The Brooklyn Rail

Tony Torn was only ten years old when he witnessed his father, the inimitable Rip Torn, perform the role of Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Five decades later, the memory of that production remains both deeply profound and deeply frightening.

“The legacy of Tennessee Williams looms large over my family,” said Torn. “That legacy is powerful and intriguing, but also intimidating.”

Torn, at sixty years old, is now an essential fixture of New York’s experimental theater scene, with over one hundred credits across a richly varied career as writer, director, and actor (extensive film and television work included). But in all those years, the challenge of Williams remained untouched. How to measure up to such a legacy? Never mind his father—Torn’s mother, the celebrated actress Geraldine Page, was among the foremost interpreters of Williams in the playwright's lifetime.

Now, Torn has finally been drawn into the Tennesse Williams orbit—albeit via an indirect route. He directs the US premiere of The Whole of Time, a feminist reworking of The Glass Menagerie by Argentinian playwright Romina Paula, now running at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg through September 20.

The production coincides with centennial celebrations for Torn’s mother, an Oscar winner and four-time Tony Award nominee. A method actress known for deep immersion into her roles, Page led Williams’s Summer and Smoke off-Broadway in 1952, then later starred in Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway in 1959. She also appeared in film adaptations of both plays.

“In a year where we’re celebrating Geraldine’s hundredth birthday, it’s heartwarming for me to be doing a play that engages with that family legacy,” Torn said.

The Brick run is a remount of the play’s New York debut in 2024 at Torn Page, a performance space that Torn and his two siblings opened in the second-floor living room of their parents’ Chelsea townhouse. That intimate staging, performed for just twenty-two audience members a night, received multiple extensions and earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Adaptation.

Torn’s direction seems “to suspend the piece in dialogue with other works,” critic Loren Noveck wrote of the Torn Page staging for Exeunt NYC. “A little of the macho energy of Streetcar Named Desire, a little of the twisted recursive fantasy life of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a little of the dirty rock-and-roll edge of early Shepard … it’s a densely intertextual work.”

The Whole Of Time first came to Torn by way of Argentinian-born actress Josefina Scaro. Asked by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY to perform a scene for an event celebrating the publication of Fauna and Other Plays, the first English-language collection of Paula’s work, Scaro was intrigued by the intersection of Torn’s family history and Paula’s unapologetically feminist reinterpretation of Williams’s masterpiece.

“It felt like a natural evolution, a way to deepen the conversation across countries, cultures, genders, and historical contexts,” said Scaro. “Tony’s version of The Whole of Time definitely carries a deeper scent of The Glass Menagerie, and that’s precisely the beauty of this collaboration. It doesn’t erase the original; it adds a new layer, a new resonance.”

Scaro takes on the role of shut-in daughter Antonia, the play’s equivalent of Laura Wingfield. Comparisons don’t extend much further—Paula’s creation is a sharp-tongued, intellectually rigorous young woman, a far cry from the innocent and childlike Laura of Menagerie.

It was that half-distance from Williams, the play’s dual state as both adaptation and critique, that allowed Torn to consider joining as director.

“It has always been difficult for me to think about taking on Tennessee," he reflected. “Rather than follow directly in my parents’ footsteps, I wanted to carve out a new road.”

Torn instead embraced the downtown scene. He appeared in Reza Abdoh’s seminal immersive work Father Was A Peculiar Man (“staged” in desolate streets and warehouses across a then-abandoned Meatpacking District) and three productions directed by avant-garde master Richard Foreman, among numerous credits. A founding director of the anti-consumerist performance troupe the Church of Stop Shopping, Torn himself frequently performs at Torn Page, where he led Claire Kiechel’s Paul Swan is Dead and Gone for The Civilians in 2019.

He and his siblings—twin brother Jon and sister Angelica—first envisioned Torn Page as hosting only small cabarets for friends. But within the last fifteen years, the three began inviting outside collaborators, realizing the space could become “more than just a place for Rip and Geraldine’s kids to do stuff,” Torn said.

A motley array of works followed. Strip back the room’s neutral white walls (returned to that color after each production) and you might find the deep green palette of Paul Swan; or the crimson red of The Only Jealousy Of Emer, a rarely performed W.B. Yeats work staged by Ray Yeates in 2018; or even the bright graffiti of Angelica’s punk rock concerts in the early 1980s.

“It’s a wonderful feeling to have all that love and attention flowing through the space,” said Torn. “And it’s a great way to honor our parents.”

It was also a perfect fit for The Whole of Time, a play set entirely within an eccentric family home in Buenos Aires. Political exiles from Mexico City, the family is, like the Wingfields, an eclectic group. Imperious mother Ursula (Ana B. Gabriel) goes drinking late into the night (and possibly hooks up with male friends while out). Antonia spends most of her time on a chunky MacBook (the play is set in 2005) researching misogyny, fratricide, and Frida Kahlo. She is deeply attached to her enigmatic brother, Lorenzo (Lucas Salvagno), who conceals from his sister a possible escape to Spain.

One night, Lorenzo brings home a coworker, the handsome Maximiliano (Ben Becher). This play’s “Gentleman Caller” has rougher edges, responding to the family’s stranger tendencies with appropriate bafflement. And in Paula’s take, he inspires carnal interest from all members of the family, falling into a charged sexual dance with mother, daughter, and perhaps even son.

“Williams’s Gentleman Caller doesn’t really push back against the world of this house,” said Torn. “There’s more of a sense of challenge between Maximiliano and Antonia, and that’s super engaging in such a different way.”

For Scaro, Antonia’s agency—and her identification with Kahlo, whose life and work upended traditional gender roles—was key to the appeal of Paula’s text.

“I’m always reminding our collaborators that this is a reinterpretation of a classic, one that consciously chose to silence a man’s voice—Tom’s—and instead center a strong female lead,” said Scaro. “Every decision we make in this process should honor that fundamental shift.”

Torn hopes the move from twenty-two seats to the Brick’s forty-five is a first step on a continuing journey for the piece. The play’s resonance, he says, comes out of its modern touches as much as its original source.

“If people come looking for a close adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, that’s not what they’re going to see,” he said. “The reason why the play means so much to me is all its meanings that are specific to the now, with beautiful echoes of Williams.”

It is also, Torn confidently proclaims, a play that his mother would have enjoyed.

“She was always somebody who preferred the details of quotidian life over grand gestures,” Torn said with a smile. “I think Geraldine would really dig this play.”