The Glass Mendacity, presented by the Peter H. Luce Play Readers at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center Saturday afternoon, is a comic mash-up that blends eight characters from three famous Tennessee Williams plays into a single, supremely dysfunctional family in crisis.
Domineering, short-tempered Big Daddy, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is married to Amanda, the obliviously nostalgic mother from The Glass Menagerie.
The three Dubois children are the mutely alcoholic Brick, who is married to desperate sexpot Maggie (both from Cat), the pathologically shy Laura from Menagerie, and a raving-mad Blanche who is married to oafish Stanley, both from A Streetcar Named Desire.
A gentleman caller (Menagerie) named Mitch (Streetcar) rounds out this cast of self-deceiving Southerners in the script by playwrights Maureen Morley and Tom Willmoth.
Read Saturday by John Brannen, Mitch also steps in as narrator, setting the action in “that quaint, humid part of America called the South.”
The heat and humidity are bad enough — “I’m perspiring like a foot!” Blanche declares, while Maggie struggles to describe her feelings: “Like a lion in a toaster? A panther in a microwave?”
But it’s the mendacity that really gets to Big Daddy, who’s having trouble deciding who should inherit the Belle Reve plantation when he dies.
“I’m surrounded by lies and deceit and mendacity!” he bellows.
“And redundancy,” Mitch helpfully adds.
As the ireful Big Daddy, Gaston Vadasz explosively delivered faux-Williams pronouncements such as “A man who drinks beer spends more money on pretzels than he does on women!” and “It ain’t proper to have a drink before 10 a.m.”
Charlena Seymour was a perfectly loopy Big Amanda, smiling blissfully as she recalls the dozens, then scores, then hundreds of gentlemen callers who courted her in her youth.
Ellie Beth switched her silky slip and schemed as Maggie the Cat, and Jay Sigler swaggered as the T-shirted, coarse-minded Stanley she disdains, yet desires.
Roberta Hurtig played not only the fragile, deluded Blanche, but Blanche playing Ophelia, believing she’s Marie Antoinette, and talking about her date with “perfect gentleman” Napoleon Bonaparte: “He kept his hand to himself.”
In a misbuttoned cardigan, Cynthia Wolfson was waiflike as the limping, deeply shy Laura, whose social anxiety inevitably makes her gorge rise.
Listed in the program as Manny Quinn, the “reader” for Brick’s role was a seated store dummy borrowed from Ghost Island Farm and costumed in a sweatshirt and ball cap, bottle near at hand.
“We all know he’ll never amount to anything,” Big Daddy says at one point. “For crying out loud, he’s just a mannequin!”
The audience for the reading numbered well over 100, filling the film center auditorium with laughter and applause. While most in the seats were over 55, one young Islander turned out even though she was unfamiliar with two of the three plays being lampooned.
“I read The Glass Menagerie in high school, so that was familiar to me, and I was curious to see how that played,” said 22-year-old Jasmine Robinson of Vineyard Haven, who gave the readers’ production two thumbs up.
“Everybody had such great personality,” she said.
The Peter H. Luce Play Readers meet weekly on Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon at the Tisbury Senior Center. About 35 to 40 people — more than 50 in the summer — regularly turn up to read and discuss plays of all kinds, said the group’s Myra Stark as she introduced Saturday’s reading.
“We do it because it’s fun, it’s intellectual stimulation and the best kind of lifelong learning: no lectures, no classes, no professors,” she said.
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