Produced by The Public Theatre
Winter, 1994

A STUDY GUIDE
Prepared by Martin Andrucki
Professor of Theater
Bates College

I. THE PLAYWRIGHT:
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He adopted the pen-name "Tennessee" in 1939.

At the time of Williams' birth, his father, Cornelius, a former telephone company employee, was working as a travelling salesman of men's clothing and shoes. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was an amateur actress and the daughter of an Episcopalian minister. Thomas--known as Tom--was their second child, a daughter, Rose, having been born in 1909. Their third child, Walter Dakin, would arrive in 1919.

Williams' father had the conventional vices of the travelling salesman, including a tendency to drink and womanize, and an aversion to domestic life. Consequently, he had not established a home of his own at the time of Tom's birth. Instead, Williams' mother lived with her parents in the Episcopal rectory, raising her first two children there, and receiving periodic visits from her wandering husband. Thus, Williams' earliest experiences were of the respectability and order of a small-town,
middle-class, Southern household, minus the conventional presence of a father. His closest companion and virtually his only friend during these years was his sister Rose--an intimate relationship that was to last throughout their lives.

In 1918, Williams' life underwent a drastic change when his father accepted a managerial job with a shoe company in St. Louis, then the fourth largest city in the United States. No longer a travelling salesman, Cornelius decided the time had come to establish a home of his own, and he moved his wife and two children to the big city.

This transition from the small-town South to the urban Midwest marked a major disruption in the future playwright's childhood. Life in St. Louis was profoundly unhappy for the Williams family. Edwina struggled without success to recapture the lost refinement of her life in the South, moving the family continually in search of more genteel housing. By the time Tom was fifteen, they had lived at a dozen different addresses in St. Louis. Meanwhile, Cornelius' continued drinking and sexual infidelity caused quarreling and even violence at home. During one altercation, Cornelius battered his way through a locked door which swung open violently,
breaking his wife's nose. Life for the children was also painful. Tom was being taunted in school for speaking in a southern accent and acting like a sissy, while sister Rose was growing withdrawn from the world, suffering nausea, headaches, stomach pains, panic attacks, and in general approaching the psychotic breakdown that would eventually disable her completely.

In 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri, only to leave after his junior year because of poor grades and family financial problems. Between 1932 and 1935, he returned to his troubled family in St. Louis. During this time, he began seriously to devote himself to writing. He also attended a business college to learn stenographic skills, and worked as a clerk in the warehouse of his father's shoe company. This period ended in April, 1935, when Williams suffered a nervous collapse. He left St. Louis to recuperate from his breakdown with his grandparents now living in Memphis.

Returning to St. Louis in the fall of 1935, he entered Washington University, where he remained until 1937, when he transferred to the University of Iowa. At both schools he worked constantly on his writing.

His sister's mental condition continued to deteriorate as she experienced hallucinations and violent schizophrenic seizures. Finally, in the fall of 1937, her doctors diagnosed her condition as incurable, and declared her capable of doing serious harm to herself and others. The treatment they recommended was a pre- frontal lobotomy, a surgical procedure in which one part of the brain is severed from the rest, bringing about calm and controlled behavior. With her mother's permission, the surgery was performed. From that point on, Rose Williams was mentally frozen in time in the autumn of 1937. For more than forty years, she would always reply
when asked that her age was twenty-eight, her brother's twenty-six.

Williams was emotionally devastated when he learned about the operation, carried out without his knowledge or approval. The destruction of Rose's personality was in some ways tantamount to her death, and thus for Williams amounted to the loss of the most intimate companion he had ever known. For the rest of his life, his work would be haunted by characters who resembled his sister: emotionally unstable southern women terrified of the world, many of them associated with the image of roses.

Williams left Iowa in 1938, and for the next six years worked at a variety of odd jobs. He continued to publish poetry, short fiction, and drama, won a number of grants and fellowships, and for a time worked as a writer for the MGM studio in Hollywood. It was there, in 1943, that he wrote a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, about an ageing southern belle and her troubled son and daughter. He offered the script to the studio, which promptly rejected it. Williams' revision of that screenplay became the The Glass Menagerie, which openend in Chicago in December, 1944, and in New York the following March. With this work, Tennessee Williams established himself as a major new American playwright.

His best-known later plays include A Streetcar Named Desire(1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth(1959), and Night of the Iguana (1960). Among his numerous prizes and awards are the Tony and Critics Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the Medal of Freedom. He died in 1983--a month before his seventy second birthday.

II. THE PLAY

I. Where: The stage directions tell us that, "the scene is memory," specifically the memory of Tom Wingfield, the narrator. As the son of Amanda and the brother of Laura, he recalls the events surrounding one crucial episode in his family's life.

The setting of these remembered events is the Wingfield apartment, located in a large building in St. Louis. The action is divided between scenes inside the apartment involving Tom and the other characters, and scenes just outside the apartment, in the alley and on the fire escape. These outside scenes are mostly monologues, in which Tom addresses the audience directly, providing the narrative or interpretive context for the action inside the apartment.

For example, at the beginning of Scene Three, Tom "speaks from the fire escape landing," and informs the audience that "the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment." Later, in Scene Five, Tom steps out of the apartment to the fire escape to get away from his nagging mother. While there, he turns to the audience, and comments on the significance of the dance hall across the alley, which offered momentary romance and excitement as "compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure."

The movement between spaces inside and outside the apartment mirrors the structural alternation of the play between narrativescenes involving Tom and the audience, and dramatic scenes, involving Tom and the other characters in his memory. This movement, which captures the fluidity of memory, may also derive from the play's origin as a movie script. The film medium is especially adept at changing scenes quickly through camera work and editing.

II. When. Tom tells us that the action takes place during "that quaint period, the thirties," when America was experiencing a "dissolving economy." This last phrase refers to the Great Depression, which began in 1929, the year Williams began college, and lasted until the outbreak of World War II. During the worst period of the Depression, one in four Americans was unemployed, and the streets of the large cities were filled with beggars and breadlines. Like Tom, who longs to escape from his confining economic and family circumstances a vast number of Americans during the 1930s felt trapped by forces outside their control.

Later in the play, Tom says that his memories are set at the same time as the bombing of Guernica, a small town attacked during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. This date is particularly significant in the life of the playwright: it was the year in which Rose Williams was lobotomized.

III.  THEMES.
A. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. According to Tennessee Williams' brother, Dakin, "The events of The Glass Menagerie are a virtually literal rendering of our family life. . . . There was a real Jim O'Connor, who  was brought home for my sister. The Tom of the play is my brother Tom, and Amanda Wingfield is certainly Mother." Other autobiographical details include the occupation of the missing father--"a telephone man who fell in love with long distances"--Tom's work in a shoe warehouse, and Laura's enrollment in a business college. More generally, the characters of Amanda and Laura faithfully reflect Williams' mother and sister.

B. GENERAL. Even though the play draws directly on Williams' personal past, it presents situations and conflicts with which everyone can identify. Although we may not have grown up during the Depression, most members of the audience have experienced some sense of entrapment caused by financial need. Many have been raised in families with only one parent. Almost everyone has felt Tom's rebelliousness, his desire to achieve independence, to experience adventure, to escape the boring routines of everyday life. All of us too will have felt something like Laura's conflicting emotions of shyness and longing for romance, her fear of the world and her yearning for connection. Many of us will have created some way of escaping from the difficulties of life, like Tom's writing, Laura's glass animals, or Amanda's memories of her seventeen gentlemen callers.

Amanda stands out in this atmosphere of yearning and frustration because she is determined to do something to bring about change, especially to make life better for her unhappy daughter. (This committment to a clear purpose is one of the most important attributes of a successful dramatic character.) Amanda nags Tom to find a gentleman caller who might become a husband to Laura, thus rescuing the frigntened girl from a future of certain loneliness and misery.

When Tom finally does invite a fellow worker home to meet his sister, it turns out to be Jim O'Connor, a boy Laura had a deep crush on--perhaps even loved--in high school, and whose memory she has treasured ever since. Of course, she was too shy then to act on her feelings, but Jim's arrival in her own living room gives her the chance to make her most cherished dream come true. When Jim dances with Laura, tells her how pretty she is, and finally kisses her, it seems as if the impossible has happened, that reality has finally lived up to Laura's desires. At that moment, however, we and Laura learn the heartbreaking truth: Jim is already engaged to be
married to someone else.

Critics call such moments of discovery and emotional change "reversals" because the dramatic situation swings around to the opposite of what it was only a moment before. Because they create an extreme and accelerated sense of change, reversals are generally among the most memorable moments in any play, and thus are used by the playwright to emphasize some idea that is of particular importance. In this reversal, Williams underlines a major theme of the play: that life rarely lives up to our expectations. Dream, fantasy, and memory are far more compelling and emotionally fulfilling than experience itself--a perception embodied in the texture of the play as a whole, which is, after all, a memory.

IV. SYMBOLS.
Language and visual imagery may be used to create denotation or connotation. Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word or an image. Connotation refers to implied or suggested meanings. The term "trope," from a Greek word meaning "to turn," refers to the various devices by which denotation in words or images is turned toward connotation. A symbol is one widely-used trope. Symbols are words or images whose meanings are established largely--or even purely--through
convention or agreement. For example, the image of the Stars and Stripes is a symbol of the United States because the connection between the flag and the country is a matter of conventional agreement. By contrast, the image of smoke is a non-symbolic indication of fire--a connection that is natural rather than conventional.

This play is full of symbols, most obviously "the glass menagerie" itself. We only come to understand the wider connotations of this phrase by seeing how is used by various characters throughout the course of the action. We see it being turned from its literal meaning--a collection of glass animals-- to a figurative meaning. Eventually we come to understand through the conventions established within the play that the "glass menagerie" symbolizes a number of elements. The fragility and beauty of the animals connote not only Laura herself, but also the beautiful and easily crushed fantasies about life that all of us cling to.

V. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
--The action occurs in Tom's memory. In what other ways is memory important in the play? What about Amanda's memories? Laura's? Jim's?

--How does the production at the Public Theater try to capture the sense that these are remembered events? For example, are there differences in the way the "narrative" and the "dramatic" scenes are staged? --Discuss the dreams of the various characters. Does anyone in the play experience the fulfillment of his or her dreams?

--If Tom yearns so desperately to escape from his family, why does he return to it constantly through memory? Is there a paradox here?

--Besides the glass menagerie, what are some of the other symbols in the play? What do they mean? For example, what about the unicorn, or the nickname, "Blue Roses?"

--Is Amanda right when she calls Tom selfish?

--Can we imagine the events of this play happening here and now?
 

III. THE THEATER

Most of us are accustomed to watching drama on film. Theater is a different medium offering different experiences and rewards.

The main difference between film and theater is like the difference between a photograph and a living person: the former offers a two-dimensional representation, the latter a three- dimensional presence. Think of the distinction between looking at a picture of a friend and actually being in the same room with him: that is the distinction between film and theater.

I. Other Considerations:

A. In the theater audience and actors share the same space and time. In films, the actors are elsewhere, and the time of the filmed events is discontinuous. For example, in many movies, the first scene shown may have been the last scene shot.

B. In theater, the audience helps to shape the performance. A responsive audience will transfer its energy to the stage: wild laughter makes comedies seem funnier, awestruck silence makes serious plays feel even more momentous. Actors in theater know the audience is there, hear its responses, and subtly adjust their performances accordingly. Performance and perception become a kind of duet. In a movie, no matter what the audience does it will have no effect on the events on the screen.

C. Movies and t.v. tend to be denotative, creating imaginary worlds through detailed pictures. Theater is more connotative, its frankly artificial sets, costumes, and even acting styles operating through suggestion rather than literal resemblance. What pleases us is the way the obviously make-believe elements of theater are skillfully
manipulated by actors, right before our eyes, to create a sense of truthfulness; how theater captures the essence of experience without presenting an exact picture of it.