has the power of Tolstoy’s words, an asset Dykstra rarely fails to use to full effect.
