Theater Talkback: Old Works, Born Anew

Michael J. Lutch Zachary Quinto in “The Glass Menagerie” at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

They just keep coming, as regular and usually as travel-worn as buses on a high street. Reviving old brand-name plays with brand-name stars (of various vintage) has become Broadway’s default production mode, and, oh, what a weary formula it is. Another “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” Another “Glengarry Glen Ross” Another “Heiress”

A theater-addicted friend of mine and I regularly call each other to report breathlessly on the latest example of such rote producing plans. Some are real (Denzel Washington in “A Raisin in the Sun”), some fabricated (Pamela Anderson in “A Streetcar Named Desire”), and the game is trying to tell when the other person is lying. These days, it ain’t easy.

In fairness, some of these shows aren’t too bad. But more often than not, they embody a dismal failure of the imagination, telling you absolutely nothing you don’t know already about the work being revived. In the most unfortunate cas! es (like the recent “Glengarry” with Al Pacino), they even manage to make a great play look small.

But to borrow a favorite line from Tennessee Williams, one of the most manhandled of great dramatists in recent years, sometimes there is God so quickly. You go to see a play you’ve seen a dozen times before â€" thinking “Not you again, you old warhorse”- and it’s as if you’re a witness to a rebirth. It’s like looking at your ancient grandmother and seeing the glowing girl she was 50 years earlier, before she was encrusted by time and habit.

That was my experience when I went to the current production of Williams’s “Glass Menagerie” at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Reading about it in advance, I had deemed it a dicey proposition. A collaboration between two Brits (JohnTiffany and Steven Hoggett) best known for their work on the whimsical musical “Once” The robust Cherry Jones as the faded, genteel Amanda A staging that included stylized gestures and tanks of black viscous liquid

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Kevin Anderson, left, and Brian Dennehy in the 1999 Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.”

But my doubts fell away almost as soon as the show began. I’ve written at length about this production already and hope to have the chance to again, if it moves t! o Broadwa! y, as is rumored. So I’ll confine myself to saying that this was a “Menagerie” that gave full, vibrant life to Williams’s notion of a play shaped by memoryâ€"and specifically, the memory of Williams’s alter-ego, Tom Wingfield (a superb Zachary Quinto). It was as if the script were being created, in a backward-looking present tense, as we watched.

I’ve had the good fortune to feel this way before during my years as a theater critic, though it’s a rare and blessed experience. Robert Falls’s darkness-shrouded 1999 production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” starring Brian Dennehy, gave a similar sense of a world summoned from the recesses of one man’s mind (in this case, atruly depressive mind).

Sometimes a single performance, and the effect it produces on the others in the cast, can startle into you a new awareness of a classic. I think of Janet McTeer in Anthony Page’s 1996 version of Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” As the infantile Nora, Ms. McTeer would appear to have been oddly cast. Her physique is that of a strapping Artemis, and she was taller than Owen Teale, who played her domineering husband.

Yet this physical incongruity lent a new resonance to the notion of Nora trapped in a role to which she was not naturally suited. It helps, of course, that Ms. McTeer is an actress of uncommon emotional transparency. Nora’s captivity had never before felt so viscerally real to me, nor her marriage so doomed. I was shaking with emotion by the end, which had certainly not been my usual reaction to “A Doll’s House.”

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Janet McTeer in the 1997 Broadway production of “A Doll’s House.”

Other examples that come to mind: Cate Blanchett in Williams’s “Streetcar,” making me see Blanche DuBois as not just a crushed butterfly but a canny, ever-struggling survivor, who has finally reached the end of her tether; Simon Russell Beale in “Hamlet,” finding the gentle, wounded but still brilliant innocent within the angry, frustrated prince; Mark Rylance as Olivia in“Twelfth Night,” presenting that bereaved countess as a young noblewoman (not unlike Queen Elizabeth I) upon whom power has suddenly been thrust.

I’ve mentioned only plays. But I have known vintage musicals to blossom in similar ways: Walter Bobbie’s stripped-down 1996 revival of “Chicago” (still running on Broadway) and Bartlett Sher’s younger-than-springtime “South Pacific,” for starters. And while I admired the original 1994 Broadway staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Passion,” I didnâ! €™t fully! grasp what it was about until I saw Eric Schaeffer’s 2002 version at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

This was a production that righted an imbalance in the love triangle that is the focus of “Passion,” putting the man, Giorgio (played by the wonderful Michael Cerveris) at its center and making it clearly the story of his sentimental education. (In that sense, it’s like restoring Tom to the center of “Menagerie.”) I’ve seen, oh, a half-dozen or so productions of “Passion” during the past two decades, and I’ll be seeing another this weekend (at the Classic Stage Company). To my surprise, I’m kind of excited, willing to be born again, once more.

What are your experiences of revivals that made you see plays or musicals in new ways When were you born again by a fresh interpretation of a familiar show