THEATER REVIEW : A Shining Performance of ‘Glass Menagerie’ : Ventura College version is classy touch to Tennessee Williams’ play about a single mother living with son and crippled daughter.

Sweet and sad, “The Glass Menagerie” was Tennessee Williams’ first hit play.Somewhat autobiographical, it plays as well today as it must have when first produced in 1945. Ventura College’s fine production, sensitively directed by Judy Garay, closes this weekend.

Amanda Wingfield (Sarah P. Meaney) is a single parent, raising her now-adult son and daughter in a St. Louis tenement. Amanda is constantly reminiscing about her past, glamorous and only possibly real. Physically crippled and mentally repressed, Laura (Jill Waggoner) mopes about the apartment, playing old records on the Victrola and tending to her collection of glass animals. Tom (Jeffrey H. Britt) is, like his mother, a dreamer.

Never quite working up the enthusiasm to join the merchant navy, Tom spends as much of his time as possible at the movies and away from his mother and sister. Then, one day, Tom invites home a co-worker at the shoe factory, Jim O’Connor (Joseph P. Smith). A dapper and enthusiastic fellow, he had been--though he never knew it--the object of a crush by Laura when both were in high school.

“The Glass Menagerie” was written as a fading memory, narrated by Tom with an accent simply reeking of honeysuckle (Williams, whose real name was “Thomas,” was born in Mississippi). It’s a terrific, sensitive and natural performance by Britt. As Amanda, Meaney gives a rather more mannered but no less effective performance, and Waggoner’s Laura is appropriately understated. When Smith’s ebullient O’Connor bursts into all of this, it’s clear that something more than a glass unicorn (symbolism alert!) will be broken.

Once again, Willy Eck has supplied an impressive stage set--oh, that all community theater groups had the resources of a college!--and Garay has scored the play like a movie, with moody instrumental backgrounds and bridges between scenes.

One of Williams’ least melodramatic plays, “The Glass Menagerie” is perhaps his most universal. The Ventura College production does it very nicely, indeed.

Details

* WHAT: “The Glass Menagerie.”

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday.

* WHERE: Ventura College Mainstage Theater, Loma Vista Road (west of Day Road), Ventura

* ETC: $9, $7 students, staff and seniors. Ventura College ASB cardholders free. For reservations or more information, call 648-8922.