"The Glass Menagerie"
Around 1941, Williams began the work that would become The Glass Menagerie. The play evolved from a short story entitled “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which focused more completely on Laura than the play does. In December of 1944, The Glass Menagerie was staged in Chicago, with the collaboration of a number of well-known theatrical figures. When the play first opened, the audience was sparse, but the Chicago critics raved about it, and eventually it was playing to full houses. In March of 1945, the play moved to Broadway, where it won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. This highly personal, explicitly autobiographical play earned Williams fame, fortune, and critical respect, and it marked the beginning of a successful run that would last for another ten years. Two years after The Glass Menagerie, Williams won another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams won the same two prizes again in 1955, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams is a famous Southern American writer, born in 1911, in Mississippi. His father was an unsuccessful salesman and an alcoholic, and his mother the daughter of a Southern Clergyman; she had mental problems and suffered from "hysteria". He had a brother (Dakin) and a sister (Rose). They lived with his maternal grandparents until he was 7, when the family moved to St. Louis. From there, the family moved 16 times in 10 years, partially due to his father's alcoholism. Williams was relentlessly taunted in school; he was an "outcast" who never quite fit in. His best friend was his sister "Rose", and she is the inspiration for "Laura" in "Menagerie". However, Rose had a labotomy due to her mental illness that led to her permanent institutionalization (Williams was in college at the time), and this greatly affected Tennessee.
Williams turned to movies and books to ease the pain of being a social outcast. At age 16, he earned $5 for answering a question to win a national writing competition. He was hooked. He entered U of Missouri in Journalism and began writing his plays. But because he failed an ROTC course, his father, who was outraged, pulled him out of school and forced him to work at the shoe factory with his father... this, he obviously hated. The 3 years Williams spent at the factory nearly drove him to a mental breakdown. He went back to college, dabbled in theater, transferred to college in Iowa and eventually graduated in 1938. He wandered from job to job until he got a Rockefeller grant to study playwriting at the New School in NY... he even worked as a Hollywood script writer. That would all change with the success of "The Glass Menagerie".
The impact of success on Williams’s life was colossal and, in his estimation, far from positive. In an essay entitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” he outlines, with both light humor and a heavy sense of loss, the dangers that fame poses for an artist. For years after he became a household name, Williams continued to mine his own experiences to create pathos-laden works. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams’s world. Since the early 1940s, he had been a known homosexual, and his experiences in an era and culture unfriendly to homosexuality certainly affected his work. After 1955, Williams began using drugs, and he would later refer to the 1960s as his “stoned age.” He suffered a period of intense depression after the death of his longtime partner in 1961 and, six years later, entered a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis. He continued to write nonetheless, though most critics agree that the quality of his work diminished in his later life. His life’s work adds up to twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir; five of his plays were also made into movies. Williams died from choking in a drug-related incident in 1983.
When The Glass Menagerie was first produced in Chicago in 1944, Tennessee Williams was an obscure, struggling playwright. He had recently quit a job in Los Angeles writing screenplays for MGM, an experience he had not considered positive. While the start was slow, within a few weeks, they were filling the house during performances. It went on to play in NY for 561 performances and won a Critics Circle Award. There have been many famous actors/actresses to play these roles.
Plot Overview T he Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one postcard, has not been heard from since. Amanda is a Southern Belle who harps on her idyllic past and her "gentleman callers". It bothers her that her daughter, Laura, who wears a brace, is not attractive to men as she was. She enrolls Laura in a Business College (in hopes her daughter becoming a success), but is again disappointed to find out that Laura couldn't handle the pressure and the shyness and drops out. This convinces Amanda that the only option for Laura is to FIND A MAN and get married. Laura collects little glass animals-- this is her "safe place"-- the animals provide her solace. Amanda sells magazine subscriptions...
Then there is TOM. Tom is Laura's brother, and he resents his mother for relying on him to be the pillar of the family. He HATES his job at a local warehouse and spends his evenings reading, at movies, and drinking. He and Amanda are always arguing, and Tom ends up breaking some of Laura's prized figurines. Amanda asks Tom to find a suitor for Laura, so he invites his friend Jim over for dinner. Ironically, Jim turns out to be the one man Laura had a huge crush on in highschool, so she refuses to come down for dinner. Tom confesses he has used the electric bill money to join the merchant Marines so he can finally ESCAPE the prison that is his life. Amanda looks foolish at dinner; she wears a dress from her youth and flirtingly speaks with Jim throughout the dinner.
At the end of the dinner, the lights go out, and candles are lit. Laura is forced to entertain Jim in the living room, but at first, she can't even speak to him. Jim breaks Laura out of her shell... reminding her of how he used to call her "Blue Roses" in HS, telling her she should stop being so shy. She shows him her prized glass unicorn, but he accidentally breaks off its horn. They do kiss, but Jim reveals that he has a fiancee... Amanda is mad, but Tom says he didn't know that.
In a famous soliloquy, Tom, from the fire escape, reveals that he got fired from his job and left his mother and sister behind. He says that although time has passed, he remains guilty for having to leave.
.
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams is a famous Southern American writer, born in 1911, in Mississippi. His father was an unsuccessful salesman and an alcoholic, and his mother the daughter of a Southern Clergyman; she had mental problems and suffered from "hysteria". He had a brother (Dakin) and a sister (Rose). They lived with his maternal grandparents until he was 7, when the family moved to St. Louis. From there, the family moved 16 times in 10 years, partially due to his father's alcoholism. Williams was relentlessly taunted in school; he was an "outcast" who never quite fit in. His best friend was his sister "Rose", and she is the inspiration for "Laura" in "Menagerie". However, Rose had a labotomy due to her mental illness that led to her permanent institutionalization (Williams was in college at the time), and this greatly affected Tennessee.
Williams turned to movies and books to ease the pain of being a social outcast. At age 16, he earned $5 for answering a question to win a national writing competition. He was hooked. He entered U of Missouri in Journalism and began writing his plays. But because he failed an ROTC course, his father, who was outraged, pulled him out of school and forced him to work at the shoe factory with his father... this, he obviously hated. The 3 years Williams spent at the factory nearly drove him to a mental breakdown. He went back to college, dabbled in theater, transferred to college in Iowa and eventually graduated in 1938. He wandered from job to job until he got a Rockefeller grant to study playwriting at the New School in NY... he even worked as a Hollywood script writer. That would all change with the success of "The Glass Menagerie".
The impact of success on Williams’s life was colossal and, in his estimation, far from positive. In an essay entitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” he outlines, with both light humor and a heavy sense of loss, the dangers that fame poses for an artist. For years after he became a household name, Williams continued to mine his own experiences to create pathos-laden works. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams’s world. Since the early 1940s, he had been a known homosexual, and his experiences in an era and culture unfriendly to homosexuality certainly affected his work. After 1955, Williams began using drugs, and he would later refer to the 1960s as his “stoned age.” He suffered a period of intense depression after the death of his longtime partner in 1961 and, six years later, entered a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis. He continued to write nonetheless, though most critics agree that the quality of his work diminished in his later life. His life’s work adds up to twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir; five of his plays were also made into movies. Williams died from choking in a drug-related incident in 1983.
When The Glass Menagerie was first produced in Chicago in 1944, Tennessee Williams was an obscure, struggling playwright. He had recently quit a job in Los Angeles writing screenplays for MGM, an experience he had not considered positive. While the start was slow, within a few weeks, they were filling the house during performances. It went on to play in NY for 561 performances and won a Critics Circle Award. There have been many famous actors/actresses to play these roles.
Plot Overview T he Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one postcard, has not been heard from since. Amanda is a Southern Belle who harps on her idyllic past and her "gentleman callers". It bothers her that her daughter, Laura, who wears a brace, is not attractive to men as she was. She enrolls Laura in a Business College (in hopes her daughter becoming a success), but is again disappointed to find out that Laura couldn't handle the pressure and the shyness and drops out. This convinces Amanda that the only option for Laura is to FIND A MAN and get married. Laura collects little glass animals-- this is her "safe place"-- the animals provide her solace. Amanda sells magazine subscriptions...
Then there is TOM. Tom is Laura's brother, and he resents his mother for relying on him to be the pillar of the family. He HATES his job at a local warehouse and spends his evenings reading, at movies, and drinking. He and Amanda are always arguing, and Tom ends up breaking some of Laura's prized figurines. Amanda asks Tom to find a suitor for Laura, so he invites his friend Jim over for dinner. Ironically, Jim turns out to be the one man Laura had a huge crush on in highschool, so she refuses to come down for dinner. Tom confesses he has used the electric bill money to join the merchant Marines so he can finally ESCAPE the prison that is his life. Amanda looks foolish at dinner; she wears a dress from her youth and flirtingly speaks with Jim throughout the dinner.
At the end of the dinner, the lights go out, and candles are lit. Laura is forced to entertain Jim in the living room, but at first, she can't even speak to him. Jim breaks Laura out of her shell... reminding her of how he used to call her "Blue Roses" in HS, telling her she should stop being so shy. She shows him her prized glass unicorn, but he accidentally breaks off its horn. They do kiss, but Jim reveals that he has a fiancee... Amanda is mad, but Tom says he didn't know that.
In a famous soliloquy, Tom, from the fire escape, reveals that he got fired from his job and left his mother and sister behind. He says that although time has passed, he remains guilty for having to leave.
.
Discussion Points
1. Tom is a dual character. He seems to have a love/hate relationship with his family. Tom is obligated to stay and take care of his family, but that obligation weighs on him terribly, and he lashes out. The irony in the end is that he's damned if he goes, damned if he stays. Do you think he makes the right decision?
2. Some critics suggest that the source of Tom's pain is really secret feelings for his sister Laura. Do you see evidence of that in the play?
3. Amanda is somewhat of a stereotype-- the "Southern Belle" who has seen her best days. Like Willy, she tends to harp on the past. Critics read her as "tragic", "comic", and sometimes "grotesque". What do you think?
4. Laura has the fewest lines in the play, yet she is a central figure (the plot revolves around her). The major symbols in the story, the 'blue roses', 'unicron', the 'glass figurines' all represent her. HOW?
5. How do Tom's and Amanda's perception of Laura differ? Why?
6. Discuss "The difficulty of accepting reality" as a theme.
7. Discuss "The impossibility of true escape" as a theme.
8. Discuss "the power of memory" as a theme.
FAMOUS QUOTES:
But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?
I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!
*Note: Some of these notes are taken from SparkNotes online.
2. Some critics suggest that the source of Tom's pain is really secret feelings for his sister Laura. Do you see evidence of that in the play?
3. Amanda is somewhat of a stereotype-- the "Southern Belle" who has seen her best days. Like Willy, she tends to harp on the past. Critics read her as "tragic", "comic", and sometimes "grotesque". What do you think?
4. Laura has the fewest lines in the play, yet she is a central figure (the plot revolves around her). The major symbols in the story, the 'blue roses', 'unicron', the 'glass figurines' all represent her. HOW?
5. How do Tom's and Amanda's perception of Laura differ? Why?
6. Discuss "The difficulty of accepting reality" as a theme.
7. Discuss "The impossibility of true escape" as a theme.
8. Discuss "the power of memory" as a theme.
FAMOUS QUOTES:
But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?
I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!
*Note: Some of these notes are taken from SparkNotes online.
Scene from "Menagerie": Tom and his controlling mother played by Katherine Hepburn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFeQbEUjHVk&feature=related
Amanda and Tom, Fire Escape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SumagAF4nU8
Scene-- Laura and Jim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKI49JfNPNc&feature=related
Student video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BTW_nBgmDk&feature=related
nice student synopsis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv2LJzc-tuU&feature=related
Amanda and Tom, Fire Escape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SumagAF4nU8
Scene-- Laura and Jim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKI49JfNPNc&feature=related
Student video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BTW_nBgmDk&feature=related
nice student synopsis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv2LJzc-tuU&feature=related
