PCPA’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’ a dreamy theater production

The fragile inner workings of a delusional family form the focus of “The Glass Menagerie.”

Roger DeLaurier directs PCPA-Pacific Conservatory Theatre’s dreamy production of the classic Tennessee Williams drama, playing through March 20 at the intimate Severson Theatre in San Maria. The production will then move to Solvang Festival Theater for a summer run, June 16 through 26.

A trio of dreamers occupies a dreary St. Louis, Mo., apartment in the late 1930s.

Amanda Wingfield (Kitty Balay) clings to memories of her genteel girlhood in the Southern enclave of Blue Mountain, when she was courted by “some of the most prominent men of the Mississippi Delta.”

Her children are no less wrapped up in their own fantasy worlds.

Tom (Matt Koenig), sick of his mother’s constant nagging and intellectually stifled by his low-level shoe factory job, escapes nightly to the movies. He longs to leave the suffocating atmosphere of the apartment and live out the adventures he sees on the silver screen.

His emotionally and physically frail older sister, Laura (Sierra Wells), spends her days caring for her delicate collection of glass animals and playing old phonograph records left behind by her absent father — “a telephone man who fell in love with long distance,” Amanda jokes.

Laura considers herself “crippled,” although her mother blithely dismisses her deformity as a “slight defect.” However serious her condition, it’s clear that Laura’s limp has done major damage to her psyche.

She’s so overcome with shyness that she secretly drops out of business college, much to her mother’s disappointment and shame. Without a career — or a constant stream of gentleman callers — Amanda is convinced that her daughter will become a destitute spinster.

“What is going to happen?” the matriarch moans. “What is to become of us? What is the future?”

Amanda begs her son to help find Laura an appropriate suitor.

A glimmer of hope appears when Tom brings home a coworker, a pleasant young man who happens to be Laura’s former crush.

A high school hero who’s lost some of the glow of his glory days, Jim O’Connor (Jordan Stidham) doesn’t seem to mind Laura’s nervous habits. In fact, he sees potential in her for greater things.

But in “The Glass Menagerie,” the promise of better days is as lovely and elusive as a soap bubble.

As Tom, Koenig serves as the play’s narrator and chief character, guiding the audience through his memories much in the manner that Virgil escorted Dante through Purgatory.

He and Balay, who’s brilliant as the overbearing Amanda, enjoy convincing chemistry as mother and son. Their explosive exchanges, bright with bitter wit and black humor, are consistently entertaining. (One of Tom’s brutal bon mots: “Every time you come in yelling ‘Rise and shine, rise and shine,’ I think how lucky dead people are.”)

As Laura, Wells at times betrays her inexperience. But her naiveté suits the character.

Stidham, a solid presence in the play’s second act, fares better as genial Jim.

Visually, “The Glass Menagerie” evokes a once elegant world now faded and worn at the edges. Scenic designer Dave Nofsinger establishes the shabbiness of the Wingfields’ apartment with scruffy furniture, scraps of wallpaper and exposed brick walls; the threadbare theme is echoed by Judith A. Ryerson’s simple costumes and Tim Thistleton’s hazy lightning.

Sound designer Chuck Hatcher provides a period soundtrack that mirrors the characters’ delusions. It seems only appropriate that the music seems to fan and fade with each memory, creating an atmosphere of doom in the gloomy spring air.

This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 1:35 PM with the headline "PCPA’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’ a dreamy theater production."