No playwright writes funnier lines than Christopher Durang at the top of his form. And that's one reason the Roundtable Theater's take on his one-act, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a devastatingly hilarious send-up of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, is such a riot. The other reason is the expert timing and daftness the four actors, under Dan Welch's skilled direction, exhibit as they plow through the absurdities of their characters and the plot. In Durang's version, the shy, crippled daughter Laura, who collects miniature glass animals, becomes wimpy Lawrence (Craig Salleng), who collects colored glass cocktail stirrers and is not only crippled but subject to asthma and eczema. Mother Amanda (Sandy Neumann), who never shuts up about the 17 gentleman callers of her genteel Southern girlhood, pressures her other son, the constantly movie-going Tom (Matt Bates), to bring home from the factory where he works a girl for Lawrence. At the movies, Tom is always meeting sailors who end up spending the night in his room. The girl he brings home to meet Tom turns out to be a brash, hard-of-hearing lesbian named Ginny (Jodie Bragg), who used to sit next to Lawrence in high school glee club. She goes home to her girlfriend Betty, prompting Amanda to remark that "we haven't had a lesbian in the house since your grandmother died."
Through no fault of their own, the first-rate cast members are largely wasted in the three short sketches that precede the "Menagerie." piece. That's because Durang's writing here is decidedly lightweight and minor. Mrs. Sorken is a monologue by Bragg as a ditzy suburban housewife lecturing on the meaning of theater and winging it because she forgot her notes. In DMV Tyrant, Jennifer Shank is a maddeningly unhelpful clerk in a government office where Bates is trying to get his driver's license information corrected. It's all quite pedestrian. And One Minute Play, with Salleng and Shank, comes and goes so fast, it is hardly there.
