New Haven Independent

He should have issued an additional minatory note: You will also be in danger of ending up inside the mind of a writer agonizing to find his story and his voice!

Edelstein’s innovation in Williams’ 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning memory play, one of the classics of American theater, is to move all the action from the shabby apartment in St. Louis, where the downwardly mobile Southern Wingfield family is struggling, to a hotel room in New Orleans. There, the son Tom, our authorial character, has escaped and is summoning his story on a shiny Underwood.

As the larger-than-life narcissistic Amanda Wingfield, played pitch perfectly by Judith Ivey, enters, followed by fragile daughter Laura, the hotel room transforms, as only theater can, into the tattered Wingfield family abode as well.

This hotel/home, past/present has a visual presence that gives the production both an additional level of poignancy and a new intellectual aspect.

For what this Glass Menagerie shows us is that when your material is also your mother (and sister), locating and then separating the poetry from the pain is not easy. Neither a good play nor is an expiation guaranteed.

When Laura first plays with her menagerie of unicorns and other glass animals, it is placed on the table right beside Tom’s typewriter. The effect is quietly and non-verbally riveting: the traditional symbol of the play is all but nudged out of centrality by that shiny Underwood on which the play we are seeing is being conceived.

It’s more than a conceit or a flourish. Edelstein keeps us focused not only on how memories are recollected — and walk like living people into the hotel room of the imagination — but how those memories are transformed, if we’re lucky and talented or both, into story.

So the rat-tat-tatting of Tom’s typewriter accompanies much of the action when it is occurring behind him. And when Amanda, at full manic, nearly logorrheic pitch, regales crippled Laura about her own gentlemen callers from Blue Mountain, Tom might be found upstage secretly taking notes on this elemental family exchange.

Laura, responding to Amanda’s interrogation (“Did you ever know a boy you liked, dear?), recalls the young man, who will soon reappear as the Gentleman Caller. He had referred to her in high school as “Blue Roses.” At that point Tom, from his writer’s corner, says the name aloud with Laura. It’s a touch, one of many, uniting past with present. For good measure, Tom writes the words in his notebook.

So in addition to the traditional satisfactions of the play unfolding before us is the added tension of seeing Tom/Tennessee put on his lighted helmet, and enter the dangerous mine of autobiography. We watch him sifting and filtering, drafting, and correcting, making pencil corrections in his narration, which he rolls out of the typewriter.

A particularly moving instant is when Judith Ivey’s Amanda first appears behind the scrim, as if summoned by Tom’s rat-tatting-and the bell of his carriage.

Edelstein has described the play (click here for a recent Indy interview) as a kind of act of atonement or survivor’s guilt. He has provided this interesting new overlay. At least for this reviewer, Tom’s writerly observation and interaction with his family, even while he participates in the action, becomes much more into focus. It is also more satisfying than the pea-coated, romantic, merchant marine takes of Tom in traditional productions.

Is there a downside? In the hands of actors less talented than Ivey, Patch Darragh’s Tom, Josh Charles’ Gentleman Caller and Keira Keeley’s Laura, evoked with particularly powerful physicality, it is possible that Edelstein’s take might come across as too clinical. When we see Tom observing his family and taking notes on them, does that also not influence us, the audience, to distance ourselves from them as he does, for the sake of his survival, and his play? It’s possible.

But, no, Tom’s writerly presence is far more active than ornamental. In the script he is referred to as “Shakespeare” down at the warehouse where he works with Jim, for the occasional poem he writes on the back of a bill of sale. Here, in Edelstein’s Menagerie, Tom, that is, Tennessee, is beyond occasional verse, in full writing mode before our eyes.

When he engages with the always daunting Amanda, he is exasperated by her endless Southern storytelling, her hyperbole and obsession with a Gentleman Caller to rescue Laura, the triumph of tale over facts as well as her often perfect homespun locutions. (“Instinct is for animals, not Christians.”) Yet we also get the sense that he is at the same time absorbing and honing these very rhetorical qualities that will later emerge in the dramatic fiction we are hearing before us.

Is there a downside to this focus away from Laura and onto Tom’s struggle to become a writer? In the second act, when Tom is for the most part off stage and Laura engages in her extended scene with her Gentleman Caller in that beautiful arc of hope raised and then dashed, the play can feel out of balance compared to what we have previously witnessed. That is, where’s Tom to record some of this?

Yet Williams’ writing here, as throughout, is so powerful, literary yet homey, poetic yet psychologically astute as well, that you soon are utterly lost in the play that Tom, grown into Tennessee, has written for us. And all is forgiven. If there ever were a play in which the writer is making a self-conscious statement about the mysterious ways of the theater and announcing his entry into it, it is The Glass Menagerie. Which makes this production’s insight seem like a natural.

The chemistry of the ensemble, led by Ms. Ivey’s force-of-nature Amanda, makes for a splendid evening in the theater. And it is supported by fine sets, costumes, lights, and sound designed by, respectively Michael Yeargan, Martin Pakledinaz, Jennifer Tipton, and David Budries.

The play runs at Long Wharf through June 7.