By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Shawn Macdonald. A Fire Escape Equity Co-op production. At the Jericho Arts Centre on Wednesday, December 10. Continues until December 21

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is one of the most beautiful scripts in the English language—but this production only reveals that beauty intermittently. 

The play is about love and suffocation, freedom and loneliness. Six years out of high school, Tom, the narrator, is still living in a St. Louis flat with his mother, Amanda—the faded and domineering southern belle—and his pathologically shy sister, Laura. Tom works in a shoe warehouse, but he composes poems on the shoebox lids and dreams of joining the merchant marine.

In his first address to the audience, Tom announces that he has tricks in his pocket: “To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Clearly, the play is saturated with poetry, and, as Tom says, “Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.”

In his program notes, director Shawn Macdonald acknowledges the script’s delicacy—but he doesn’t treat it delicately. Under Macdonald’s direction, the play’s emotional undercurrents too often become melodramatic and even funny because they’re overplayed.

As Tom, Scott Button sometimes delivers affecting work. When Tom is teasing his mother about bringing a gentleman caller around to meet Laura, his wicked playfulness in the exchange helps to make their relationship feel real, and, at the end of the story, Tom’s declaration of love for his sister broke my heart. But under Macdonald’s direction, Button also unnecessarily ornaments the text, illustrating with coy poses Tom’s description of his mother’s women’s magazine, for instance. And Tom’s angry outbursts are so extreme and sustained that they squander the play’s narrative tension.

Christine Quintana has even more trouble as Laura. In the script, Laura has a limp that she regards as pronounced. In my experience—so far—the most effective acting choice is to make Laura’s limp slight so that it’s clear that she’s isolating herself by exaggerating her supposed defect. But Macdonald doesn’t go for the internal or the understated. In his production, Quintana’s Laura has the most exaggerated physical disability of any Laura I’ve seen, and she’s not even close to being the old-fashioned girl that Jim, the gentleman caller who eventually comes by, describes; she’s a flailing, neurotic mess.

As with Button, Quintana has a legitimate emotional bead on the character. When she encourages Jim to hold one of the glass animals from her collection—“Go on. I trust you with him”—the moment is undeniably moving. But, as with Button’s Tom, too much of what should be inside Quintana’s Laura is on the outside.

Amanda is the starring role in Glass Menagerie, and Marilyn Norry, who plays the part here, is one of the best actors in town, but her performance is only okay in my opinion. There are affecting moments—Amanda’s despair when she finds out that Laura has been skipping her typing lessons, for instance—but Norry’s work isn’t as deep or clear as I expected it to be.

Surprisingly, Graeme McComb delivers the performance of the evening in the smallest role: Jim. The gentleman caller is a showboat, but he’s also kind, and McComb effortlessly embodies that complexity. In his scene with Laura, this production finally comes into focus.

Director Macdonald’s most successful choice, other than casting McComb, is to include violinist Masae Day on-stage. There’s just the right combination of magic and melancholy in that decision. If only the rest of this production were as original and subtle.