The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Sands Theatre Center (now at the Athens Theatre), Deland, FL  2008

We are a kind people living in a cruel time. We don’t know how to show our love. This inability was the subject of his plays, the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language.                                      

          — David Mamet on the work of Tennessee Williams

The STC cast

Amanda           Allison Moseley                                          Tom                 David Knoell

Laura               Nikki O’Donnell                                          Jim                  William Lage

David Knoell and Allison Moseley as Tom and Amanda

This was a really wonderful cast. The play is such a staple, such a part of the American canon, that it’s sublime qualities are often dismissed by those who first encountered it in a high school classroom or on a college stage. All I can say to that is, it takes a lot of dismissing to elide the genius of what Williams accomplished in this beautiful play.

Nikki had played Laura before, but for the rest of us, it was a first production of this classic play. David and Allison in particular tore into the Tom and Amanda scenes  like starving actors which was, as I recall, not far from the truth for all of us at the time.

[slideshow]