The Glass Menagerie is an unremarkable but intimate production

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First produced in 1944, The Glass Menagerie held a peculiar importance to Tennessee Williams, the playwright responsible for it. It was his first major play, yes, but it was also the first play that he had managed to write without, in his words, "succumbing to the fascination of violence."

But while The Glass Menagerie is a quiet play, it is fierce enough, collisions everywhere. Dreams against harsh realities, desperation raging, illusions shattered like a glass unicorn dropped onto the floor, aggression introverted but the shrapnel still flying.

The Howland Company, a Toronto-based theatre ensemble made up of 11 artists, opened its modest production of The Glass Menagerie on Wednesday at the Theatre Centre's Incubator Space. An audience of 60 or so people gathered around a square sunken staging to see Williams's poetic study and semi-autobiographic memory play. The simple setting was a drably contemporary(ish) St. Louis apartment – Ave Maria on the Victrola becomes Mariah Carey on compact disc – and some actors bothered with American accents while others did not.

One who absolutely did was Tracey Hoyt. She was Amanda Wingfield, the faded Southern belle whose energies are primarily directed at prodding her son's ambitions and finding a husband for her "home girl" daughter. "My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children," she cries early.

Hoyt convincingly plays a scold who picked the wrong husband and whose past, to use her own words against her, has turned into "everlasting regret." She is taut and birdlike, her calories coming from swallowed pride. "A woman's charm is 50 per cent illusion," says A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche DuBois, but that estimate seems low here. There is something heroic – some might say pathetic, but some are mean – about this mother's fierce false hopes.

Mother has her hands full with daughter, whose catastrophic insecurities are ably presented by Hannah Spear, a performer with a background in improvisational comedy. We see gangly Laura retreating to her little world of glass-animal figurines. Her fantasy world extends to the bedroom, where she pleasures herself in a scene which the playwright might well have imagined but never did commit to paper.

Williams did specify that daughter Laura was slightly "crippled", but Spear doesn't play it hobbled – the limp only implied. Her psychological and emotional disabilities, however, are crystal clear.

Her older-by-two-years brother is Tom, a brooding, slouching and dissatisfied warehouse worker and aspiring writer. In the morning his mother tells him to "rise and shine." He does the former grudgingly. The latter, he doesn't do at all.

Tom is played by James Graham, also in character as the narrator, setting up the flashback scenes. His mother nags at him to not drink his coffee black, as it will cause a disease of the stomach. Does it matter? His frustrations are eating him alive anyway.

He does what he can though, and completes his task of bringing home a prospective husband for "little sister." The guy is Jim, a fellow warehouse worker who is the melodrama's Gentleman Caller character. Portrayed with cocky spunk by newcomer Samer Salem, the Caller hits it off with Daughter, but, ultimately, he won't be calling on her again.

Likely no one else will either, a realization that crushes her mother. She hides her devastation from Caller, but actress Hoyt does not hide it from us.

It's about façades. In director Philip McKee's version of this play, the daughter not only has a glass menagerie – figurines fragile as she – but a mirrored face mask too. It's put on for reflection as much as obscuring.

With its relatively inexperienced cast – lines were occasionally stumbled upon on opening night – this production of The Glass Menagerie isn't particularly remarkable. Its charm, I suppose, is its intimacy. So quiet, you can hear the hope drop.

The Glass Menagerie continues to Sept. 11 at The Theatre Centre.