Sally Field & Joe Mantello star in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.
Two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field and two-time Tony Award winner Joe Mantello star in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Also starring Finn Wittrock and Madison Ferris. Tony winner Sam Gold directs.
The Glass Menagerie is the play that brought a brilliant young writer named Tennessee Williams to national attention when it premiered on Broadway in 1945. More than seventy years later, Williams' most personal work for the stage continues to captivate and overwhelm audiences around the world.
Sam Gold is the latest to pick up the next-to-nothing-is-more approach to Tennessee Williams. The American director's 'Glass Menagerie' opened Thursday at the Belasco Theatre, and it is pure Gold in every sense of the word. Has there ever been a barer stage on Broadway? The four actors enter from a side door on the orchestra level, with Sally Field pushing newcomer Madison Ferris in a wheelchair. What follows is one of the evening's many silent longueurs as Ferris, a woman with muscular dystrophy, negotiates the small staircase to the stage to take her place there. Occasionally, she walks by pushing her buttocks in the air and taking steps on her feet and hands. But for most of the production, this Laura sits on the floor or in the wheelchair. It's odd to begin a review by concentrating on an actor's physical challenges, but that first long ascent to the stage pretty much establishes Field's tortured Amanda Wingfield and, in essence, Gold's take on 'The Glass Menagerie.' It's a daring, masterful stroke, and one that redefines the Williams classic, and will influence every 'Menagerie' to come in the next few years.
Sally Field's citric, unvarnished performance as Amanda Wingfield is so riveting you may find your focus pulled from the larger picture created by Sam Gold's shocking revival of The Glass Menagerie, which opened tonight at Broadway's Belasco Theatre. Stripped bare of the accoutrements of poverty Williams so carefully articulated in the notes for his 1945 'memory play,' Gold (Fun Home) takes more seriously Williams' prefatory caution that 'everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation' free of the 'exhausted theater of realistic conventions...'
Videos