"Mr. Gold and his cast, led by an intrepid Sally Field, have dismantled a venerable classic, but darned if they can figure out how to put it back together again...This is a production in which subtext elbows text out of bounds...Less a thought-through interpretation than a sustained scene-study class...On occasion, Mr. Gold’s interpretation takes on the vicious aspect of a nightmare in which you see your past at its distorted worst. But even that vision is not sustained."
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"Sam Gold’s starkly compelling, bravely executed revival...It’s rare for a Broadway audience to face an iconic stage classic so radically and brutally 'interrogated.' For that reason alone, it is imperative that you see it...For all this production’s cerebral choices and cold, distancing design, the emotional impact is there: love, disgust, betrayal, shame and the longing for understanding. Yes, 'Menagerie' is memory, and I’ll not soon forget this shockingly fresh frame and angle."
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"A rigorously de-romanticized, contemporary rethinking by director Sam Gold...It is nakedly, bracingly theatrical...By paring everything extraneous from the mise en scène, Gold and his designers are preparing the audience to embrace the exploratory nature of the production...Purists may yelp. But...it’s a 'Glass Menagerie' that restores what must have been the shock of the original while also reframing our ideas about Williams as an imperfect person and a pitiless autobiographer."
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"I couldn’t tell if my confused, hurt fury was caused by the pretentious and callous staging I had just witnessed or if my anger was a result of feeling robbed of the beauty of Williams’s script...Gold makes clear his desire to leave his mark on the play—at all costs, including the play itself...The actors tear through the script with little care for what is being said or how to say it...Gold puts a stop to the language by inserting himself and his own intellect where the Wingfields should be."
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"Mr. Gold is apparently unhappy with reality—the play’s reality. So he creates a world of artifice more suited to his tastes...The results almost eclipse the two actors who lead the cast...Ferris barely hints at Laura’s shifting wisps of hope, shame and despair; neither do we get a sense of a fully developed private world...The night I saw her, Field was a monotone hysteric with time out for creepy sentimentality...Mr. Gold’s preferred figurine here is not glass, but leaden and sodden."
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"This is not your parents’ 'Glass Menagerie'...For some theatergoers, this latest revival will be more of a nightmare than a dream of memory. Not for me...So we have a 'Glass Menagerie' that doubtless looks like nothing in Tennessee Williams’ imagination, and yet which in its way fullfills the playwright’s deepest desire, which was to invert the comforting conventions of 'realistic' theater and shake us to the core. That, Sam Gold has done, and then some. This is why we have revivals."
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"Revisionist reboots of modern classics can open your eyes—or make them glaze over. Broadway's stark, stripped-back new take on 'The Glass Menagerie' starring Sally Field lands, alas, in the latter category. Tennessee Williams’ 1945 masterwork has never emerged smaller, flatter or less poignant...On paper, it’s intriguing. In practice, it makes for a disjointed 'Glass' that is empty of emotion and impact. Intimacy gets lost when actors seem to be in different plays."
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"A most unlikely candidate for deconstruction. But that doesn’t deter director Sam Gold from laying hands on this gem and subjecting it to a severe reinterpretation...Williams’s play has been stripped to the gut, shorn of its lyrical accoutrements and reduced to its raw text. But a strategy that might illuminate other dramas disregards the fact that these embellishments are intrinsic to the writer’s plays...Understated in the muted performances, the poetry is not quite lost, but diluted."
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