A good script can wear a lot of blunders. Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is such a text. Read by semi-literate high school students, it would still resonate. As such, La Boite's unfocused take on the classic is still broadly enjoyable. It just falls considerably short of the script's potential.
There are nice parts. Helen Howard's Amanda Wingfield is an almost faultless performance. If anything, her rendition of the overbearing matriarch of the play is a little too effective – coaxing more sympathy from the audience than the character deserves or demands. Elsewhere, there are some clever design tricks that will truly dazzle an audience. Unfortunately, the overall direction of the work is deeply flawed. Director David Berthold bizarrely tries to turn the play into some kind of farcical comedy. The innate tension and volatility of the script is neutered almost utterly in favour of forced laughs. Equally frustrating, only Howard nails the necessary regional American accent of the script. Kathryn Marquet and Jason Klarwein skew for completely different dialects. Stripped of both its (profoundly relevant) sense of locale and underlying narrative tensions, Berthold's ...Menagerie loses all propulsion and pathos. Only the script remains to be enjoyed.
