Humour me: Coriolanus and The Glass Menagerie

Even the heaviest plays contain some elements of humour and levity — though often only the savviest of directors and cast tease those out.

Stick with me...

My wife and I attended two plays usually given austere treatment — Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. In our case both productions were intelligently teased apart to yield insight and, yes, laughter, where lesser talents have plodded directly into the morass. Both plays are tragedies, but the humour — even if it is ironic — is finally what makes a production humane and relatible.

Robert Lepage's Stratford production of Coriolanus is sensational and not to be missed. Lepage's enthusiasm for designing dynamic set-pieces is put to excellent effect.

The play is given a contemporary setting, and a fifth-act exchange of texts between two soldiers is guaranteed to bring down the house. Lepage and cast clearly understand that Coriolanus' twin defects are his pride — he is a gifted soldier, but also a belligerent moralist and a stiff — and his entitled status as a mama's boy. The latter is played to great effect, keeping audience reception warm and engaged.

Menagerie's Tom Wingfield is also a mama's boy, albeit one whose sense of entitlement is deliberately leading him out of the family fold.

Most productions feature Tom in a remorseless state of pique, well past receptivity to any of his mother's expressions of love — which are fraught, to be sure, but needn't be played with po-faced “Mommie Dearest” hideousness. Annette Stokes Harris' and Michael Serres' direction of Menagerie for Port Perry's Theatre On The Ridge artfully avoids that temptation.

You can't rewrite the play — Tom is clearly beyond ready to leave — but Liam Lynch embodies Tom with a fading, but still present, awareness of his mother's love, as well as his for her. Where other actors present a seething mien when Amanda spins off into yet another southern belle reverie, Lynch lets slip a reluctant smile, and the sense that his initially sarcastic response to her play-acting is a mask he wears for his own sake, and occasionally slips as the three Wingfields settle into their co-dependent fortress.

Full disclosure: Annette and Michael are our dear friends. My wife and I enjoy their company, in large part because they embody the creative/collaborative spirit. With Theatre On The Ridge they have pulled together a cast of up-and-coming actors-on-the-cusp, and the results for Menagerie are utterly spectacular. Lexi MacCrae, Michael Williamson and Lynch are all advanced students in, or recent graduates of, esteemed drama programs — the fusion of youthful energy/hunger with the keenness to go pro must have been an absolute gas for our friends to work with, and it shows.

The concluding performance of The Glass Menagerie is tomorrow, 7:30 at Port Perry's Townhall Theatre. Don't miss it.

Coriolanus runs until October 25, in Stratford, Ontario.