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PITTSBURG —
Pittsburg Community Theatre will present “The Glass Menagerie” at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium.
The play, which had its premiere in 1944 in Chicago, was the first successful play by Tennessee Williams, and is still counted among his best works.
The play has only four characters, but Williams has filled them with enough drama for a cast of thousands. This may be because the play is partly autobiographical, with the mother and sister in the show based on his own.
Amanda Wingfield, portrayed by PCT veteran Faith Paoni, is tragic and hilarious, infuriating and sympathetic. She grew up in the Old South, where she was wildly popular and had 17 gentlemen callers on one memorable day. She could have married a wealthy plantation owner, but instead married a man who worked for the telephone company.
“He fell in love with long distance,” Amanda says in one of the play’s great lines.
Abandoned by her husband, Amanda now lives in St. Louis with her two adult children. Austin Curtright shines as Tom, the deeply unhappy son, who hates his boring warehouse job and dreams of travel, adventure and becoming a writer. By the way, playwright Williams’ real first name was Thomas.
Michelle Rhoades plays Laura, his sister. She has a slight limp, but her real disability is her pathological shyness and self-consciousness.
Amanda enrolls Laura in a business course, but the girl’s nervousness is so extreme that she drops out after a few days. She continues to pretend that she’s attending the class, spending her days wandering around parks, until her mother discovers the truth.
Desperate, Amanda begs Tom to find some nice young man at the warehouse and bring him home to meet Laura. Tom does, and by coincidence his friend, Jim, played by Zach Adams, is a young man that Laura had a crush on in high school.
That sets the scene for a tender meeting between Jim and Laura that makes the girl believe, for just a few minutes, that she really could be like normal people and find love. She even shares her collection of glass animals, the “Glass Menagerie” of the title, with Jim.
At the end, Tom achieves his dreams, but at a terrible cost.
Director is Linden Little, a fixture of the Pittsburg theater scene since his school. He also designed the lighting, sound and video, and he and Curtright also designed the set. Megan Gabehart is assistant director, and Lisa Quinteros did the costume design.
Tickets are available at the Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium box office. Anyone needing ticket information may call 231-7827.
Pittsburg Community Theatre will present “The Glass Menagerie” at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium.
The play, which had its premiere in 1944 in Chicago, was the first successful play by Tennessee Williams, and is still counted among his best works.
The play has only four characters, but Williams has filled them with enough drama for a cast of thousands. This may be because the play is partly autobiographical, with the mother and sister in the show based on his own.
Amanda Wingfield, portrayed by PCT veteran Faith Paoni, is tragic and hilarious, infuriating and sympathetic. She grew up in the Old South, where she was wildly popular and had 17 gentlemen callers on one memorable day. She could have married a wealthy plantation owner, but instead married a man who worked for the telephone company.
“He fell in love with long distance,” Amanda says in one of the play’s great lines.
Abandoned by her husband, Amanda now lives in St. Louis with her two adult children. Austin Curtright shines as Tom, the deeply unhappy son, who hates his boring warehouse job and dreams of travel, adventure and becoming a writer. By the way, playwright Williams’ real first name was Thomas.
Michelle Rhoades plays Laura, his sister. She has a slight limp, but her real disability is her pathological shyness and self-consciousness.
Amanda enrolls Laura in a business course, but the girl’s nervousness is so extreme that she drops out after a few days. She continues to pretend that she’s attending the class, spending her days wandering around parks, until her mother discovers the truth.
Desperate, Amanda begs Tom to find some nice young man at the warehouse and bring him home to meet Laura. Tom does, and by coincidence his friend, Jim, played by Zach Adams, is a young man that Laura had a crush on in high school.
That sets the scene for a tender meeting between Jim and Laura that makes the girl believe, for just a few minutes, that she really could be like normal people and find love. She even shares her collection of glass animals, the “Glass Menagerie” of the title, with Jim.
At the end, Tom achieves his dreams, but at a terrible cost.
Director is Linden Little, a fixture of the Pittsburg theater scene since his school. He also designed the lighting, sound and video, and he and Curtright also designed the set. Megan Gabehart is assistant director, and Lisa Quinteros did the costume design.
Tickets are available at the Pittsburg Memorial Auditorium box office. Anyone needing ticket information may call 231-7827.
