Celia Keenan-Bolger is Laura in 'The Glass Menagerie'

Joe Tabacca for New York Daily News

Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays Laura in the Broadway revival of “The Glass Menagerie,” outside the Booth Theater on 45th St.

Celia Keenan-Bolger could never embrace “The Glass Menagerie” — in fact she shied away from it.

“I read it in high school and couldn’t find a way in,” she says. “It felt dysfunctional in a way I couldn’t completely relate to.”

But the actress could totally see herself working with stage great Cherry Jones and “Star Trek” star Zachary Quinto — who had already been cast as the troubled mother and son in the Tennessee Williams’ classic.

“When I auditioned it was less about the play than the people involved in it,” says Keenan-Bolger. “Now my whole relationship with the play has changed.”

The 35-year-old actress won the role of the fragile Laura in the revival of the 1944 drama by breaking director John Tiffany’s heart.

“Celia is one of the few actors to have made me cry in an audition — for the right reasons,” he says. “She has a great ability to enable audiences to access the inner worlds of the characters she plays.”

Some of those women include the plucky Molly in “Peter and the Starcatcher” and the sweet-sad Olive in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” — which earned her two Tony nominations — and wild Katie in “Bachelorette.”

“I’m very social and comfortable around people,” says Keenan-Bolger, who just celebrated her third wedding anniversary with actor John Ellison Conlee. Tonight at 7 p.m. they’re doing a reading of the new play, “Tumacho,” a western, at the Public Theater.

“Laura’s interior life is enormous but any time she’s demanded to express it is very challenging,” says Keenan-Bolger. “Laura is the character who’s most different from myself.”

One look at a production photo from the revival that ran this past winter at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., makes it clear that it’s not your mother’s “Menagerie.”

Tiffany, who’s staged the award-winning war drama “Black Watch” and the musical love story “Once,” has situated the abstract set above pools of black liquid. “We’re suspended somewhere in the universe,” says Keenan-Bolger.

It’s a spare place. Laura’s collection of glass has been winnowed to just her beloved horned horse.

“So much of what Laura does is care for her unicorn,” she says. “When it breaks it’s even more terrible. When she gives it away at the end there’s nothing left. It’s pretty dark.”