Cracking The Glass Menagerie
Return to stage: Tennessee Williams classic showcases students, faculty
In the slide show above, Jim Petosa, director of the CFA school of theatre, talks about The Glass Menagerie, the inaugural production of the Boston Center for American Performance.
Hamlet’s line “The play’s the thing” is often quoted, but the marrying line of the couplet, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” usually vanishes. Hamlet was trying to trap his father’s killer, and theater large and small always tries to goad an audience — inspiration, agitation, contemplation, anything so long as there’s movement out there. All year, examples of that emerged in and around BU; this week, we revisit some of those “things.”
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ classic 1944 play about memory, illusion, and escape, launched the inaugural season of the College of Fine Arts Boston Center for American Performance (BCAP). The initiative is aimed at fostering interaction between performing arts professionals and CFA.
The production, which featured a cast, crew, and design team of BU faculty and students, opened on October 15, 2008, and ended with a five-performance stretch beginning October 30, at the CFA Theatre Lab.
Jim Petosa, director of the school of theatre, directed the play, which follows the loosely autobiographical tale of a fragile Southern family abandoned by their patriarch. “We wanted to find a play that we considered to be quintessentially American,” Petosa says, “a play that still spoke to us in our time today.”
The second production of BCAP’s inaugural season, Doug Wright’s one-man play I Am My Own Wife, ran from April 22 to May 10, 2009.
Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.
This story originally ran October 29, 2008.
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