THE GLASS MENAGERIE
(1945)
Tennessee Williams (1911-1988)
Tennessee Williams’s early life was associated with the South (and so are many of his plays and stories). He was born in Columbus, Mississippi and his family moved to St. Louis some years later. His father was a violent, aggressive traveling salesman, his mother, the high-minded, puritanical daughter of a clergyman; his elder sister, a shy and hypersensitive girl with mental as well as physical problems which eventually necessitated that she be institutionalized. His family thus provided him with the seeds for characters who were to people many of his plays. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take up a clerical job in a shoe factory, before resuming his academic studies at Washington University, in St. Louis, and then at the University of Iowa.
Williams was constantly striving to become a writer, turning out a steady stream of poetry, s
tories and plays. He wanders about the country working at a variety of jobs in New Orleans, Mexico, Chicago, Florida, Los Angeles. He waited table, ushered in movie theaters, and ran elevators, etc. until he reached New York, determined to make a career of the theater.
A series of one-act plays attracted attention to Williams, and in 1940 the Theater Guild sponsored his first professional full-length production of Battle of Angels in Boston. The play failed to reach New York but his next effort, The Glass Menagerie, after a long tryout in Chicago, came to New York in 1945 and was a popular and critical success, which lofted him into the celebrity. Two years later he triumphed again with A Streetcar Named Desire and became one of America’s most applauded playwrights. Other plays of Williams’ include Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana. Many of the plays have been translated for productions throughout the world, and, with few exceptions, his works (including some of his novels) have been effectively transferred to film.
In an early short story, Tennessee Williams described a character’s “sense of the enormous grotesquerie of the world,” a phrase which can stand as the paradigm of his own world view. Out of the compassion born of his own painful discovery of the ultimate loneliness and isolatedness of individual human experience in the world where he lived, Wil1iams has fashioned a theater in which images of incredible brutality collide with those of fragile beauty. Many of his plays embody the point of view he once announced: “It is not the essential dignity but the essential ambiguity of man that I think needs to be stated.”
CHARACTERS
AMANDA WINGFIELD [the mother]: A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place. Her characterization must be carefully created, not copied from type. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at. Certainly she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her slight person.
LAURA WINGFIELD [her daughter]: Amanda, having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live clergymanvitally in her illusions, but Laura’s situation is even graver. A childhood illness has 1eft her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace. This defect need not be more than suggested on the stage. Stemming from this, Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.
TOM WINGFIELD [her son, and the narrator of the play]: A poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity.
JIM O’CONNOR [the gentleman caller]: A nice, ordinary, young man.
PRODUCTION NOTES
Being a ‘memory play’, The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom from convention. Because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric to
uches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic icecubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. 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.
These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.
THE SCREEN DEVICE
There is only one important difference between the original and acting version of the play and that is the omission in the latter of the device which I tentatively included in my original script. This device was the use of a screen on which were projected magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles. I do not regret the omission of this device from the present Broadway production. The extraordinary power of Miss Taylor’s performance made it suitable to have the utmost simplicity in the physical production. But 1 think it may be interesting to some readers to see how this device was conceived. So I am putting it into the published manuscript. These images and legends, projected from behind, were cast on a section of wall between the front room and the dining-room areas, which should be indistinguishable from the rest when not in use.

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