Review
Brenda Tavakoli
Senior Staff Writer
A crocheted tablecloth. An antique victrola spinning mournful swing music. A calico quilt innocuously tossed on a tiny twin bed. With these props, dim lighting and some comic relief, The Glass Menagerie lulls its audience into a sense of complacency only to smash it, leaving any sense of ease on the floor like so many shards of shattered glass.
The A.D. Players' adaptation of the Tennessee Williams classic remains faithful to the original work. Though set in a decadefaded into the realm of memory, this play remains as powerful as when it was first staged.
A story of human conflict, frailty and family tragedy, the drama centers on the Wingfield family. Amanda Wingfield, her son Tom and her daughter Laura live in a cramped St. Louis flat. The family exists without the pleasure of a father figure's company. The elder Wingfield, a telephone man who "fell in love with long distance," left the family years earlier. Yet his specter haunts them all, as evidenced by his grinning photo that gazes at them smugly from one wall.
The characters cannot, or refuse to, let go of the past; the one who longs for a future, Tom, finds himself torn between his duties to his family and himself.
Amanda (Jeannette Clift George) is an aging Southern belle whose glory days have clearly passed. She bides her time reminiscing in an exaggerated drawl and meddling in her offspring's affairs, or lack thereof.
Shondra Marie plays Laura Wingfield, the fragile, meek daughter with a sizable confidence deficit. She passes her days playing old records her father left behind and tending to her precious menagerie of glass.
Tom (Lawrence V. Rife), in contrast, has a heart full of hopes but a torn spirit. He despises his warehouse job and longs to live an adventurous life as a writer, yet guilt obliges him to remain and support his mother and sister.
Amanda wants the best for her children but like many parents takes this desire to the extreme. She projects her need for male attention onto Laura, whom she