The Glass Menagerie

Overview

I tried to leave you behind me

but I am more faithful than I intended to be

Tennessee Williams' most autobiographical play is a brilliant and compelling portrait of a family in crisis. At the heart of Polly Teale's evocative new production is Tennessee himself. As the writer returns to confront the past, his family come to haunt the stage...

In the tenement apartments of St. Louis, the Wingfield family struggle to make ends meet. As America is ravaged by the Depression, Amanda clings to memories of her idyllic youth in the South, where she was wooed by scores of rich and handsome suitors. With her husband long gone and her own days of courtship over she is determined to find her daughter a husband. But Laura is painfully shy. She plays with her collection of glass animals and lives in a world of her own. And Amanda's son, Tom, an aspiring poet in a dead-end job, secretly dreams of escape.

We are excited to be presenting this new production, directed by Polly Teale, in association with the Salisbury Playhouse.

Cast and Creatives

Trailer

Available During March - May 2010

Thoughts from the Director

The Glass Menagerie is the most autobiographical of all Williams' plays. Tom, the central character, is given Tennessee's real name. Not only does much of the story come directly from Williams' own life and experience but he places the writer at the heart of his own creation. The writer tells us the story. In The Glass Menagerie we are taken inside the author's mind as he conjures up characters and places. As he returns to his past in order to face the guilt he feels about abandoning his family for another life.

Rereading the play I became fascinated by the process by which the writer inhabits his characters, hearing their voices, sensing their energy and inner life, their physical and emotional presence. This becomes all the more fascinating when the characters are members of the writer's own family, when they are so closely connected to the writer and the writer's evolution that they exist both as characters and as a part of the writer's self. Tennessee grew up suffused in his mother's idealised romantic stories of her youth in the Deep South. There was a part of him that adored and embodied that old world charm and vivacity. Tennessee was every bit the socialite, the charismatic entertainer and seducer. But there was also a part of Tennessee that identified with Rose, his sister and model for Laura. Perhaps it was this affinity that made them so close and sharpened his guilt at abandoning her to her unhappy fate. Rose became increasingly unstable in the years after Tennessee left home and then never recovered her sanity after a disastrous lobotomy. But even before this catastrophe Rose was a fragile young woman. And Tennessee knew Rose's fear and insecurity only too well. The recluse, the drinker, the man who wanted to hide away, the fragile spirit who withdrew into his writing, too afraid to face the world.

So, Amanda and Laura can be seen as parts of Tennessee himself. They are the very stuff of which he is made. They are the past he cannot leave behind because it is himself. The writing of the play is perhaps an attempt to exorcise his past. To make it visible, to see it and face it instead of carrying it within.

Finally a word about the use of projected movie footage. The thirties is often referred to as the Golden Age of Cinema. Whilst all other industries floundered during the Depression the movies thrived. For a relatively small price anyone could escape into another world. A world of adventure and glamour, of excitement and romance. The collective consciousness was changed forever as America went into "the dark room" to see it's fantasies and fears made real on the screen. Both Tom and Amanda's inner worlds are strongly influenced by the movies. When Tom explains why he has to leave St Louis it is because he wants to experience the life he's seen in the movies. Amanda's life is only bearable because she escapes into her fantastical memories of her charmed youth. The stories play out like scenes from old films. As if she were the star in her own movie.

So, in order to conjure more vividly the characters experience we have created our own cinema. The celluloid movie stars projected huge behind our flesh and blood characters, just as they exist in their minds.

Williams wrote in the introduction to Glass Menagerie that productions of the play should be "Expressionistic" and free from the constraints of naturalism. "The scene is memory. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details and exaggerates others according to the emotional value of the articles it touches". In the pages of notes with which he prefixes the play he urges us to find a language that goes beyond the surface of life and expresses a deeper truth. "A more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are".