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This epic poem has been converted for a theater audience and has also been given a twist.

Mr. Craig is hilariously revenge-of-the-nerdy as Beowulf, his heroic posturing notably at odds with his paunch and his glasses. And those academics turn out to have darker aspects to their personalities: they become Grendel and the other beasts Beowulf confronts.

“Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage” is a song-play that both depicts every English major’s epic-poem scourge in clever rock opera terms and deconstructs its own deconstruction via mock academic panel analysis.

Memory may be a torturer in “The Glass Menagerie.” But every so often, as this glorious production allows, it lights up the darkness like a divine benediction.

In this abstract reproduction of Tom’s shabby prison, with its beckoning escape, Tennessee Williams’s timeless Depression-set “memory play” appears suspended in a somber universe — which, as it turns out, is exactly where it should be.

 Cherry Jones’ turn as Amanda Wingfield in American Repertory Theater’s “The Glass Menagerie” is agonizingly, painfully perfect.In rare moments of tenderness, you’ll want to hold the tortured, torturing matriarch and tell her everything is going to be all right. But most of the time, you’ll want to strangle her. 

If Amanda Wingfield ever goes on trial, she’d be wise to retain Cherry Jones as her defense attorney.

Ladies like Amanda Wingfield, Tennessee Williams’ overbearing mama of The Glass Menagerie, ring a belle for Southern-bred actress Cherry Jones.

Some people are shocked to hear that for the first time in its 30-year history, the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge is producing a play by the great Southern writer Tennessee Williams.

Were Williams alive to see the new production by the American Repertory Theater, however, he might have turned to T. S. Eliot’s suggestion, in “Burnt Norton,” that “all time is eternally present.”

The A.R.T. production, in Tennessee Williams’s words, does not go to the moon. It goes much further.