Somehow, some way, Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of “The Glass Menagerie” punches through. Being prepared for the emotional impact does nothing to stop it from hitting where it hurts. In large part, this is because Allie Pratt masterfully portrays Laura, the tender heart of the play, with a pained gait and a sparkling intelligence evident in her lucid appraisal of her own state.
Tom smokes, Amanda yells, but Laura takes it all in and thinks of others before herself. Pratt gives the play a raw self-consciousness in a character who feels too deeply to manage the situation she inherits. She can neither please her mother nor navigate an escape from her influence.
Will Block brilliantly plays her conflicted younger brother Tom with an honest rage as he rails against the bars of his reality. The sympathy Block elicits for Tom’s situation makes the character’s actions that much more devastating. If he were unlikable, it wouldn’t be a dynamic play.
The audience must feel for Tom in order for tension to build. And tension does build in this production. The burden he internalizes begins to force its way out of his discontented frame like steam streaming from a jumping and whistling pressure cooker.
Stifled by his controlling mother and the dim economic prospects of his hometown, Tom escapes through dishonesty and a betrayal as dissolute as the smoke he blows from their balcony. Block leads us through this journey with fidelity to the feeling of being stuck and incapab.