Review: THE GLASS MENAGERIE Makes New Memories at Gloucester Stage

Tennessee Williams found fame with 1944’s “The Glass Menagerie,” which is considered to be one of the gifted playwright’s most notable works along with “A Streetcar Named Desire, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Sweet Bird of Youth.” That status is being affirmed once again by the magnificent production of the drama now at Gloucester Stage through June 28.

In the memory play, Williams brings to life the characters of Amanda Wingfeld and her two adult children, Tom and Laura, using autobiographical elements from his own life and the lives of his controlling mother Edwina and his mentally and physically challenged sister Rose. In real life, Williams is said to have had a contentious relationship with his mother while maintaining a lifelong devotion to his sister, also named Rose, who had schizophrenia and was institutionalized for much of her adult life.

Since its first Broadway production, Amanda – the role legendarily created by Laurette Taylor – has been played on stage and in feature films and television by some of the finest actresses of the past century, including Helen Hayes, Maureen Stapleton, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Booth, Jessica Tandy, Joanne Woodward, Julie Harris, and Jessica Lange. In the summer of 2001, Elizabeth Ashley top-lined a Hartford Stage Company production that played the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge.

The 2013 revival’s out-of-town tryout also played the Loeb, with A.R.T. founding company member Cherry Jones as Amanda, before transferring to Broadway’s Booth Theatre where Karen McDonald, another A.R.T. founding company member, was Jones’ understudy.

That would be heady company for just about anyone taking on this iconic role. But Adrianne Krstansky – unforgettable in so many area productions, most notably her heartbreaking, Elliot Norton Award-winning portrayal of Lola in “Come Back, Little Sheba” at the Huntington in 2015 – proves to be more than up to the challenge. Amanda can be overbearing, but Krstansky plays her with a determination that almost makes you want to root for her and shows what it was like to be a working-class single mother in the 1940’s when women weren’t even allowed to sign apartment leases.

Director Doug Lockwood has not only created a sensitive and movingly rendered production of this 80-year-old masterpiece, he has also gently tweaked its backstory. While Williams’ singularly poetic language remains intact, Amanda’s marriage is shown to be interracial, with the man who walked out on her seen in a portrait that hangs in the family living room. It is a detail that, while not reflected in the script, adds interest and meaning to the casting of De’Lon Grant as Tom.

After five years on Broadway in the musical “Come From Away” and touring internationally in “Jersey Boys,” Grant is now one of Boston’s most sought-after actors, thanks to leading roles in plays like “A Case for the Existence of God” and “Pru Payne,” and musicals including “The Scottsboro Boys,” all at SpeakEasy Stage Company. His reputation is sure to be further enhanced by his nuanced portrayal of Tom, a laborer at a shoe factory who, frustrated with his job, aspires to be a poet. Tom’s family obligations are not lost on him, but he still longs to leave home and forge his own independent life.

Grant captures that dichotomy and the heavy weight Tom carries while pondering his next move. And when Tom and Amanda face off, Grant and Krstansky’s body language makes clear that, while the mother and son’s disagreements are damaging, their love for one another is never destroyed. As Tom says, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

Liza Giagrande – a standout in the Umbrella Stage Company’s recent production of “The Spitfire Grill” – makes Laura, while still as fragile as the miniature crystal figurines she collects, more grounded than other portrayals have shown her to be. As the Gentleman Caller Jim O’Connor, a former high school classmate of Tom and Laura and onetime star athlete turned shipping clerk, 2025 Elliot Norton Award winner Patrick O’Konis (Apollinaire Theatre’s “Touching the Void”) is paired perfectly with Giagrande. The honesty of their respective performances infuses a masterfully executed act-two scene that finds Laura and Jim alone with each other with breathtaking naturalism.

Jenna McFarland Lord’s spare act-one set design for the Wingfelds’ St. Louis apartment is revealed when a gauzy drape surrounding the thrust stage is pulled back, with the same approach used to open act two which features a fully furnished living room with timeworn furniture, light fixtures, and rugs that wonderfully capture the period.

The production’s only minor missteps come from Nia Safarr Banks’ costume designs for Amanda, who wears a house dress and ankle socks with her high-heeled shoes in act one and, for act two’s dinner party, sports a gold lamé turban that looks like it was borrowed from a fortune teller. Banks does better by Grant, whose Tom is decked out in well-tailored and suits and black and white lace-up wingtips.