The Glass Menagerie

Director Hagan’s rendition of the textbook memory play—Williams’s autobiographical study of a family fettered by a drab St. Louis apartment and a mother’s oppressive memories of better times—has much to recommend it. Start with the design: Hagan’s shabbily appointed set, with abstracted fire-escape gangways hemming in on every side, feels just claustrophobic enough to be the way narrator Tom remembers it. The interplay among the scenic design, Shelley Strasser Holland’s subtle lighting and Mike Tutaj’s video projections—which threaten to distract but instead evoke the associative nature of memory—is a delight.

Reiter’s Amanda Wingfield, the frustrated fading belle, is both mercurial and precise; every moment of her performance feels considered but natural. Dastmalchian’s sharply drawn Tom effectively hints at his character’s inner longings without making a showy actor’s spectacle of them. Falevits, as gentleman-caller Jim, is a charming optimist, entirely believable as a young man whose golden adolescence hasn’t made the transition to golden adulthood.

But if these three performances inhabit the same plane, Batty’s runs perpendicular. Her unsettlingly affected turn as Laura, Tom’s painfully shy sister, is a near-cartoon of bug-eyed childishness and breathy hysteria. In the ought-to-be-tender interaction between Laura and Jim, in which he almost convinces her that she’s special, she’s closer to special needs. Hagan’s failure to match Batty’s tenor to his production’s grounded tone makes the memory play less memorable.