Blown Glass

Tom and Laura seem as dismayed by this production as I was.

It's hard to think of two sensibilities more opposed than those of Tennessee Williams and Trinity Rep's Fred Sullivan, Jr., so it's no surprise that nearly everything in Sullivan's production of The Glass Menagerie, which closed last weekend at Pawtucket's Gamm Theatre, felt subtly, but deeply, wrong. Sullivan (who just wrapped a riotous turn as Sir Toby Belch at Trinity) is all about smart, funny, cynical insights - he's the kind of guy who would immediately tear away the silk shades that Blanche DuBois slides over the lightbulbs in A Streetcar Named Desire. But while Williams is all about insight too - like every other great playwright - he's nevertheless quite attached to those silks; he identifies with Blanche, not her attackers.

Of course in The Glass Menagerie, the playwright himself - or rather his factotum, "Tom" (Tennessee's given name) both conjures and destroys the haunted reverie that protects his female protagonists, the fragile, self-conscious Laura Wingfield (Diana Buirski), and her notoriously overbearing, but equally fragile, mother Amanda (Wendy Overly). But do I really have to go into the story of The Glass Menagerie? Don't we all know it by now?

Well, apparently Sullivan doesn't, because in his version, Mom is a kind of drill sergeant and it's son Tom (Marc Dante Mancini) who's so delicate he practically jumps out of his skin whenever she barks an order. Their ongoing war, which should be recalled so ruefully by Tom as he narrates his "memory play," is here sketched as a bitter mother-son battle royale like the one in Awake and Sing! (which, perhaps uncoincidentally, was Sullivan's last directing assignment at the Gamm).

Sullivan's apparent attempt to pound the template from that play onto this one is frustrating in more than one respect, because Wendy Overly brings a high level of detail to Amanda's harangues - this could have been a great performance if it had been pitched at a more graceful, vulnerable angle. But as she bustles about Patrick Lynch's period set (the only aspect of the production that feels right), we never catch a hint of the fact that she, too, is living in a kind of dream designed to ward off reality (Laura and Tom are very much her children). The rest of the cast is likewise prone to pushing things a little too far, and in the wrong key. Mancini overemotes like mad, while Buirski, though certainly a passable Laura, relies too much on technical tricks to simulate the character's famous quiet luminousness. Kelby T. Akin is a bit better as the "Gentleman Caller" who briefly seems to woo her - at least once he calms down after some opening broadness that, like so much else in the production, seems pitched to some nonexistent upper balcony.

There are a few "twists" in the production that I suppose are worth mentioning. Sullivan has decided to break the role of Tom in two, so we get the much-older author, in the person of actor Sam Babbitt (who looks nothing like Mancini) occasionally delivering the lines that sail across the fourth wall - although mostly Babbitt just hangs out on the sofa, watching the action with an air of "been there, done that, found a pill for it." This turns out to be not quite as irritating as it sounds, but it does undermine the play's mysterious atmosphere, and Babbitt's jaded, bemused look doesn't exactly jive with the tone of his lines. (When he sighs that he's been more faithful to Laura than he ever intended, we don't believe him for a second.) Meanwhile the issue of Tom's (and Tennessee's) homosexuality is made clear with a brief tryst on the play's iconic fire escape. This Tom was played as such a nervous nelly that the scene was by and large superfluous, but strangely enough, in its reticence it was probably the subtlest moment in the whole production.

The darkest hour

Casey Seymour Kim in 4:48 Psychosis.

In Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, the "4:48" of the title refers to that darkest of hours, the one that comes just before dawn. For the despairing narrator of this long night of the soul, however, it also marks an unusual moment of clarity in her ongoing decline into fragmentation and pain. And for her, that promised dawn never comes; instead, in her last moment of clarity she chooses to end it all, with a simple, resigned command - "Open the curtain."

The playwright, of course, famously made the same decision - Kane took her own life just before 4:48 began rehearsals at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000. That last, terrible act both bestowed upon the script an undeniable aura of authenticity, and yet at the same time made it almost impossible to consider the play as a work of art rather than autobiography.

Of course sometimes the two forms can fuse - and it's hard to deny that this was the case with 4:48, particularly when so many of her friends could testify to Kane's long struggle with depression, and the fact that she repeatedly awoke at yes, 4:48 AM. Likewise no one familiar with Kane's oeuvre could have been surprised at the subdued intensity of her final opus. The literal horrors (cannibalism, rape, penile amputation) that had made her early work notorious had now been subsumed into night terrors. But while the weapons of 4:48 Psychosis may only be daggers of the mind, they nevertheless draw real blood.

And there's definitely a lot of the red stuff on the floor in the new Gamm Theatre production of this harrowing, but compelling, work (playing now through February 7). The piece is famously open to multiple interpretations; there are no "characters," or even stage directions; the text reads more like a poem than a play. Cast sizes have ranged in number from 1 to 12, but the Gamm Theatre's Artistic Director, Tony Estrella, has decided on two, structuring the piece around the implied relationship between Kane (here "Woman") and a nameless psychiatrist.

This decision, I'm afraid, has a downside: the emphasis on clinical mental illness slightly dilutes the poetic dimension of Kane's writing, as well as its evocation of deep inner disorientation and, yes, madness. This is essentially 4:48: Manic Depression, not 4:48 Psychosis. Still, perhaps sensing this gap, director Estrella supplies an ongoing stream of video imagery and lighting/sound effects that do evoke to some degree a sense of growing personal disintegration.

And on the plus side, the story-spine that Estrella has provided the script does seem to allow audiences access to its power; the nearly sell-out crowd I caught it with down in Pawtucket, of all places, seemed utterly absorbed in a work that no major theatre in New England has yet dared to produce. And in the central role, the fearless Casey Seymour Kim did limn Kane's brand of dark with a twitchy intelligence, an unguarded reserve of emotion, and yes, even a playful wit (the play is often mordantly funny); watching her was like watching a lonely soul with a single candle venture down every hallway of a truly terrifying haunted house. How this actress goes through this every night I've no idea.

But make no mistake: Sarah Kane's voice is indeed great enough - Beckett-like, but number, if needier - to have earned her a niche in what we call for lack of a better word "the canon," probably only the second female playwright we can confidently place there (Caryl Churchill is the other). That Kane is so rarely produced in this country counts as a scandal, and the fact that the Huntington and the A.R.T. have found time for the likes of Pirates! and Red Sox Nation while ignoring Blasted and Crave only underlines my long-standing complaint against their policies regarding "new work." Kane doesn't even count as "new" anymore, and yet our major theatres are still afraid of her; if only they could grow the same balls that the Sarah Feinstein-Gamm Theatre down in Pawtucket, R.I. seems to sport. And if only their audiences responded like the ones in Pawtucket and Providence! Just as I often feel at Trinity Rep, the connection between audience and actors at the Gamm was all but palpable; later, at the talkback, when one woman angrily protested, "Where was the nobility in this? Where was the hope?", another audience member confidently replied, "It was in our seeing this; it was in our being here." That made me want to weep almost more than anything that had come before in a production that I'd say represents required viewing for theatre lovers across the region.