Cheap Seats Familiar economic problems fill The Glass Menagerie

Welcome to Cheap Seats, where every Thursday we’ll talk to folks behind the scenes of the stage events opening around town, in order to give you a flavor of the productions that won’t be found in any of the promo materials.

The Glass Menagerie, Bartell Theatre, Oct. 1-16

Promo pull quote: “The Glass Menagerie is the story of a family desperate to break free of the burdens of their past and their present. Each escapes into their own personal ‘glass menagerie’ as a means of eluding the pain of their own—and each other’s—existence.”

What it’s really about: The Tennessee Williams-penned Glass Menagerie, like a lot of Williams’ work, concerns itself with social status, and how one family—mother, son, and daughter—used to have it but doesn’t anymore. It follows only four characters (including family-friend Jim O’Connor) as they come to terms with growing up, leaving home, and dealing with their lives apart from the family. “The whole family is like a big spider web, any time you touch a part of it, all the rest of it shakes,” director Joan Brooks said. “Any pressures on one member of the family are going to affect all the other members.”

Fun fact: Even though The Glass Menagerie is more than 60 years old, its central theme of economic strife bearing down on a family has a good parallel between the economic problems in the late ’30s (when the play was set) and today. To make sure no one misses that, Brooks inserted a single line into Williams’ original text: “Tom is talking to the audience, and he says because the people of the country had ignored their knowledge of what was happening, ‘their fingers were being pressed down on the fiery Braille of a dissolving economy,’” Brooks said. “And I have him look at the audience and say, ‘Sound familiar?’ And that’s one of the reasons [we] chose to do this play, because there’s still a lot of economic pressure on families.”

Best reason to try it: In addition to the Madison Theatre Guild’s production featuring four veteran Madison theater actors—Michael Andersen, Kate Ewings, Casey Grimm, and Judy Kimball—Glass Menagerie is one of the most revered plays of the 20th century, written by one of America’s greatest playwrights. “One of the best things about great plays is that they are continually fresh and continually new,” Brooks said. “And this has the dynamism of some of the greatest writing in American theater.”