By Carolyn Hayes Harmer

Posted: March 13, 2015 at 2:20 p.m.

A story of a family on the brink, painful memories of abandonment and deep wounds of the heart and psyche inflicted by one’s own family are universal pain inducers, which is why Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” not only gets constantly revived in the U.S., but has been translated into dozens of languages.

The current Puzzle Piece Theater production of the play, directed by Amanda Grace Ewing, appreciates the pliable nature of Williams’ text and its interpretation, creating a kind of theatrical sandbox in which the characters can dramatically frolic in pain and heartache that travels well beyond the confines of the playwrite’s American south.

Menagerie, first produced in 1945, put Williams on the map. Somewhat autobiographical for the Mississippi-born Williams, it is a “memory play”–a hybrid of narration and drama that flexes notions of truth and reality in the name of artistic exhibition. The term was coined by Williams, and Menagerie is considered the mother of all memory plays.

The story of this fragile family is conveyed via Tom Wingfield (D.B. Schroeder), who introduces himself to the audience as the narrator as well as a principal character. Tom looks back on his past self as a dissatisfied dreamer, yearning to make his way in the world as a writer, but held back by a demeaning warehouse job and the responsibility of providing for his family. Tom’s mother, Amanda (Connie Cowper) — when she’s not taking on some little miserable side work to compensate for her adult children’s sour prospects — alternates between sugar-coating her Southern- belle past and agitating her dejected progeny to aspire and achieve something in their lives. Even more worrisome to Amanda than the openly resentful Tom is his misfit older sister, Laura (Laura Heikkinen), who has a limp from a physical deformity as well as a debilitating terror of human interaction. Laura’s occasional stutter, refusal to get herself married or work at all, and an assortment of glass tchotchkes that makes up the entire rest of her personality make her the object of pity and frustration to no end. The misery of these three people shines like a beacon in this telling, as they scrape by and nurse empty hopes for an escape from a future even bleaker than their miserable present.

To reinforce the conceit of the memory play — that this is not absolute truth, but rather how the present Tom’s subjective mind perceives it — the production design takes corresponding liberties. Schroeder’s lighting design particularly unburdens itself from strict scene breaks and transitions however it sees fit, and sound design by Ewing plays up moments of aggression and sentimentality with a range of cinematic scores that push themselves boldly to the foreground.

The scenic design (also by Schroeder) is similarly elastic, but this may be a function of the size and shape of The Abreact performance space where the production is being staged. Even if done only conceptually, it’s difficult to fit an interior dining room, separate sitting room, outdoor terrace/fire escape, and theatrical neutral zone into one corner of a black-box theater, and unfortunately those constraints show. The finished design sets out key scenic zones that choke off the full sweep of the intended blocking and force numerous concessions and suspensions of disbelief, especially with respect to properly showing Laura’s disability.

Even in this small space, however, the actors play large with a heightened intensity that gorges on conflict. Schroeder’s Tom, as narrator, plays his current emotions close to the vest, even as the character he’s created wallows in the unfairness of his lot and brutally lashes out whenever he feels cornered. As Laura, Heikkinen ignores the other characters’ insistence on her sweet introversion in favor of a more abrasive, standoffish, eye-rolling kind of brooder. As the thankless mother of these two utterly hopeless cases, Cowper gets her digs in, but also makes a wonderfully embarrassing, flagrant display of thinly veiled hospitality when a young visitor comes for dinner. Set up as Laura’s last hope against spinsterhood, the unsuspecting Jim (Zach Hendrickson) shakes up the dynamic of the long second act, packaging his wisdom and condescending life lessons in the smiling insincerity of a blustering huckster.

The production is chockablock with choices in blatant opposition to the script, many of which are clearly and cleverly intentional; for example, the references to the “smiling” visage of an absent patriarch’s portrait, which contradict the exiting silhouette the viewer sees. Other inconsistencies lack the same payoff and may be loose ends rather than departures, such as Heikkinen’s period-adjacent costuming.

In all, this “Menagerie” is a playful exercise in the artificiality and pretense of theater. But here’s the thing about a sandbox: It’s the same when you leave it as when you entered. Viewers who can appreciate play for play’s sake will find it in abundance here. But for all its layering of interesting conceptual risks over a malleable modern-classic text, the production’s forays into memory don’t always necessarily speak to what these memories — or reviving them — means.

SHOW DETAILS:
“The Glass Menagerie”
Puzzle Piece Theatre
Abreact Performance Space, 1301 West Lafayette Detroit, MI 48226
8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, March 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28
2 p.m. Sunday, March 15, 22, 29
$20
313-303-8019
www.puzzlestage.org