ongoing – Sun. March 17

     So, I’ve just seen a new production of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 classic “The Glass Menagerie” at the American Repertory Theatre’s Loeb Drama Center. I’d read it in high school (hasn’t everyone? do kids still?) and seen it performed at least twice that I can recall. Is this a dusty old classic? Something you perhaps feel duty-bound to see?

   It is not. This play – directed by John Tiffany and set designed by Bob Crowley (both Tony winners for “Once”) – is a riveting, kick-ass affair. And there’s nothing antiquated about the quiet rage and frustration felt by the characters in this Southern drama.The stage is both old-fashioned, bare-bones spare and, somewhat deceptively, post-modern. Everyone’s talking about the viscous blue-black goo surrounding the three hexagons on stage and then there’s the couch, which appears to be an ordinary couch until … it isn’t. (No, I won’t tell you what happens on it; just make sure your eyes are on it as the play’s drawing to its conclusion.) Two big stars here: Cherry Jones (a longtime A.R.T. vet and multiple Tony Award winner along with her many other movie/theater/TV roles) as the mother, the faded Southern belle that is Amanda Wingfield. And there’s Zachary Quinto as Tom, the tormented narrator brother-of-mousy-Laura-son-of-Amanda, frustrated warehouse worker who may, at least in this production, be wrestling with his sexuality. Quinto – Mr. Spock in the “Star Trek” reboot and the evil doctor in “American Horror Story: Asylum” – in real life is not doing that; he’s openly gay. For that matter, so is Jones. You want a little coincidental twist? In “Horror Story” Quinto’s extremely evil and duplicitous character (nicknamed Bloody Face) raped the writer played by Sarah Paulson, who was Jones’ girlfriend until an amicable breakup in 2009.)

    While we’re on the subject of sexuality, a quick diversion: Boston’s extra-prolific and outrageous Ryan Landry, master of genre mashups and parody, staged an all-male “The Plexiglass Menagerie,” in which Landry played Amanda as a trailer park queen in post-Katrina New Orleans.

   So, anyway, we’re at the post “Glass Menagrie” opening  night party at Upstairs at the Square. ART artistic director Diane Paulus has spoken, paying eloquent tribute to cast, crew and director. (She didn’t say it but you’ve got to believe she and they are surely taking this cast and production to Broadway.) The Irish-born Tiffany has echoed her sentiments. Now, as the mingling commences, I’m saying hi to Quinto and trying to think of something beyond, “That was terrific.” And so, I opt for: “This playwright, he’s good.

    Quinto: “He has a future.”

   That’s banter!

   It's a bit better on stage actually. Tiffany’s approach to “Menagerie,” he told the New York Times was this: “I’m doing it the only way I know how to – very spare, very pure, with none of the phony realism that I dislike in theatre.” Choreographer Stephen Hoggett added: “John and I live by the maxim of plastic theater, even before we knew Tennessee had called it that. For me, in this case, it was about reading ‘Glass Menagerie’ and finding moments where we could expand from the script – be plastic – to create a physical world for the characters’ emotions and tensions.” To that end there is a fire escape leading to nowhere. (The play is regarded as Williams’ most autobiographical; his first name was Thomas before the change.)

    What goes on at the Loeb is emotional and it is tense. The daughter-sister Laura (Celia Keenan-Bolger) exudes repression, solitude and pain. She’s crippled, lonely, shy, ill-at-ease – always. Her only joy comes from her glass animals (the menagerie). Her mother sees her living a wonderful dream-life, after being swept off her feet. Laura sees, like Sartre, no exit. The bleakness is underlined by Nico Mulhy’s piano-based score.

   Quinto, as Tom, narrates the play with a charming drawl that almost belies his pent-up frustration. He sulks, he broods, he explodes rather spectacularly for all his reservation. Tom is a factory worker who wants to be a writer. He’s trapped, at least in this point in time (1936 or 1937) and is trying to envision a life that is not this. It’s a so-called “memory plan” – Tom’s recollections of his life at a certain point in time with his family. (The dad has long been gone.) Tom’s frequent escape from the tension is going “to the movies,” which perhaps is his code word for “a bar.” He feels for his sheltered sister, though, and acceding to his mother’s wishes and hopes for a “Gentleman Caller” to come rescue Laura he brings home his work-mate Jim (Brian J. Smith), who doesn’t even know Tom has a sister. (Yes, there seems like there might be a spark betweenTom and Jim.) Laura had a crush on an unknowing Jim when they were in high-school. She was, as is now, a wallflower; he was a sports star. But now his job is about the same as Tom’s, though he has the thought that things could, might, get better.

   How does this work out? Well, poignantly. You’ll leave the theater feeling palpable rage and sorrow, carrying the thought that you have seen an old gem with new life breathed into it, that what happened in the pre-WWII resonates just as much today as it did then.

Tickets: $65-$24. Up through Sunday March j17. Tuesday-Friday at 7:30, Saturday at 2 and 7:30, Sunday at 2.

64 Brattle St. Cambridge, 617-547-8300 www.amrep.org