This season has been particularly auspicious at Princeton Summer Theater. Following its extraordinary presentation of Urinetown earlier, with a large multitalented cast of singers and dancers, the company is staging a much more intimate classic, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.

   Back in 1943,Williams was a scriptwriter for MGM. His screenplay A Gentleman Caller, never produced, was derived from a short story and became the germ for The Glass Menagerie, which launched his career as a major voice in American theater. By today’s standards, the play doesn’t seem especially innovative. However, in notes to the Princeton production, director Lileana Blain-Cruz points out that Williams intended to break the grip of realistic conventions that kept American theater from achieving the vitality he felt it should have.

   She quotes Williams: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.”

   The play is presented as a writer’s memory of events that led to his becoming an artist. It’s been considered an autobiographical coming-of-age story about Williams’s own emergence. He struck out from the stifling household of overbearing parents, and in the process left behind a fragile sister, who eventually broke down.

   The play’s voice is that of Tom Wingfield (Patrick Harvey), who introduces us to the setting. Stepping out of the action from time to time, Tom comments on events, much like the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. In two acts, the narrative is sharp and the characterizations are crystal clear, supplemented by images projected on a screen and snippets of period music. Working in a menial job at the local shoe factory, Tom seeks escape from his toxic home atmosphere by going out to the movies every night and returning drunk.

   His mother, Amanda (Sara-Ashley Bischoff), a faded Southern Belle and debutante, is anxious that her troubled daughter, Laura (Laura Hankin), be married off before it’s too late. The girl is painfully shy and slow, utterly lacking self-confidence or motivation. She spends most of her time at home, playing an ancient Victrola and tending her collection of glass animals. When Tom announces that he is inviting a co-worker, Jim (Tyler Crosby), home for dinner, Amanda pounces on this as an opportunity to match him up with Laura and get her launched. But Laura is terrified, because in high school she had a secret crush on Jim, whom she assumed never noticed her.

   Despite a very rocky start, with Laura becoming physically ill, the evening seems to turn out much better than expected. But this being Tennessee Williams, expectations have a way of becoming cruel disappointments.

   This is a challenging drama for local theater, but the Princeton cast is more than up to it. Harvey projects multiple sides of Tom, at once a restless and defiant young man who is determined to break out of his rut. Yet he is torn about leaving his sister behind. From the perspective of a seasoned poet who is looking back on his fitful start, the narrator Tom is eloquent and self-assured.

   As the taciturn Laura, Hankin has few spoken lines; she has much more to tell us through her body language and her facial expressions. She cowers like a wounded animal, only to come alive with the encouragement of the boy she idolized. One of the most moving scenes in the play, in the second act, is the stylized pas de deux between Laura and Jim, whom Crosby plays with a mixture of self-assured cockiness and empathy.

   Lording it over everyone as Amanda, Bischoff is larger than life, a blustery, bossy belle who hasn’t let go of the past. It’s as if she’s trying to re-create it through her daughter. If only Amanda’s manic energy would rub off, but it just drives Laura into her shell and Tom back to the late show at the cinema. Bischoff plays the character with gusto and humor.

   This is a taut drama that is very well served by the excellent performances of its small cast. If you’ve never seen the play or one of the film versions, by all means don’t miss this very fine production. And even if you know it well, you’ll find this a rewarding evening at the theater.

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  The Glass Menagerie continues at the Hamilton Murray Theater on the Princeton University Campus, July 16-17, 8 p.m., July 18, 2, 8 p.m., July 19, 2 p.m.; Tickets cost $10-$20. 609-258-7062; www.princetonsummertheater.org