THE FRAGILE THINGS
WE CAN’T LEAVE BEHIND

Center REP’s intimate revival finds the
suffocating bonds of family at the heart of
Tennessee Williams’ enduring memory play

Center REP launches its 2026–27 season with Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, the 1944 classic that helped establish Williams as one of America’s great playwrights. Directed by Matt M. Morrow, the play looks back at the Wingfield family through the memories of Tom (Cody Sloan), a young man caught between his obligations at home and his desperate need to escape.

Set in 1930s St. Louis, Tom lives in a cramped apartment with his mother, Amanda (Nancy Carlin), and his painfully shy sister, Laura (Alanna Darby). Tom works a warehouse job to support the family but dreams of becoming a writer and seeing something of the world. Laura, whose physical disability has contributed to her withdrawal from life outside the apartment, spends much of her time listening to old records and tending to her collection of delicate glass animals.

Then there is Amanda.

Carlin makes her a force to be reckoned with: controlling, intrusive, and forever clinging to memories of her youth as a Southern belle surrounded by gentleman callers. She worries obsessively about what will happen to Laura after she is gone, while expecting Tom to support the family and somehow secure his sister’s future. Amanda’s concern for her children is genuine, but so is the suffocating effect it has on them.

Yi-Chien Lee’s scenic design makes that suffocation almost tangible. The Wingfields’ apartment dominates the action, with the fire escape offering Tom his only temporary refuge from his mother and the responsibilities waiting inside. Morrow uses the confined space to reinforce the sense of a family unable to get away from one another—or from the disappointments that have accumulated around them. Center REP’s production also features Meg Neville’s costumes, Spense Matubang’s lighting, James Ard’s sound, and Yuki Izumihara’s projections.

The mood changes when Tom invites Jim O’Connor (Rob Fagin), a coworker from the warehouse, home for dinner. To Amanda, Jim is the long-awaited “gentleman caller” who might provide Laura with the future she cannot imagine for herself. His arrival briefly brings optimism into the apartment.

The scene between Jim and Laura is the emotional center of the play. Away from Amanda’s expectations and Tom’s frustration, Laura begins to emerge from her shell as Jim talks with her, encourages her, and treats her with a kindness she rarely encounters. For a little while, another life seems possible. But when Jim reveals that he is already engaged, that possibility disappears almost as quickly as it arrived.

Williams calls The Glass Menagerie a memory play, and Morrow never lets us forget that everything we see is filtered through Tom’s recollection. The past is not being recreated objectively; it is being revisited by a man who escaped his family physically but discovers that memory is much harder to leave behind.

The four actors make the Wingfields’ disappointments painfully believable. Sloan captures Tom’s growing resentment at being trapped as the family breadwinner, while Carlin’s relentless Amanda can make the apartment seem even smaller than it is. Darby gives Laura a vulnerability that never reduces her to helplessness, and Fagin’s easygoing Jim brings a welcome change of energy before his revelation turns hope back into disappointment.

What stays with us is not simply that Tom leaves. It is that leaving doesn’t free him. His memories—particularly those of Laura—continue to follow him long after he has escaped the apartment.

Morrow’s production understands the claustrophobia at the center of Williams’ play: four people crowded together with their fears, disappointments, illusions, and hopes for lives that may never arrive. At times, watching them can be genuinely uncomfortable because the family dynamics are so recognizable.

More than 80 years after its premiere, The Glass Menagerie remains painful not because the Wingfields are extraordinary, but because they aren’t. Center REP brings us close enough to this family that their memories can begin to resemble some of our own.

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photos by Kevin Berne

The Glass Menagerie
Center Repertory Company
Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Dr. in Walnut Creek
approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes, including intermission
ends on September 27, 2026
for tickets, call 925.943.7469 or visit Center REP

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