A ‘Glass’ of Medicine

Because Americans are almost congenitally reluctant to face the realities of disappointment and failure, we need to see Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” from time to time, as a kind of curative.

Like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” it should be required national viewing because it speaks to the national soul.

It speaks, that is, when it’s done well. Too often, the play’s treatment of faded elegance and thwarted imaginations is translated into sentimental mush or an antebellum quaintness that pushes it close to museum theater.

In most ways, director Tim Vandehey’s revival at the Camino Real Playhouse--care of Changing Masks Theatre Company--is aware of the play’s poetry of loss.

The tale of shy, pleurisy-afflicted Laura Wingfield (Darri Kristin)--who is prodded by her delusional, overbearing but life-force-of-a-mother, Amanda (LaDonna DeBarros), to meet a “gentleman caller”--would seem so familiar as to dare our interest--and the cast’s.

At first, that apathy seems to be front and center, as Laura’s footloose writer brother Tom (Michael Cunningham) introduces us to his family and Depression-era St. Louis.

Cunningham speaks Williams’ richly dense prose like it’s a chore, as if the responsibility for establishing the play’s social context were too heavy a load. Yet it is precisely this critical opening speech that makes “The Glass Menagerie” a play about America rather than just about the Wingfields’ stifling, enclosed domestic world.

Things get better, quickly. DeBarros’ Amanda is a broad-shouldered bear of a woman, a linebacker of the kitchen and living room, forever alert against any offense to her stability or motherhood.

Her Southern accent is musical, but it crests and dives like a verbal rapier (“I’m not criticizin’,” she says to Tom, gracefully but in total control). DeBarros understands that vocal delivery, manners and graciousness are all that Amanda has left. She is interested in Amanda as a fighter, and it lends this revival a huge source of energy.

We’re also made to understand why Amanda’s husband fled this family for the Pacific coast of Mexico. This Amanda is that nightmare of a mother who lives her life entirely through her children, hugging and pampering them to death.

We get a strong sense here of Tom’s fear of losing his own identity unless he runs away from his mother, and a profound sense of Laura almost totally blotted out in her mother’s shadow. Cunningham’s problems continue with his characterization, which isn’t keyed into Tom’s worsening frustrations, but only a vague, uninteresting alienation.

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Kristin, by contrast, so inhabits Laura that it’s nearly too painful to watch at times. This is a brave, rigorously focused performance; watch the petite Kristin’s face, and you see a little girl yearning to break through into womanhood, but wrenchingly unsure of literally every step she makes.

She turns Laura’s emotional opening-up, in her private scene with the gentleman caller Jim (Jay Fraley), into a deeply intimate exchange between wounded young people. Jim, too, is a disappointment to himself, and Fraley lets us see Jim reflected in Laura. These actors understand Williams’ sympathy for lost souls, their curious linkages, their unbridgeable gaps.

Scenes like this are so strong that you forgive other details: some sloppy light cues marring Quang Bui’s light design; the Camino Real’s functional stage and flats, which give Vandehey’s set a bland look; some barely audible George Gershwin music that’s more intrusive than supportive. The poetry, though, is direct, clear and passionate.

* “The Glass Menagerie,” Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 5 p.m. Ends Sunday. $12-$15. (714) 647-7794. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Michael Cunningham: Tom Wingfield

LaDonna DeBarros: Amanda Wingfield

Darri Kristin: Laura Wingfield

Jay Fraley: Jim O’Connor

A Changing Masks Theatre Company production. Direction and set by Tim Vandehey. Lights: Quang Bui. Costumes: Kimberley Krone.