"Sold out? The entire weekend?" I started panicking. I needed to get into this show. "We can put you on a waiting list," the calm woman at the ticket booth offered. As I sat in the foyer of Spingold Theater Center, I met a man whose guest was unable to attend the Friday night performance and jumped at the opportunity to join him. I hurried down the hall to the newly renovated Merrick Theater, where Brandeis Theater Company's production of Tennessee Williams' classic play, The Glass Menagerie, was being performed. The play, which ran from Nov. 29 through Dec. 2, was directed by professional actress Paula Plum and featured a cast solely composed of Brandeis undergraduates. 

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Before the play began, the actors sat at the front of the white-walled cozy theater, in a modest 1930s St. Louis parlor. The set, designed by the scenic paint charge for BTC, Kristin Knutson, was immaculate-a claw-footed Davenport, wooden rocking chair and matching dining room setup, table lamps and a throw rug. The walls of the 'apartment' were draped with white, gauzy linens. Light-colored laundry was strung up to dry. The dreamy-white color scheme of the room reminded audience members that the play is simply a series of memories. 

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For those unfamiliar with Williams' original script, the play is built upon two parallel premises: the dynamics of a broken American family, and the conflict one faces when he feels he lives an unfulfilled life. The play is very much a reflection upon the past, present and future of each character. 

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The family, the Wingfields, is led by a washed-up Southern belle of a mother, Amanda (Ellyn Getz '13), who struggles to protect her two adult children, Tom (Justy Kosek '14) and Laura (Corrie Legge '14), after their father, represented in the play only by a portrait hanging on the wall, runs away. Laura is plagued by a self-consciousness about her crippled leg, and instead of leading a normal life, she sits at home most days and plays with her collection of glass figurines, which her mother calls 'the glass menagerie.' Tom, who narrates the play alone in between scenes with other characters, works grueling hours at a factory to keep the family afloat and spends his nights at the "movies," always dissatisfied with his limiting job and dreaming of liberation from his family. 

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Plum's direction of the play does more than animate the original script-it brings to life elements of the story that, even though I have read Williams' script, I never quite seemed to get. In perhaps the single most important scene, Laura shows her glass menagerie to gentleman caller Jim (Ahmed Kouddous '14), who she is all too fond of, yet finds intimidating. Seeing the play acted out as opposed to reading it helped me to understand Laura in an entirely new way. While the script portrays Laura as potentially disturbed, Plum's production shows that she is, in fact, more fragile than anything else.  

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Jim has just enjoyed supper with the Wingfields when Amanda leaves him alone with Laura, hoping to catalyze a romantic interaction. The young man sweeps her up to dance to the victrola music but clumsily bumps a table upon which Laura's favorite figurine, a glass unicorn, sits. It falls and its horn is broken off, and it becomes just a normal horse. From the script, I gathered that this scene represented a loss of virginity, innocence and a crushing of dreams. But under Plum's direction, it became clear how violent the emotions in this scene are-Laura is not just disillusioned by the figurine breaking, she is devastated; it seems that this episode is something she is not to recover from.

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Indeed, the entire play is laden with instances from which the characters are not to recover: like Amanda's choice to marry an alcoholic dreamer who abandoned the family years ago, or Tom's failure to pursue a life more promising than his meaningless factory job. But even in the throws of such material, the actors incorporated comedy and skill into their delivery. Amanda is quite difficult to take seriously, as she is the only character who dons an unflinching Mississippi accent established in her youth growing up on the Delta. Even though her children have grown up in St. Louis and would not naturally have comparable accents, hers was so pronounced that it makes her seem a bit too comical when she is actually quite an angry character. Getz's stamina with a character as incessant and volatile as Amanda is nothing less than impressive, though the humor she injected into the role undermined the seriousness of Amanda's manic nature. This is easily seen in a truly desperate Amanda's still laughable attempts to court a suitor for her daughter. 

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Tom provides a valuable perspective to the audience, as he is the only one who sees the other characters as they truly are, and is separate from the circumstances that limit them. Jim and Laura both slide perfectly into their roles; the conversations they have about being comfortable with oneself despite one's flaws are a pleasant balance to the tense relationship evident between Amanda and Tom. The beauty of BTC's production of The Glass Menagerie lies in these students' capacities to inject new, dynamic life into each character. It was truly as if I was experiencing the story for the very first time.