Eclipse Theatre opened a world premiere of Michael Aman’s Glass, directed by Greg Smith, this weekend.
Glass is a fictional look at Tennessee Williams (Benjamin Turner) as he appears in Laurette Taylor’s (Kathy Strum) dressing room on the frigid Chicago opening night of his first success: The Glass Menagerie. This two-hander orbits – and sometimes crashes violently around – Taylor’s dressing room. The playwright tries, as he says, to trust the most important actor in his play’s “difficult birth,” and she tries to assuage some of his fears without surrendering.
Aman’s play understands that any two artists, any two broken people, are, as his Williams remarks, “trying not to die.” The desire to make something that lasts beyond the creator’s life is a stand against entropy, against our inevitable decay. As Taylor says in the play, “Not all glass breaks. There are stained glass windows that are centuries old.” Smith’s sensitive direction understands the way people make that horrible truth more obvious through their own obfuscation.
They’ve found exquisite vessels in the two actors here. Kathy Sturm is the force of nature Williams talks about; the audience believes she can rip power-lines off their poles and shatter windows. But Sturm never plays the character as a cartoon; she finds the complicated humanity in a real person most of us only know through legend. Every time there’s the hint of a stereotype we see Sturm’s Taylor using that archetypal power, exploiting it and showing us the cracks in that epic facade.
Benjamin Turner takes on the difficult task of portraying a famous voice before Williams codified his persona into Tennessee Williams. He takes this on like a prizefighter, hinting at the legend but stripping the ease and calculation away. Watching his rhythms bouncing off – and being absorbed by – Sturm is one of the great pleasures here.
At 90 minutes with no intermission, Glass is a hair too long. Cutting some hammering repetition would help. Easing up on the trope of “I’ve wasted too much of your time, I should go,” “No, don’t go!” would let what’s good here breathe. But there are more than enough moments in Glass to send any theatre fan out into the cold night satiated.
Glass runs through December 3 with shows at 7:30 pm Thursday through Saturday and 2:00 pm Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit eclipsetheatrecompany.org