The Glass Menagerie

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The Glass Menagerie Dramaturgy

"Being a 'memory play,' The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention... 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...

"When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken...

"The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is predominately in the heart."

— from Tennessee Williams’ production note for The Glass Menagerie

 

Set Model by Anya Klepikov

 

Amanda Wingfield, the Mother	Tom Wingfield, her Son	Laura Wingfield, her Daughter	Jim O'Connor, the Gentleman Caller

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The Glass Menagerie Dramaturgy

Dramaturg Drew Barker has created a Google site about the life and works of Tennessee Williams, as well as the production history and historical context of The Glass Menagerie.
Click here to visit our The Glass Menagerie Google site.

 

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Tennessee Williams (Photo: The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library)

“A Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” a short story written by Tennessee Williams in 1942, partly provided the basis for the play The Glass Menagerie.  In 1943, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio (and then-employer of Williams) rejected a film script version of the story entitled The Gentleman Caller.  More than this, however, inspired the play.

Known as the most autobiographical of all of (Thomas Lanier) Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie’s narrator, Tom, introduces us to his family.  Consequently, the Wingfield family is a theatrical distillation of the Williams family.

After moving with his family from Clarksdale, Mississippi, Williams lived in St. Louis from 1918 until he left for University of Missouri at Colombia in 1929.  His study of journalism at university was cut short by his alcoholic father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, who felt disgraced after discovering his son had failed Army ROTC.  Williams’ father then put him to work at the International Shoe Company in 1932 where he remained for three years.  (During his time there he worked with a Polish fellow named Stanley Kowalski who would make an appearance later in one of Williams’ plays.)  Williams continued to write at night and longed for the day he could afford to return to university.  His elder sister, Rose, enrolled at Rubicam’s Business School, and did indeed quit because of the stress and criticism— instead opting to walk about in the park.  Their father was verbally abusive and hypocritically demanded frugality.  Williams had wished that his father was out of the picture.  The mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, attempted to maintain Christian prudence and order in the house even as Rose’s sanity began to slip, Cornelius continued to drink, and Williams drowned himself in writing.  Edwina not only had genuine endurance, but also enduring love for her children.  She recalls in her journal Williams’ routine:

“Every evening when he came home from the shoe company, Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I could hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house.  Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes as he fell off to sleep at heaven knows what hour.” 

Williams with his sister, Rose (Photo: Dakin Williams Family Collection, Collinsville, IL)

Above all, Williams felt a special kinship with his emotionally and mentally fragile sister, Rose, who was forced by her parents to eventually succumb to the new scientifically trendy procedure called a prefrontal lobotomy.  His parents thought it would cure her of depression and delusional outbursts.  Williams never seemed to forgive himself for allowing this to happen.  After the operation, Rose became child-like, almost autistic and had to be looked after for the rest of her life.  Williams reflected later, “I think the petals of her mind had simply closed through fear.”

Williams later returned to the University of Iowa, graduating with a degree in playwrighting.  The Glass Menagerie received ample incubation and then received warm praise when debuted in New York.  Williams’ first popular play not only received critical acclaim, but also a long life making it the most produced of all his plays, and one of the most produced plays ever in America.