Fine cast in a splendid 'Glass Menagerie'

Tennessee Williams' beautiful, sorrowful play

The Glass Menagerie

is having a lovely, quiet revival at Independence Studio on 3 under Bill Van Horn's delicate direction. The cast is remarkably fine, and the production is distinguished by its evenhandedness: It's rare to see a

Glass Menagerie

where it is so easy, so necessary to sympathize with all the characters. Nobody is the villain, nobody is to blame.

The play is a guilt-soaked memory: Tom (Damon Bonetti) has already left his mother (Wendy Scharfman) and his sister, Laura (Jillian Louis), abandoning them as his father did 16 years before. The scenes we see are his haunted recollections of his arguments with Amanda, his nagging, desperate mother, a faded Southern belle who still talks - endlessly but charmingly - about her many gentleman callers and gathering jonquils in the Delta when she was a debutante. His sister, Laura, is crippled and cripplingly shy, unable to live in harsh reality, retreating to the fragile world of her menagerie of glass animals.

When Tom invites Jim (Jared Michael Delaney) over for dinner, hopes are high that this will be Laura's gentleman caller. But, as Amanda says, "Things have a way of turning out so badly."

This production is far more measured than Williams' overwrought stage directions suggest. As Tom, both past and present, Bonetti finds just the right note (with the slightest hint of a Southern accent) of exasperation: He is torn between his love for his family and his sense of responsibility toward them, and his own frantic need to get out of the trap that is his life.

Amanda is often played as irritating beyond bearing and flirtatious to the point of embarrassment; here, Scharfman seems a plausible, lovely woman who is annoying enough to make us understand Tom's need to escape. Mary Folino's tasteful costumes really matter here.

As Laura, Louis has, perhaps, the play's most difficult role; she is onstage for long stretches of time with nothing to say; she is often frozen in fear or panicked into tears, yet Louis never lets Laura become cloying, and we see her tremulously emerge from her shell in the long, sweet scene with Jim.

As Jim, Delaney is sensitive and tender, not the brash, crass ex-high-school hero, as he is sometimes played.

Adding to the production's charm are the lighting (crucial in a world "lit by lightning" as well as candles) designed by Shon Causer, and the elusive sound design by Christopher Colucci.

Tennessee Williams would have been 100 this year; well, that was never likely. But he certainly knew the truth of the line he wrote for Amanda: "The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret. . . ." The Glass Menagerie is the everlasting testament to his regret.