Jack McGee
Simon Leary (Gravity & Grace, & The Lochburns…, a million other Circa shows) is easily one of my favourite local performers. I’ve always found him to be rigorous, generous, and intelligent— particularly in Heartbreak Hotel. I say this to help contextualise my bewilderment at seeing The Glass Menagerie sold with Leary front and centre on the poster. I’m not shocked that Leary is there, I’m confused by what's not. The play's oft-celebrated female characters are nowhere to be seen.
The idea of a Tennessee Williams play being marketed not on its Southern belle but on its self-insert narrator? Perplexing. A disingenuous comparison, sure—Leary is one of the play's three central characters—but it’s a little like putting Peter Falk on the poster for The Princess Bride, or giving Richard Dreyfuss an above-the-title billing for Stand By Me (can you tell Rob Reiner is on the mind? What a tragedy). The shows' tagline--Tom Wingfield has secrets to share—emphasises this framing. Before the lights even go down, we’re being asked to think about this story as Tom’s. I am striving to keep an open mind.
Why am I so prickled by this before the show has even begun?
The Glass Menagerie is, to me, two things, above all else. Firstly, it is a Tennessee Williams play—perhaps the Tennessee Williams play— which means it should be bursting with big, colourful, characters who are yearning and desiring both the world outside and one another with unbelievable passion. It is funny, it is fiery, it is electric. Really, it’s about the women—as all his big plays are—not to shade Newman or Brando or any man who’s turned in a brilliant performance, but c’mon.
Secondly, it’s a fictionalised recounting of the devastating tragedy that shattered the Williams’ family. His sister Rose was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic in her youth (in all likelihood, she was simply neurodiverse), subject to ECT, and ultimately lobotomised. Reading Williams memoirs last year, it was the sections about Rose that stuck with me—notably, a doctor essentially prescribing her a boyfriend, something eerily mirrored by the arrival of a Gentleman Caller (Jackson Burling) for her stand-in Laura Wingfield (Ashley Harnett), in the second-act of the play. Tennessee’s mother, Edwina—the basis for Tom’s mother Amanda (Hera Dunleavy)— was a complex, often manipulative figure who made the siblings' childhood far from easy. While The Glass Menagerie is fiction, it carries the weight of real trauma, and I doubt Williams would ask us to shrug that off. Again: it is really, deeply, about the women.
Watching the first act of the play, I don’t succeed in getting over this. Leary gives us a strong performance, unapologetically invoking Williams himself, and making it clear where Tom goes when he “goes to the movies” at night (I thought of Harper asking Prior in Angels in America “Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?”). He’s much older than Tom is during the events of the play, but that’s common enough—this is a memory play after all, recounted years later. Leary excels at conveying the regret, and when he speaks about the sheer distance of the time in between him now, and him then, it lands.
Still—confirmation bias or not, shoot me—I can’t shake the feeling that his Tom is suffocating the play. Laura remains elusive in the first act, which is unsurprising given her marginal positioning, but my greater concern is how this dynamic affects Amanda. Dunleavy plays a smaller, more grounded Amanda than I’m used to. This isn’t inherently a problem; in fact, it’s often refreshing. I found myself siding with her against Tom more easily than usual. When he accuses her of being overbearing, it feels largely like his projection. Her flights of fancy aren’t that fanciful—it’s less Norma Desmond, more your friend’s mum.
Leary, however, is playing big. He feels centred rather than peripheral, and their arguments are dominated by him. While this isn’t unengaging on a scene-by-scene level, it has broader consequences.
The central dynamic of The Glass Menagerie feels cuttingly contemporary: a mother longing for a world that cruelly passed her by and trying to put it onto her children, not quite understanding that the world has changed so radically that even if her children weren’t so damned idiosyncratic and non-traditional, they’d still struggle to find the life she imagines—because it no longer exists. See: home ownership. See: unions, careers, stability. The battle here, to keep an imagined world alive, is as much between Amanda and Amanda, as it is Amanda and Tom. This is less the case than I would like in the Circa staging, perhaps by some imperfect alchemy between a big, centred Tom, and smaller Amanda.
Then comes the second act—and suddenly, the play sings. It not only works, it whirs. My arms uncross. If the first act is about Amanda, the second belongs unequivocally to Laura. Burling, her key scene partner, also plays large, but crucially, he calibrates himself to her level. And what a level that is! Harnett steals the play.
She takes us on a journey of overwhelming anxiety and fear, into bravery, into joy and romance and holy shit all my dreams are coming true, into absolute heartbreaking devastation, all while having a fraction as many lines as Burling. Half of that journey happens while she’s listening. The shows' director, Colin McColl, is a Kiwi theatre legend. A previous artistic director of ATC, he was around for the early days of Circa, and they’ve brought him back to kick off the theatre’s fiftieth, in conjunction with veteran designer Toby Rabbit. It’s in Burling and Harnett’s interplay that I see why he’s one of the greats. Their scene is so confidently directed, performers rarely move, and when they do, it feels effortless, not like actors hitting marks. It’s Burling’s strongest work yet, and I was very wowed by his performance last year in Over and Out (directed by Leary).
Leary also gets his moment in the play's closing stretch, where he lays everything bare and the spectre of Rose’s lobotomy becomes unavoidable. And while he nails his final beats, this is where the lack of Amanda really hits for me. Tom had his moment, Laura had the scene to end all scenes, and Amanda didn’t get hers. I never felt like I reached her, and she’s widely considered the lead of the play.
To acknowledge external factors: it’s possible my marketing grievances stem from Leary being cast before the rest of the company. I've heard whispers that the rest of the cast wasn’t confirmed when they announced the show, though I could be mistaken. It’s worth noting that despite all my complaints, the show appears to be selling very well, so props to publicist Jo Marsh for that. It’s also only night two or three of the season when I attend, and these dynamics may well shift over the season.
Design-wise Rabbit's set, while at first glance a little unwieldy, is wonderfully effective. It uses the width of Circa One, and, most strikingly, frames backstage as the outside world—the place our characters yearn for. It also enables Rabbit to do some exquisite evening lighting, with some theatre-magic-orange that left me wondering why all lighting doesn’t look like that.
The sound is more mixed. While there are elements of John Gibson's score that I find compelling, the integrated glass-based-music of Annea Lockwood is too on the nose for me. Outside the show its beautiful; here, the glass sounds for The Glass Menagerie were more intrusive than illuminating.
I’ve also wavered on the decision to replace the play's titular glass animals with small glass bottles—perfume bottles, perhaps? It frames the character's poverty in an interesting way, and dovetails with Tom’s closing monologue, but honestly? To hell with it. I miss the unicorn. Making the animals purely products of Laura’s imagination also feels unnecessary audience hand-holding—Harnett is already giving us everything we need.
This staging is well worth seeing for the second act alone, and there’s plenty to love in the show at large. I will echo Theatreview in saying I wish there were a Kiwi play in this specific slot, but tall poppy syndrome non-withstanding, it was a joy to see Circa One packed out on a Tuesday night for some capital D-drama. Here’s to fifty more years.
Why am I so prickled by this before the show has even begun?
The Glass Menagerie is, to me, two things, above all else. Firstly, it is a Tennessee Williams play—perhaps the Tennessee Williams play— which means it should be bursting with big, colourful, characters who are yearning and desiring both the world outside and one another with unbelievable passion. It is funny, it is fiery, it is electric. Really, it’s about the women—as all his big plays are—not to shade Newman or Brando or any man who’s turned in a brilliant performance, but c’mon.
Secondly, it’s a fictionalised recounting of the devastating tragedy that shattered the Williams’ family. His sister Rose was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic in her youth (in all likelihood, she was simply neurodiverse), subject to ECT, and ultimately lobotomised. Reading Williams memoirs last year, it was the sections about Rose that stuck with me—notably, a doctor essentially prescribing her a boyfriend, something eerily mirrored by the arrival of a Gentleman Caller (Jackson Burling) for her stand-in Laura Wingfield (Ashley Harnett), in the second-act of the play. Tennessee’s mother, Edwina—the basis for Tom’s mother Amanda (Hera Dunleavy)— was a complex, often manipulative figure who made the siblings' childhood far from easy. While The Glass Menagerie is fiction, it carries the weight of real trauma, and I doubt Williams would ask us to shrug that off. Again: it is really, deeply, about the women.
Watching the first act of the play, I don’t succeed in getting over this. Leary gives us a strong performance, unapologetically invoking Williams himself, and making it clear where Tom goes when he “goes to the movies” at night (I thought of Harper asking Prior in Angels in America “Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?”). He’s much older than Tom is during the events of the play, but that’s common enough—this is a memory play after all, recounted years later. Leary excels at conveying the regret, and when he speaks about the sheer distance of the time in between him now, and him then, it lands.
Still—confirmation bias or not, shoot me—I can’t shake the feeling that his Tom is suffocating the play. Laura remains elusive in the first act, which is unsurprising given her marginal positioning, but my greater concern is how this dynamic affects Amanda. Dunleavy plays a smaller, more grounded Amanda than I’m used to. This isn’t inherently a problem; in fact, it’s often refreshing. I found myself siding with her against Tom more easily than usual. When he accuses her of being overbearing, it feels largely like his projection. Her flights of fancy aren’t that fanciful—it’s less Norma Desmond, more your friend’s mum.
Leary, however, is playing big. He feels centred rather than peripheral, and their arguments are dominated by him. While this isn’t unengaging on a scene-by-scene level, it has broader consequences.
The central dynamic of The Glass Menagerie feels cuttingly contemporary: a mother longing for a world that cruelly passed her by and trying to put it onto her children, not quite understanding that the world has changed so radically that even if her children weren’t so damned idiosyncratic and non-traditional, they’d still struggle to find the life she imagines—because it no longer exists. See: home ownership. See: unions, careers, stability. The battle here, to keep an imagined world alive, is as much between Amanda and Amanda, as it is Amanda and Tom. This is less the case than I would like in the Circa staging, perhaps by some imperfect alchemy between a big, centred Tom, and smaller Amanda.
Then comes the second act—and suddenly, the play sings. It not only works, it whirs. My arms uncross. If the first act is about Amanda, the second belongs unequivocally to Laura. Burling, her key scene partner, also plays large, but crucially, he calibrates himself to her level. And what a level that is! Harnett steals the play.
She takes us on a journey of overwhelming anxiety and fear, into bravery, into joy and romance and holy shit all my dreams are coming true, into absolute heartbreaking devastation, all while having a fraction as many lines as Burling. Half of that journey happens while she’s listening. The shows' director, Colin McColl, is a Kiwi theatre legend. A previous artistic director of ATC, he was around for the early days of Circa, and they’ve brought him back to kick off the theatre’s fiftieth, in conjunction with veteran designer Toby Rabbit. It’s in Burling and Harnett’s interplay that I see why he’s one of the greats. Their scene is so confidently directed, performers rarely move, and when they do, it feels effortless, not like actors hitting marks. It’s Burling’s strongest work yet, and I was very wowed by his performance last year in Over and Out (directed by Leary).
Leary also gets his moment in the play's closing stretch, where he lays everything bare and the spectre of Rose’s lobotomy becomes unavoidable. And while he nails his final beats, this is where the lack of Amanda really hits for me. Tom had his moment, Laura had the scene to end all scenes, and Amanda didn’t get hers. I never felt like I reached her, and she’s widely considered the lead of the play.
To acknowledge external factors: it’s possible my marketing grievances stem from Leary being cast before the rest of the company. I've heard whispers that the rest of the cast wasn’t confirmed when they announced the show, though I could be mistaken. It’s worth noting that despite all my complaints, the show appears to be selling very well, so props to publicist Jo Marsh for that. It’s also only night two or three of the season when I attend, and these dynamics may well shift over the season.
Design-wise Rabbit's set, while at first glance a little unwieldy, is wonderfully effective. It uses the width of Circa One, and, most strikingly, frames backstage as the outside world—the place our characters yearn for. It also enables Rabbit to do some exquisite evening lighting, with some theatre-magic-orange that left me wondering why all lighting doesn’t look like that.
The sound is more mixed. While there are elements of John Gibson's score that I find compelling, the integrated glass-based-music of Annea Lockwood is too on the nose for me. Outside the show its beautiful; here, the glass sounds for The Glass Menagerie were more intrusive than illuminating.
I’ve also wavered on the decision to replace the play's titular glass animals with small glass bottles—perfume bottles, perhaps? It frames the character's poverty in an interesting way, and dovetails with Tom’s closing monologue, but honestly? To hell with it. I miss the unicorn. Making the animals purely products of Laura’s imagination also feels unnecessary audience hand-holding—Harnett is already giving us everything we need.
This staging is well worth seeing for the second act alone, and there’s plenty to love in the show at large. I will echo Theatreview in saying I wish there were a Kiwi play in this specific slot, but tall poppy syndrome non-withstanding, it was a joy to see Circa One packed out on a Tuesday night for some capital D-drama. Here’s to fifty more years.
Jack McGee is a Te-Whanganui-a-Tara based playwright and theatre maker. Some of his notable works include Boys and the Silent School Disco, Edit the Sad Parts, and Music Sounds Better Out Here. He works regularly with Squash Co. Arts Collective where he is a co-director, and is in no way related to Greg McGee.