Last year, Ryan Purcell, founder of the Williams Project, collaborated with Intiman Theatre Festival to produce an underwhelming but basically serviceable production of Orpheus Descending. This year, he's collaborated with Cafe Nordo to create the same sort of thing—dinner-theater style.

Designer Ryan Dunn has "transformed" Cafe Nordo into the St. Louis apartment where The Glass Menagerie takes place. A long table sits at the center of the room. Two small stages rise at either end of that table, and the audience surrounds the scene at their own tables. A few lucky audience members (including my guest and me, who greatly appreciated the comped tickets) sit beneath the oppressively bright stage lights at the long table, right in the middle of a dysfunctional family's hours-long argument.

In the play, the paterfamilias—"a telephone man who fell in love with long distances"—has abandoned the family for Mexico, leaving his wife, Amanda Wingfield (played with plenty of urgency by Nancy Moricette), with nothing but her memories of better times. Her son, Tom (Grant Chapman), has creative aspirations that reach beyond the shoe factory where he works to support the family, but his boozing might jeopardize that future. Meanwhile, the daughter, Laura (Elise LeBreton), struggles with self-esteem as a result of her disability.

Like her mother, Laura's stuck in the past, a place where her few happy memories can crystallize and brighten over time. When Tom brings home a friend from work—the Gentleman Caller (Leicester Landon)—Amanda seizes the opportunity as her one chance to get Laura married off. The play was personal for Williams, and it's one of his greatest achievements. Purcell's and Nordo's production of it is not at all great.

Have you ever been to a dinner at a friend's house that dissolved into an awkward shouting match between a mother and her ungrateful children? That's what the first act of this collaboration feels like. If that's your idea of a good time, then you can pay $80 for the pleasure, plus a chance to eat some mediocre food served up family style.

I got dizzy watching Moricette chase Chapman around the table, grasping at the collar of her housedress. More dizzying were the gestures at chronological destabilization. The music (Sia, D'Angelo, Bieber), some of the costumes, and Laura's neon headphones place us in the present day, but everything else—about the play and the production—points back to the past. The choice didn't seem fully committed or justified. The anachronisms seemed like whims and afterthoughts.

Aside from a pair of pimento-cheese finger sandwiches at 7:30 p.m., the Southern-style supper isn't served until 9:00 p.m. The gray "Mississippi Pot Roast" that broke the fast wasn't much of a consolation. My greens were sweet (and good) and the cornbread was dry, but it was useful as a sop for the soup the black-eyed peas swam in. I couldn't catch a buzz on "Tom's Sidecar," the well-balanced but small brandy cocktail served with dinner, though I desperately wanted to take the edge off the family drama exploding all around me.

Then there was the cake. Like Tennessee Williams himself, the gooey butter cake is one of St. Louis's most meaningful contributions to American culture. It's like three pounds of butter, sugar, and cream cheese. The distinctive chewy, yellow cake crust is the best part, and so a corner piece is prized. Nordo's variation is pale yellow instead of golden brown, bland instead of rich and buttery, and it comes with an unwelcome squirt of raspberry coulis. Being a Missouri boy, I was looking forward to a madeleine moment with the confection, but it was as unfulfilling as Amanda's memories.

After dinner, the darker, quieter, second act begins. This act is much better than the first, but maybe I was just relieved not to be in the crossfire of all that arguing? Landon really turns up the goof in his portrayal of the Gentleman Caller, but he spurs a better performance from LeBreton. These two carry the rest of the play, which, until this point in the performance, was really only being held up by Moricette.

The Glass Menagerie is a classic that deserves the designation. It consecrates the damned-if-you-leave/damned-if-you-don't theme that forever haunts people who grew up in small towns. No amount of mediocrity can entirely undermine Williams's incredible language, but it's a shame you have to put up with so much to see it dramatized.