Photos by Ralph Freso / Slideshow
Grand Canyon University’s theatre department will unpack a lot, from themes of isolation to illusion, in its final production of the season, “The Glass Menagerie,” opening tonight at 7:30 in the College of Arts and Media’s Black Box Theatre.
The Tennessee Williams classic follows the Wingfield family – Tom, Laura and their mother, Amanda – and how they navigate love, tragedy and abandonment while confined in a small, secluded apartment in Depression-era St. Louis.
“This play is like an onion. There are so many layers,” said director and theatre professor Claude Pensis. “We have life lessons in terms of isolation, communication, friendships, reaching out, being a part of the world, as opposed to being apart from the world. It is just an incredible veneer that you can see way deep down inside.”
Tom (Maverick Lemmon), the play’s narrator, dreams of leaving home and escaping his nagging mother, Amanda (Cora Epton), a fading Southern belle, to build a life of his own and pursue a writing career. But his guilt of leaving behind his fragile sister, Laura (Nia Hughes), holds him back from a new, liberating life outside of their apartment.
Based off a semiautobiographical story, Williams pays homage to his real sister, who struggled to meet the high social expectations their mother placed on her and to break through her mental battles after their father left them at a young age.
“The whole production is a memory play,” Epton said. “We are watching Tom’s memory, so things are a little bit off – the lighting is different, everything is slightly different because it is not true reality.”
Epton compares her preparation process to the intricacies of making lace – how, when you are weaving and interlacing the threads, you can’t tell what you’re making until the final product is done. Rehearsals felt like that – she couldn’t see how the pieces and characters fit together until the final week of rehearsals and the cast ran through the whole show.
“It is interesting as a 19-year-old playing a 45-year-old Southern mother,” Epton said. “But it has been incredible building from the ground up, not quite knowing what the final product is going to be.”
The Black Box Theatre, with its small stage and a slim cast of only four characters, fosters the familial intimacy of the play and heartfelt emotions commonly experienced in family relationships.
Themes like isolation and living in the present and letting go of the past cultivated transformational conversations that the cast said challenged them to not only step into their roles temporarily, but it changed them permanently.
“Each of the characters is struggling to hold on to something from the past,” Lemmon said. “As an audience member, you can see that each one of them is battling with that. It hangs over their subconscious.
“Their dad leaves, which leaves Tom to be that fatherly role. Tom is expected to live his life in that manner but never gets to live a life of his own. It’s a common experience many have lived and can relate to.”
Marked by universality and specificity, the 1930s classic carries instrumental significance in today’s society and culture. Pensis encouraged the cast to reflect on the themes the play teaches and intends for the audience to take away.
Still reeling from quarantine and physical separation brought on by COVID-19, the cast reflected on how the isolation experienced from the recent period is closely related to the isolation in which the Wingfield family is trapped.
While Tom, who works in a shoe warehouse, tries to seek adventure away from his family life, Laura hides within the four walls of their apartment and retreats to a world of fantasy and imagination through her collection of glass animals. Their mother, Amanda, is stuck in her romanticized past, often reminiscing of what once was when she grew up in the South, and is struggling to accept the present.
Each are isolated in their own mental state and fail to move forward.
“One of the biggest questions we asked is why choose this play in the first place,” said junior Brandon Erickson-Moen, who portrays Jim. “One of our greatest inventions and greatest setbacks today is the invention of the internet. There is no more interaction between humans and real connections, which leads to isolation.”
Jim O’Connor is Tom’s co-worker, who gives a glimpse of the real world to the Wingfields. He shows romantic interest in Laura but stuns the family when he suddenly disappears and breaks Laura’s heart. Though painful, Erickson-Moen says there is a valuable lesson, even in heartache, as it teaches the family how life opportunities come and go.
“It is a sad play, but it shows the reality, and it was an outlet for Tennessee Williams to portray his grief and the actions of his own life,” Hughes said. “No line in this play is a throwaway line. There are layers upon layers, it is like an onion of decisions.
"As a college actor, it is good to learn to choose plays like this that require us to dive deeper into our characters and understand it is important to keep art real.”
GCU staff writer Izabela Fogarasi can be reached at Izabela.Fogarasi@gcu.edu
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IF YOU GO
What: "The Glass Menagerie"
Where: Black Box Theatre, Grand Canyon University
When: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, as well as 7:30 p.m. March 28-29 and 2 p.m. March 30
Tickets: Click here.
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