Director & Set Designer LON WINSTON
For its latest production, the Thunder River Theatre Company has festooned its playhouse with clotheslines. A mock fire escape staircase lined with tattered steel railings juts from the floor downstage
and off-kilter telephone poles tilt in the blue twilight behind a meager, 1930s-era living room: a few lamps, a sofa, a phonograph, a coffee table burdened with a collection of fragile glass figurines.
As Tom Wingfield, the narrator and a character in The Glass Menagerie intones during his opening monologue, this is a memory play. So the set is somewhat fantastic and the telephone poles,
in particular, are laden with symbolic weight. In Tom’s mind, which is where the drama unfolds, they loom large, illuminated as the long-distance destination toward which the events
of Tennessee Williams’ famous play will push him.
The Glass Menagerie focuses on a transition in the life of Tom Wingfield and his poverty-stricken family. Tom has the heart and intellect of a poet but passes his days toiling in a warehouse to support
his mother and sister. He spends his nights drinking and most of the rest of his time suffering Amanda’s harangues. His father is absent. He was a telephone worker who abandoned the family years ago,
in the process setting a dangerous and tempting example for Tom – hence the telephone poles and all their foreboding. And in the hands of Artistic Director Lon Winston, that foreboding makes sense.
He and the cast offer their audience a play that simmers along filled with enough frustration and tension to make it perfectly clear why Tom storms off the stage in the last scene. 
The Glass Menagerie is not to be missed. It’s another gift from the Thunder River Theatre Company and a rare chance to enjoy a classic drama right in
downtown Carbondale.
