The Glass Menagerie (starring Sally Field) NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it back together again...This is a production in which subtext elbows text out of bounds...Less a thought-through interpretation than a sustained scene-study class...On occasion, Mr. Gold’s interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you see your past at its distorted worst. But even that vision is not sustained."
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"Sam Gold’s starkly compelling, bravely executed revival...It’s rare for a Broadway audience to face an iconic stage classic so radically and brutally 'interrogated.' For that reason alone, it is imperative that you see it...For all this production’s cerebral choices and cold, distancing design, the emotional impact is there: love, disgust, betrayal, shame and the longing for understanding. Yes, 'Menagerie' is memory, and I’ll not soon forget this shockingly fresh frame and angle."
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"A rigorously de-romanticized, contemporary rethinking by director Sam Gold...It is nakedly, bracingly theatrical...By paring everything extraneous from the mise en scène, Gold and his designers are preparing the audience to embrace the exploratory nature of the production...Purists may yelp. But...it’s a 'Glass Menagerie' that restores what must have been the shock of the original while also reframing our ideas about Williams as an imperfect person and a pitiless autobiographer."
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"I couldn’t tell if my confused, hurt fury was caused by the pretentious and callous staging I had just witnessed or if my anger was a result of feeling robbed of the beauty of Williams’s script...Gold makes clear his desire to leave his mark on the play—at all costs, including the play itself...The actors tear through the script with little care for what is being said or how to say it...Gold puts a stop to the language by inserting himself and his own intellect where the Wingfields should be."
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" In a bold experiment that's often riveting but seldom wholly satisfying, director Gold rips away illusion like a bandage off a wound...Despite some fine work from the actors, you end up being moved more by the sheer resilience of the writing than by the intrusive presentation...The result is one of the most hauntingly lyrical dramas in the American canon transformed into a blunt dysfunctional family play in which indelible melancholy gets trampled by anger and bitterness."
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"Gold applies an innovative yet back-to-basics take on an old standard, and the result is a stunning, emotionally rending production. It doesn’t hurt that he has stacked the deck with acting talent...The minute Tom delivers his opening narration with the house lights up, it’s obvious that this is a much-needed fresh perspective on the show...Though Gold's vision might not be for everyone, there’s no arguing that it’s a bold, creative one. The rare revival that breathes new life into a classic."
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"A most unlikely candidate for deconstruction. But that doesn’t deter director Sam Gold from laying hands on this gem and subjecting it to a severe reinterpretation...Williams’s play has been stripped to the gut, shorn of its lyrical accoutrements and reduced to its raw text. But a strategy that might illuminate other dramas disregards the fact that these embellishments are intrinsic to the writer’s plays...Understated in the muted performances, the poetry is not quite lost, but diluted."
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"Mr. Gold is apparently unhappy with reality—the play’s reality. So he creates a world of artifice more suited to his tastes...The results almost eclipse the two actors who lead the cast...Ferris barely hints at Laura’s shifting wisps of hope, shame and despair; neither do we get a sense of a fully developed private world...The night I saw her, Field was a monotone hysteric with time out for creepy sentimentality...Mr. Gold’s preferred figurine here is not glass, but leaden and sodden."
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