STAGE REVIEW : Fragile ‘Menagerie’ at La Jolla : Theater: Playhouse production is spotty in first act, but much better in the second.

Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” can be as fragile as the image in its title.

We’re too aware of that fragility in the first act of Douglas Hughes’ staging at La Jolla Playhouse. But the second act is much better.

A case of opening night jitters may have been at least partially responsible for the problem in the first act. Whatever the cause, Marion Ross’ performance as Amanda Wingfield was none too assured.

There were misspoken words, oddly placed hesitations, repeated phrases. None of it stopped the play cold. But Amanda, of all people, should not have to grope for the right phrase.

Trained as a Southern belle, Amanda “developed a tongue to meet all occasions”--a claim that even her bitter son Tom cannot refute. So the minor slips of Ross’ tongue mattered.

Apart from her line readings, Ross’ vocal timbre isn’t quite rich enough for the role. It’s perfect for Amanda’s more fluttery moments--which are frequent--but it doesn’t have the darkness for her angrier moments. Some of her shouts are closer to squeals.

She does have a distinctive way of biting into the u sound. Words like chew , do , you and fuse sound almost multisyllabic. It’s funny, until it’s overdone.

Ross’ finest moment in the first act is without words. Just before intermission, Tom cautions her not to expect too much of her daughter Laura’s meeting with her first gentleman caller--and Ross’ eyes well up in an eloquent moment of heartbreak. Credit a sensitive edit as well as Ross--according to my version of the text, three expendable lines were sacrificed to make room for that moment.

Ross’ comic sense blossoms in Act II, when she puts on her show for the gentleman caller. She enters in a long, lemony gown that looks absurd, especially for this time and place (St. Louis, the Depression). But it might have passed for something swank in Amanda’s Mississippi Delta years--and she hasn’t been able to afford anything else since then. David Woolard did the costumes.

Ross teasingly ruffles and then straightens strategic areas of her dress for the benefit of Gentleman Jim, as her mouth unleashes a torrent of honeyed Southern charm. Suddenly, on opening night, Ross’ earlier hesitancy was gone.

This speech ushers in an exquisite rendition of the famous scene between Laura and Jim. With her hair down and in curls, Jane Adams’ Laura looks like a haunted portrait from a Victorian locket, and her initial horror over the meeting with Jim is palpable and painful. But a glimmer of hope begins to register on her features as the scene goes on. For his part, Matt Mulhern’s Jim is a blithely irresistible force, with charm enough to meet Amanda on her own turf. The unhappy ending of this duet hurts.

In Act I, Adams fades into the woodwork, as Laura was inclined to do, except for a novel introduction to the scene in which Amanda exposes her daughter’s typing-school truancy. To segue from the preceding scene, Hughes has Laura dance with one of her glass animals--until she’s interrupted by what sounds like marching jackboots, whereupon she rushes to her typing and resumes deceiving her mother. The harsh noise heralds the arrival of Amanda, in a snit.

Because Laura limps (albeit somewhat inconsistently in Act I) and later tells us that she has never danced, the scene is clearly a figment of her brother’s imagination, his dreamy memory of the grace he saw in his sister despite her handicap. It’s a sentimental interpretation--which flies in the face of the direction that Hughes told an interviewer he was taking. Still, it might work if not for the jackboot sound (designer: Michael Roth). Did Laura--or Tom--think of Amanda as a Nazi, or what?

It’s true that Andrei Both’s jagged apartment set, topped by a blue neon skyline, indicates that there were violent angles within Tom’s memories. But Randle Mell’s Tom doesn’t look quite as troubled as the set. Though he speaks the lines fluidly, he’s even more handsome than the Gentleman Caller--as if he could forget the warehouse and get a job as a model. His appearance is yet another piece of this “Menagerie” that seems slightly out of place.

* “The Glass Menagerie,” Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, UCSD campus, La Jolla, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends June 14. $23.75-$29.75. 534-3960. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes. Marion Ross: Amanda Randle Mell: Tom Jane Adams: Laura Matt Mulhern: Jim By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Douglas Hughes. Set by Andrei Both. Costumes by David C. Woolard. Lights by Peter Maradudin. Music and sound by Michael Roth. Dramaturgy by Elissa Adams. Stage manager Sandra Lee Williams.