The Glass Menagerie

"This is the play that catapulted him to fame. It was the play that brought, what he called in an essay a few years after it premiered, ‘the catastrophe of success.’ The Glass Menagerie wasn’t his debut; he’d written a few politically-charged agitprop plays for a low-key independent theatre group called the Mummers of St Louis—like Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind— plays that dealt directly with the hardship and poverty of the Great Depression. But they weren’t particularly successful and weren’t really designed to be. Before The Glass Menagerie, to try for mainstream Broadway success, he wrote a play called Battle of Angels, which had a disastrous premier in Boston in 1940; there were pyrotechnics in the final scene, and the theatre in which the play was staged nearly caught fire, so the production had to be curtailed. But Williams didn’t give up, remained persistent. Battle of Angels later formed the basis of his play Orpheus Descending . Then he came to The Glass Menagerie , initially during a very brief and essentially unsuccessful period in Hollywood, where he wrote a treatment for a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller . It wasn’t produced, but the screenplay drew enough eyeballs that it got the attention of this actor-producer named Eddie Dowling, who would come to play Tom in the original Broadway production. Dowling’s attention led to the casting of Laurette Taylor as Amanda and Julie Haydon as Laura. The rest is Broadway history. The reason I’ve chosen to highlight it is because it sets up so many o fthe perennial themes that we’ve come to identify with Williams’ work. Namely, right at the top of the list is the importance of, and tensions within, families. The Glass Menagerie is a quintessential family play, and Williams comes back, repeatedly, to the centrality of the family in American life. He stages—with this triptych of Amanda, Laura and Tom—the loneliness and the alienation and the yearning that emerges from three disconnected, withdrawn, uncertain, fragile, but also beautiful characters. There’s also this blurring of fact and fiction, realism and magic, and that establishes Williams’ talent for—as Tom says in the beginning of the play—truth “in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” He wants to tell hard truths about life, but also to put them through some kind of rose-coloured filter. Not to be overly brutal, but also not to shy away from the fact it was an especially difficult time in the 1930s and early 1940s. The play shows his penchant for creating undeniably human yet profoundly flawed characters, and though we are separated now from The Glass Menagerie by a good 80 years, everybody feels that pain felt by Amanda, or the loneliness of Tom, or the alienation of Laura, because these are the bedrock of what it means to be human. I think that for anybody who wants to understand these themes—both in terms of their own humanity, and also as a way of understanding Williams’ dramaturgy— The Glass Menagerie is a perfect place to start. The memory play is, essentially, a character—in this case, Tom Wingfield—looking back on a very important moment in his life and theatricalising it. He draws the audience’s attention to this, making very clear that this is artificial, remembered, and may not be accurate or even reliable. Williams is drawing attention both to the fallibility of Tom’s memory, and also inviting us to draw our own conclusions about Tom’s relationship with his family. Vieux Carré, the next play I’ve picked, is also a memory play. I’ve always read it as a sort of sequel to The Glass Menagerie . The memory play form functions primarily as a way in which Williams’ characters can process traumatic memories. For example: Tom’s relationship with his mother is extremely strained and awkward; she calls him her “right hand bower” and says she will only allow him freedom to go “whichever way the wind blows you” after Laura gets married. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to place on one person’s shoulders, not least because Mr Wingfield, the family patriarch, is gone. Tom, for all intents and purposes, is the man of the house. He has to do the job that his father has abandoned, and Tom doesn’t want to fill that role, frankly. The memory play functions as a way to unleash these traumas and tensions, and through that being able to reconcile the guilt of walking away from the family and the responsibilities. Whether fully relinquishing that guilt is possible for Tom, though, Williams doesn’t make clear."