The Glass Menagerie

I'm continuing my celebration of the centennial of the birth of Tennessee Williams by looking at his first hit, The Glass Menagerie (for those interested, my discussion of A Streetcar Named Desire can be found here). It is my personal favorite of his plays (though I can't say I've read them all, not yet), and his least controversial, probably the only one that could be on my school groups without an eyebrow being raised.

The play was first produced in 1944, though the major elements of it were contained in a short story that Williams wrote. It is intensely personal--the narrator is Tom Wingfield (Tom being Williams' real first name) and the character of Amanda Wingfield is modeled after his mother, and Laura is clearly his sister.

Tom describes the play as a memory, and in most productions the lines between reality and dramatic license are scrubbed. In the official published version, Williams includes the screen titles that were to be flashed onto a scrim, but he indicates these were not included in the original Broadway production. They are a bit much, such as when Laura is under stress we see the word "Terror!" on the screen--that is a bit much.

But what is so palpable about the play is the heartbreak that still can be felt, even almost seventy years later. The story is simple--Tom, now in the Merchant Marines, remembers a time in 1936, when he lived with his mother and sister. He worked in a shoe factory, but dreamed of becoming a writer (he would end up getting fired for writing a poem on a shoebox lid). Laura is a recluse, shy and considering herself a cripple (one leg is shorter than the other). She plays old records and tends to her collection of glass animals--her glass menagerie.

Dominating the action is Amanda, their flamboyant mother, who is trapped in a nostalgic past of the Old South. She constantly refers to the old days, especially an afternoon when she entertained seventeen gentleman callers. She tells Laura to be prepared for her own callers, though it's clear to everyone but Amanda that no one is going to call on Laura.

Amanda asks Tom to ask around at the shoe warehouse for a single man, and he finds one, Jim O'Connor, whom Williams describes as "a nice, ordinary young man." It turns out that Laura knew Jim in high school, and she had a crush on him. He called her "Blue Roses," mishearing her when she said she missed school because of pleurosis (Williams' sister, who was lobotomized and institutionalized, was named Rose).

The scene between Jim and Rose, when they sit and talk by candlelight (Tom has forgotten to pay the light bill) is so tender and emotional that it's almost too much to bear, especially when Jim tells her that he is engaged to be married.

Tom speaks of his father, who has abandoned the family but is represented by a portrait on the upstage wall, as a "telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town..." (Williams' father did not abandon the family, though he and his mother divorced when Williams was an adult, but his father did not approve of his career choice and the two were estranged for many years).

There is also just a hint of Williams' homosexuality, perhaps only visible in hindsight. Amanda asks him where he goes every night, and he says the movies, because he likes to see people have adventures. But one wonders whether that's a cover-up for something more debauched.

The original production starred Laurette Taylor, a celebrated stage actress who at the time was thought to be a hopeless drunk. She pulled it together, though, and her portrayal of Amanda was considered to be one of the greatest Broadway performances of the age. I saw the play on Broadway almost twenty years ago, with Jessica Tandy as Amanda and Amanda Plummer as Laura. I found Tandy to be a little stuffy in the role, but my memory of it is colored by my getting mugged just before I entered the theater.

It is difficult not to be moved by this play, particularly the last lines, which Tom speaks while Amanda and Laura are in the background, miming a conversation in candlelight: "Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful then I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger--anything that can blow your candles out! (Laura, in the background, bends over the candles). For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura--and say goodbye.... (She blows the candles out).