Rita Moreno Carries A Rep
31 May 2006

The diva shines in a refreshed Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie

Margaret Mitchell might have conceived the world's most famous portrayal of a Southern belle in her 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, but Tennessee Williams arguably created the nuttiest. Having grown up in St. Louis, Mo., under a bossy mother, whose idealized visions of the gallant South would later find their way into plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, Williams had firsthand experience of the archetype — and made ample use of it in his writing. (Even in later plays, such as 1975's Out Cry, the playwright's female characters betray Blanche DuBois–inspired touches.) Relying on the kindness of strangers or pinning their future happiness on the arrival of gentleman callers, the genteel ladies who ornament Williams' works like antique lace are as much overbearing prophets of doom as they are figments of a quaint and bygone era.

It is this balance of the delicate and the domineering that Rita Moreno gets just right in her performance as Amanda Wingfield, the aging matriarch at the center of Williams' 1944 drama The Glass Menagerie. Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production of this semi-autobiographical play set in 1930s St. Louis, about the fractured relationship between a pushy mother and her fragile daughter and maladjusted son, provides an eloquent platform for the Oscar-, Tony-, Grammy-, and Emmy-winning diva. Larger than life in gaudy frocks that have — like the spindly matron inside them — seen better days, Moreno's Amanda bounds about the cramped, threadbare set smothering and goading her children, yet Moreno never once overdoes it. What's more, the actor injects moments of hilarity into what's usually considered a gloomy and pathetic role.

Berkeley Rep's production has deservedly been extended twice, but its success can't simply be attributed to Moreno's star power. From Scott Bradley's claustrophobic set design, with its sparkling, translucent floor, to arresting performances from Emily Donahoe as Amanda's daughter, Laura, Erik Lochtefeld as her son, Tom, and Terrence Riordan as the Gentleman Caller, director Les Waters' staging takes the play beyond typical (and frequently dull) autobiographical revelations. (Commentators, audiences, and directors have long obsessed over the little-disguised parallels between the characters in The Glass Menagerie and their real-life counterparts; not only is Amanda a take on the playwright's own imperious mama, but Tom and Laura are similarly modeled on the frustrated writer and his emotionally disturbed sister, Rose.) The freshness of this show may have something to do with the director's background: Brought up in England, Waters had never seen the play before he directed it for Berkeley Rep. The result is something as delicate as a tiny glass animal and as potent as the myth of the upstanding South.