Theater Professor Mixes Emotion with Technology for The Glass Menagerie
March 25, 2011
It was “hugely challenging, like the Olympics” for Derek Goldman to direct his version of Tennessee Williams’ iconic play, The Glass Menagerie, for Georgetown College’s “Tenn Cent Fest,” a celebration of the famed playwright’s 100th birthday running on campus from February 24 to March 27. But with help from creative students and new technology, Goldman, who is the Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center, staged a production worthy of the famous American writer.
Also an Associate Professor in the Theater and Performance Studies Program, Goldman has been a Tennessee Williams fan for as long as he can remember. While many playwrights can make an audience think, Goldman said, Williams stood alone in his ability to fuse the cerebral with the sentimental. “Williams is the poet laureate of the heart. We have other great American dramatists, but he was the one who was the most emotionally naked and lyrical,” said Goldman. “I think his plays make the world a better place, a more humane place. There are playwrights I admire that I don’t feel that way about.”
Set in a tenement apartment in 1930's St. Louis, The Glass Menagerie portrays the regret, despair, and longings of Williams’ semi-autobiographical Wingfield family as they struggle to hang on to their dreams amidst the Great Depression. So emotional, “raw, and urgent” is the play that Goldman found his task simplified. He connected with the actors—among them Helen Hayes Award winner and Adjunct Professor of Theater and Performance Studies Sarah Marshall—on a visceral level, as “artists I could trust,” and guided the production with an eye not just for dramaturgy, but for sensory experience.
Video footage played along background walls and objects onstage to convey passing time and the feelings of characters—a novel touch for a classic play. “People don’t think of the play as revelatory because it’s familiar. We think of it as a sad family drama about a crippled girl, and that’s all there is to it,” Goldman said. “It has a dusty or gauzy reputation, so we think, ‘Oh, it’s a chestnut.’ But it’s not. It can be fresh and new. It’s exciting to explore technology, to reintroduce vocabulary Williams was interested in but couldn’t imagine 70 years ago.”
Over a dozen Georgetown students also worked to put a fresh take on the theatrical standard by creating and acting in short pieces and projects that were released during its run. Courtney Ulrich (C’11), a Theater and Performance Studies major who served as assistant director for The Glass Menagerie, was inspired by a class she took with Goldman in the fall semester to create an interactive exhibit called “The Overstuffed Chair.” The project relates the catastrophes of Menagerie’s Wingfield family to the personal traumas Williams chronicled in “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” an autobiographical essay. Installed in the Davis Performing Arts Center’s lobby, the exhibit speaks to the complex relationship Williams had with his emotionally absent father, and is Ulrich’s attempt to bring people closer to understanding the playwright as a person.
“I admire Tennessee Williams for having the courage to be so honest about his life and for throwing everything about his personal life into his work. It shows that the personal can also be public and be very moving,” Ulrich explained. “The exhibit is everything I hoped and imagined it would be. Even the sensor technology, where you can sit in the chair and it comes to life, that’s very new for us and really exciting.”
For Goldman, it was not a stretch to connect The Glass Menagerie—a story about dreams as fragile as Laura Wingfield’s figurines—to the socially activist spirit that permeates the Georgetown campus. In directing, Goldman did not consciously attempt to highlight the timeless theme of great ambition thwarted by low social status—rather, he trusted the motif would emerge on its own and resonate with young Hilltop theatergoers.
“I love the Georgetown community, and I think the play is very timely because it’s about vulnerable people and how they move on and survive and cope, and we’re at a world-class university devoted to thinking about justice and values,” Goldman said. “This festival makes you feel like a part of a community, because so many people have been inspired by the works of Williams and aspects of his legacy. He only turns 100 once, so to mark and explore and celebrate the occasion all together is something amazing.”
--Brittany Coombs
Photos from top by Kuna Hamad: Sarah Marshall onstage during the performance; Rachel Caywood (C'10) and Sarah Marshall as Laura and Amanda Wingfield; Rachel Caywood, Sarah Marshall, and Clark Young (C'09), courtesy of the Department of Performing Arts.
