Amanda, the mother, is a faded Southern belle living in a tenement and also in a dream world, wondering how many gentlemen callers might arrive on any given night. The answer is usually none.
Laura, the daughter, who lives with a physical limp and a punishing degree of social anxiety, lavishes care on her collection of glass animal figurines.
Tom, the son, supports the family by working at a dead-end job. Oh, how he would like to escape.
Do these people, characters in “The Glass Menagerie,” seem pathetic? Pitiful?
“I consider their dynamic pitiful,” said Conor Kelly O’Brien, who is directing the Tennessee Williams classic for three performances, at 7:30 p.m. April 9, 10 and 11 at the Sanctuary Theater in Scranton. “Their situation is pitiful. And it’s easy to say now, ‘Why didn’t they do this? Why didn’t they do that?’ But in this time period, there was no support for mental illness.”
The play is set in the 1930s and is a memory play, with the narrator/character Tom informing the audience that things may not have happened exactly as he remembers.
“I’ve been itching to direct this for some time,” O’Brien said. “I’m a long-time lover of the work of Tennessee Williams. He wrote with such vividness, such passion, such specificity. These characters stand the test of time.”
Early in the play, audience members will watch Amanda learn that, while she believed her daughter was taking a secretarial course at a business school, Laura had actually dropped out and had been pretending to go to school every day.
What will become of Laura if she can’t get an office job? Wishing her daughter would find someone to marry, Amanda pins her hopes on the arrival of a “gentleman caller” who visits because his co-worker, Tom, invited him over.
“He’s a great ambassador of the outside world,” O’Brien described this fourth character. “He’s very self-made. He’s going into radio. If the play was present-day, he’d be a dude with a podcast.”
It turns out, Laura remembers this gentleman from high school and has had a crush on him. But he does not return her interest.
“He can tell, from the second they open the door, that he is not available to her. He is not interested in her, with her lack of charisma,” O’Brien said. “He leads her on … she just bares her heart and soul to him … but he’s not a villain. No one is a villain.”
“The actors are doing such beautiful work,” O’Brien said. “This is really such an actor’s piece of theater.”
To see how it turns out, consider a trip to the Sanctuary Theater, located in a one-time church at 1735 North Main Ave., Scranton, that is part of Discovery Montessori’s Providence campus. The Sanctuary Theatre is a new theatre and arts space for the Scranton Fringe Festival, which is sponsoring the show. For tickets, see scrantonfringe.org.