Wurtele Thrust Stage / Sept 14 – Oct 27, 2019

The Glass Menagerie by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS directed by JOSEPH HAJ PLAY GUIDE Inside

THE PLAY Synopsis, Setting and Characters • 4 Responses to The Glass Menagerie • 5

THE PLAYWRIGHT About Tennessee Williams • 8 Tom Is Tom • 11 In Williams’ Own Words • 13 Responses to Williams • 15

CULTURAL CONTEXT St. Louis, Missouri • 18 "The Play Is Memory" • 21 People, Places and Things in the Play • 23

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION For Further Reading and Understanding • 26

Guthrie Theater Play Guide Copyright 2019

DRAMATURG Carla Steen GRAPHIC DESIGNER Akemi Graves CONTRIBUTOR Carla Steen EDITOR Johanna Buch

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2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTO: GRAYSON DeJESUS AND CAREY COX IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) “Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.”

– Laura to Jim in The Glass Menagerie

About This Guide

This play guide is designed to fuel up on a play before you see it DIG DEEPER your curiosity and deepen your onstage. Or perhaps you’re a fellow If you are a theater understanding of a show’s history, theater company doing research company and would like meaning and cultural relevance for an upcoming production. more information about so you can make the most of your We’re glad you found your way this production, contact theatergoing experience. You might here, and we encourage you to dramaturg Carla Steen at be reading this because you fell in dig in and mine the depths of this [email protected]. love with a show you saw at the extraordinary story. Guthrie. Maybe you want to read

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SYNOPSIS CHARACTERS illusions, but Laura’s situation (as described by is even graver. A childhood Tom Wingfield conjures from Tennessee Williams) illness has left her crippled, memory his family’s life in their one leg slightly shorter than Amanda Wingfield, St. Louis tenement apartment the other and held in a brace. the mother during the depths of the This defect need not be more A woman of great but Depression. He holds a dead- than suggested on the stage. confused vitality clinging end job at a shoe warehouse Stemming from this, Laura’s frantically to another time and while nursing dreams of being separation increases until she place. Her characterization a writer. His older sister Laura is like a piece of her own glass must be carefully created, has retreated from life’s harsher collection, too exquisitely not copied from type. She realities to live in a world of fragile to move from the shelf. is not paranoiac, but her life old records and glass figurines. is paranoia. There is much Their mother Amanda retains Tom Wingfield, her son to admire in Amanda and hope that her children will thrive The narrator of the play as much to love and pity as in a world that doesn’t appear and a poet with a job in a there is to laugh at. Certainly to have a place for them. warehouse. His nature is not she has endurance and a Tension in the tiny apartment remorseless, but to escape kind of heroism, and though mounts as Tom grows restless from a trap, he has to act her foolishness makes her and chafes under Amanda’s without pity. unwittingly cruel at times, vigilant attention. The arrival there is tenderness in her of Jim, a gentleman caller for Jim O’Connor, the slight person. Laura, could be a door opening gentleman caller for all of them or a disturbance A nice, ordinary young man. Laura Wingfield, her daughter that finally shatters their Amanda, having failed to fragile home. establish contact with reality, continues to live vitally in her SETTING An apartment and alley in St. Louis. The near and distant past.

Being a “memory play,” The Glass actually or should be attempting into other forms that those Menagerie can be presented to find a closer approach, a more which were merely present with unusual freedom from penetrating and vivid expression in appearance. convention. Because of its of things as they are. The straight considerably delicate or tenuous realistic play with its genuine These remarks are not meant as a material, atmospheric touches Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, preface only to this particular play. and subtleties of direction play its characters that speak exactly as They have to do with a conception a particularly important part. its audience speaks, corresponds of a new, plastic theatre which Expressionism and all other to the academic landscape must take the place of the unconventional techniques in and has the same virtue of a exhausted theatre of realistic drama have only one valid aim, photographic likeness. Everyone conventions if the theatre is to and that is a closer approach should know nowadays the resume vitality as a part of to truth. When a play employs unimportance of the photographic our culture. unconventional techniques, it in art: that truth, life or reality is is not, or certainly shouldn't be, an organic thing which the poetic Tennessee Williams, “Production Notes” trying to escape its responsibility imagination can represent or to the Definitive Text, New York: New of dealing with reality, or suggest, in essence, only through Directions, 1999 interpreting experience, but is transformation, though changing

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Responses to The Glass Menagerie

and glittering and Broadwise. Its unforced wit is as pure as its understated pathos. It glows most humanly in a sustained atmosphere of other-worldliness.

Ashton Stevens, “Great Actress Proves It in Fine Play,” Chicago Herald American, December 27, 1944

Preceded by warm and tender reports from Chicago, “The Glass Menagerie” opened at the Playhouse on Saturday, and immediately it was clear that for once the advance notes were not in error. Tennessee Williams’ simple play forms the framework for some of the finest acting to be seen in many a day. “Memorable” is an overworked word, but that is the only one to describe Laurette Taylor’s performance. PHOTO: REMY AUBERJONOIS, CAREY COX AND JENNIFER VAN DYCK IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON)

Lewis Nichols, “The Play in Review,” The New Too many theatrical bubbles burst In a beautiful and mystically vivid York Times, April 2, 1945 in the blowing, but “The Glass play, whose setting and lighting Menagerie” holds in its shadowed by Jo Mielziner is a new note in fragility the stamina of success. the poetics of the modern stagery, Even as an inexperienced young This brand new play, which turned Laurette Taylor vouchsafes a writer, Tennessee Williams the Civic theater into a place of characterization that is more revealed a strong instinct for the steadily increasing enchantment than beautiful. It removed this visual qualities of the theatre. If last night, is still fluid with first-nighter so far from this he had written plays in the days change, but it is vividly written, earth that the return to mundane before the technical development and in the main superbly acted. desk and typewriter finds him of translucent and transparent Paradoxically, it is a dream in the unaccustomedly dizzy in the scenery, I believe he would have dusk and a tough little play that head, to say nothing of the heart. invented it. This was the first knows people and how they tick. Fifty years of first-nighting have Williams play to reach Broadway, Etched in the shadows of a man’s provided him with very few jolts so and in the script he wrote, “Being memory, it comes alive in theater miraculously electrical as the jolt a ‘memory play,’ The Glass terms of words, motion, lighting Laurette Taylor gave him last night. Menagerie can be presented with and music. If it is your play, as it is unusual freedom of convention. mine, it reaches out tentacles, first Whether Mr. Williams’ play is as Expressionism and all other tentative, then gripping, and you undebatably great as Miss Taylor’s unconventional techniques in are caught in its spell. performance, I have my just doubts. drama have only one valid aim, But it is a lovely thing and an and that is a closer approach Claudia Cassidy, “Fragile Drama Holds original thing. It has the courage of to truth.” … Theater in Tight Spell,” Chicago Tribune, true poetry couched in colloquial December 27, 1944 prose. It is eerie and earthy in the My use of translucent and same breath. It is never glossy transparent scenic interior walls

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was not just another trick. It Malcolm Goldstein, “The Playwrights of the [Theater] was a pridefully tough was a true reflection of the 1930s,” The American Theater Today, New profession in the forties. TIME contemporary playwright’s interest York: Basic Books, Inc., 1967 magazine referred to playwrights in — an at times obsession with who wrote hits as “crack,” implying — the exploration of the inner something like target shooting, man. Williams was writing not It all began for me in Chicago in brisk and very technical, with big only a memory play but a play of 1944. I’ve had some of the happiest money prizes for hitting the bull’s- influences that were not confined times of my life here. We were in eye, no sissy literary nonsense in within the walls of a room. Chicago for three and half months cranking a play together, but a with The Glass Menagerie. We job for cigar-chewing mechanics Jo Mielziner, Designing for the Theatre: A opened in late December and serving — according to the going Memoir and a Portfolio, New York: Bramhall played until mid-March. And I myth of the time — the whole House, 1965 had a lovely time. I knew a lot of American people. university students, you know? It was an audience impatient Despite extensive changes in So I associate the success of with long speeches, ignorant of American life since World War II, Menagerie with the Chicago any literary allusions whatever, as the social dramatists of the 1930s critics Claudia Cassidy and Ashton merciless to losers as the prizefight continue to exert an influence. Stevens. They really put it over. crowd and as craven to winners, Our most respected postwar The opening night audience had an audience that heard the word playwrights, Tennessee Williams never seen this kind of theater culture and reached for its hat. Of and Arthur Miller, achieved their before, and their response was course there were people of great first successes with plays written puzzlement. And I suppose the sensibility among them, but a play under the shadow, so to speak, of play would have died here if had to be fundamental enough the prewar years; Williams’ The Claudia Cassidy and Ashton to grab anybody, regardless. Glass Menagerie and Miller’s All My Stevens hadn’t kept pushing One healthy consequence of this Sons are plays of family tension and pushing and pushing. … audience’s makeup, both actual in which the author champions and fancied, was a shift toward the right of youth to rebel against Before the success of Menagerie full-blown plays with characters the muddled world of their I’d reached the very, very bottom. and a story that asserted as little as parents. … For these writers, all of I would have died without the possible verbally and dramatized whom came of age in the 1930s, money. I couldn’t have gone on as much as possible by action. This materialism is a permanent target. any further, baby, without money tended to keep speeches short Although they have begun to give when suddenly, providentially, The and the stage active rather than greater weight to psychological Glass Menagerie made it when reflective. Different as we were as motivation than to more narrowly I was thirty-four. I couldn’t have writers, Tennessee Williams and social issues, they refuse to take gone on with these hand-to-mouth I both thrived on these stringent prosperity for granted. Like the jobs, these jobs for which I had no demands. The time was far, far Depression writers, they ask the aptitude, like waiting on tables, off when a character could be biblical question: “For what is a running elevators and even being a permitted to sit in one place man profited, if he shall gain the teletype operator. None of this stuff indulging in pages of monologue whole world and lose his own was anything I could have held for while surrounding actors stood soul?” The difference in approach long. ... So if I suddenly hadn’t had absolutely still and mute awaiting is that their characters have gained this dispensation from Providence the end of his aria. (When O’Neill the world before the rise of the with Menagerie, I couldn’t have so indulged, his storytelling never curtain and on first entrance reveal made it for another year, I stopped, and if it did he failed.) that their souls are lost, whereas don’t think. Even further off was the time when the characters of the 1930s gained a certain span of sheer boredom or foreswore the world midway Tennessee Williams, interviewed by Dotson was thought to be a signal that through the action and lost or Rader in 1981 for Playwrights at Work, edited a culturally rare event was taking saved their souls accordingly. by George Plimpton place on a stage. The revolutionary newness of The Glass Menagerie,

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for example, was in its poetic lift, Through the course of this experienced across a tapestry but an underlying hard dramatic [memoir] I may talk a lot about of cultures. The only thing that’s structure was what earned the play Miss Edwina. But right now I’ll kind of really novel about the its right to sing poetically. Poetry only say that she was a lady and whole thing is the fact that it’s the in the theatre is not, at least ought that she still is a lady at the age first time in the UK the Wingfield not be, a cause but a consequence, of eighty-nine or ninety. My dear family [aren’t white]. In America and that structure of storytelling friend, Marion Vaccaro, once said it’s done to death.” Why does the and character made this very to me, speaking of my sister, “Miss “gentleman caller” who shatters private play available to anyone Rose is a lady but your mother just much of the characters’ false capable of feeling at all. misses.” I never quite knew what illusions remain white? she meant about Miss Edwina. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, New York: I think perhaps she sensed that “I didn’t want it to be a gimmicky Grove Press, 1987 Miss Edwina had not been quite play. It was enough for me to go, so perceptive about Miss Rose as yeah, I want to make the Wingfield she might have been, but I feel family [African American] and just Mother came up to Chicago for that Mother always did what she go: ‘How much have they allowed the opening there of Menagerie thought was right and that she has us to hear the text differently?’” in late December of 1944. I don’t always given herself due credit for recall her precise reaction to the it even though what she sometimes Bridget Minamore, “Femi Elufowoju Jr: Why play but it was probably favorable, did was all but fatally wrong. did Tennessee Williams marginalise African for Mother was very concerned Americans?,” The Guardian, May 27, 2019 with my long-delayed success. I Tennessee Williams, Memoirs, New York: do recall her coming backstage New Directions, 2006 after the performance which she attended and paying her respects to Laurette. For The Glass Menagerie [at the Arcola in London], Elufowoju Jr “Well, Mrs. Williams,” said Laurette, has cast the Wingfield characters briefly scrutinizing Edwina Williams as African American. Why? in her dressing-room mirror, “how “Tennessee Williams grew up in did you like yourself?” east Mississippi, before the Great Migration,” he says. “If you look at “Myself?” said Mother innocently. all of Williams’ plays, he sets most of his stories in the south, [but] Laurette was as kind a person as the African American presence I have known in a theatre mostly within his plays is marginal. They’re inhabited by jungle beasts, but not in any lead roles whatsoever. even she, being Irish, was not But his plays are amazing one to pass by an opportunity stories, completely and utterly to be mischievous. accessible. They’re psychological thrillers, historical pieces, cultural “You notice these bangs I wear? I masterpieces, and you just have to wear them playing this part question: was he doing because it’s the part of a fool and I it deliberately?” have a high, intellectual forehead.” Look at what the Wingfield family Miss Edwina did not pick up on this deals with, he says. “Single parent, either. She let it go by her without ambitious mother, ambitious son a sign of offense. She was probably who’s an artist, an older sister bedazzled by Laurette’s somewhat who is struggling with herself? supernatural quality on the stage. Ambition, the way the mother looks to the son to be the breadwinner? All those things are just universally

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About Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier (“Tennessee”) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was born in Ohio and imagined herself to be a Southern belle. His father, Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams, was a rough man with a fine Southern pedigree. The family included his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin. C.C. was absent for long periods throughout their childhood and moved the family from town to town. Williams was a sickly child and Edwina insisted that he focus on Shakespeare rather than sports, which fostered his interest in literature and, eventually, writing.

The family moved from Clarksdale, of verse in a Greenwich Village depression and memorialized it. Mississippi, to St. Louis, Missouri, nightclub. While working these odd Theresa Helburn and John Gassner in 1918. Although Williams wanted jobs, Williams was writing furiously, gave him a scholarship to their to be a writer, his father forced him mostly for the stage. advanced playwrights’ seminar to quit the University of Missouri at the New School for Social and work in a shoe factory. He His talents were recognized Research. In this class, he wrote finally received his B.A. in 1938 several years before he received his second full-length play, The from the University of Iowa. After a professional production. The Battle of Angels, which received a graduation, he worked as a bellhop Group Theatre awarded him a professional production after the in New Orleans, a handyman in a cash prize for four one-act pieces instructors presented the script shoe warehouse, a teletypist with a appropriately titled American to the Theatre Guild. Angels was corps of engineers in Jacksonville, Blues, as the young author was abandoned in Boston where it Florida, and a writer and reciter well acquainted with the pre-war caused a minor scandal, and plans

8 \ GUTHRIE THEATER CULTURALTHE PLAYWRIGHT CONTEXT to revamp the play for New York acting — a new technique that career coincides with and in many failed to materialize. Williams also stressed empathizing with one’s ways complements Williams’, are received a Rockefeller Foundation character to create a realistic, inevitable. Setting Menagerie so Fellowship in 1940 and was psychological portrayal. Actors squarely in the Depression of the awarded a $1,000 grant for work in trained in the method technique 1930s seemed to prefigure the drama by the American Academy quickly discovered that Williams’ emphasis on social context more and National Institute of Arts work stripped bare an American characteristic of Miller, but this area and Letters. culture of repression and denial. was not developed further. A close-knit circle of performers, Williams’ work is best approached directors and writers gathered Before the success of Cat came through his three most successful around the temperamental three less successful works. plays: The Glass Menagerie Southern playwright. Summer and Smoke (1947) has (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire problems engaging a complete (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Comparisons and contrasts with sympathy for, and comprehension (1955). The first has a lyrical, sad the work of Arthur Miller, whose of, its small-town misfits. The gentleness that separates it from the savage cruelty of much of his PHOTO: CAREY COX AND GRAYSON DeJESUS IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) later work. Menagerie shows his sympathetic insight into female psychology, which is distinctive of Williams’ dramas. Similarly, the use of the eponymous collection of fragile animal models in the play establishes the delight in symbolism that in later plays is often overworked.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Blanche DuBois is driven mad by her brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, whom Williams modeled after a co-worker from his shoe factory days. The heroine is more ambivalently presented as partly the architect of her own destruction. Living dangerously near the edge of sanity and dependent on “the kindness of strangers,” Blanche is the first of a line of characters who protected themselves by “mendacity.”

Williams’ work resonated deeply with the performing arts community of the 1940s. His complex characterization and difficult subject matter appealed to a new generation of actors. The 1947 Broadway production of Streetcar featured then-unknown actors Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Karl Malden, all of whom were trained in method

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Rose Tattoo (1951), a turbulently than family, and the Southern so wish to latch onto something melodramatic celebration of the decadence that earned Streetcar didactic; I do not deal with the sexual vigor of Sicilian immigrants, its initial notoriety became more didactic, ever. … I wish to have a has at least the dramatic sensationally sinister. Sexual and broad audience because the major robustness to give it a theatrical other forms of perversity were thrust of my work is not sexual vitality. Camino Real (1953), which prominent, including cannibalism orientation, it’s social. I’m not about Williams thought to be his greatest in Suddenly Last Summer (1958) to limit myself to writing about gay achievement but flopped on and castration in Sweet Bird of people.” As is often the case with Broadway, sustained his reputation Youth (1959). What Williams once Williams, his statement is both true for imaginatively exploring the identified as “the passion for and untrue — his great midcareer possibilities of dramatic idioms, declivity” in human nature became plays focus on relationships rather but its expressionism, labored paramount. Yet his obsession than politics, but the figure of the symbolism, lack of realism with cruelty, loneliness, depravity, gay male appears in his characters and romanticism of loneliness desperation and death in these both explicitly (Charlus in Camino bewildered or alienated audiences. plays is often Jacobean in intensity Real) and implicitly (Brick in Cat) and dramatic energy. throughout his works. Williams’ most vivid excursion into the tensions of family life came Throughout his writing career, In 1943, Williams’ mother with Cat, which is tightly and Williams nurtured a public persona authorized a frontal lobotomy more conventionally constructed, that gradually shifted from shy to on his sister, Rose, and Williams displaying a lively, if bitter, sense of flamboyantly homosexual in an era cared for Rose for the rest of her humor and a powerful vitality. The reluctant to accept gay men. His life. In New Orleans in 1947, he met attention of high school football fears of audience backlash against Frank Merlo, a former sailor in the hero Brick to his deceased buddy, his personal life progressively U.S. Navy, who became Williams’ Skipper, poisons his relationship proved groundless. Even late in companion until Merlo died of with his wife, Maggie (the cat), and life, Williams was reluctant to lung cancer in 1961. Williams was his self-aggrandizing father, embrace a political agenda. In 1976, depressed for much of the rest of Big Daddy. Gay Sunshine magazine declared his life and became addicted to that the playwright had never prescription drugs and alcohol. After Cat, which earned Williams dealt openly with the politics of In 1969, his brother placed him in his second Pulitzer Prize, he gay liberation, to which Williams a St. Louis psychiatric institution concentrated more on loners immediately responded, “People where Williams suffered two massive heart attacks before being PHOTO: JENNIFER VAN DYCK AND CAREY COX IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) released. He died in New York City on February 25, 1983.

A compulsive writer, Williams wrote more than 100 poems, more than 60 short stories, at least 25 full- length plays, many short plays, two novels (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moise and the World of Reason) and a memoir (Memoirs), from which his personality emerges as more ebullient than the blackness of his plays might lead one to expect.

Sourced and edited from several biographies, including Penguin Random House, St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America and International Dictionary of the Theatre

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Tom Is Tom

By Carla Steen Dramaturg

“I’m very personal as a writer, yes. I don’t mean to be, I just am.

Unavoidably.” Williams in the early 1940s – Tennessee Williams, in an interview with David Frost, 1970

When pressed by interviewer David Group Theatre contest, he adopted clothes as he fell off to sleep at Frost, Tennessee Williams named the pen name “Tennessee” to heaven knows what hour.” Williams Camino Real his most personal honor his father’s roots in the state left the shoe company only after play, as it was an expression of his and mask his identity. he broke down from exhaustion. own philosophy. Almost anyone else would likely choose The Glass Williams had developed a Rose Williams was a looming Menagerie because it is one of his passion for writing as a child and presence in her brother’s life. She most autobiographical works. pursued the craft at the University had a thin, fragile appearance of Missouri. When C.C. was and suffered from stomach Born Thomas Lanier Williams in disappointed in Williams’ grades, trouble; in her late teens, she was Mississippi in 1911 to Edwina and he forced Williams to quit school diagnosed with schizophrenia C.C. Williams, he arrived as a and work as a clerk-typist at the and had difficulty holding a job. younger brother to their daughter, shoe company, a job he held for In 1937, Rose was admitted to the Rose. A second brother, Dakin, almost three years. Edwina recalled Farmington State Hospital, and was born after the family moved in her memoir, Remember Me to six years later, she underwent a to St. Louis when Tom was 7. The Tom, that Williams persevered prefrontal lobotomy as treatment relocation was prompted by C.C. in his writing: “Every evening for her mental illness. By that time, taking a management job for the when he came home from the Williams’ writing allowed him to St. Louis-based International Shoe shoe company, Tom would go to travel, and he never forgave himself Company, and the Midwestern his room with black coffee and for being away from Rose. city became Williams’ home for cigarettes and I would hear the the next two decades. He loathed typewriter clicking away late at Williams found his footing as a St. Louis yet found permanent night in the silent house. Some writer by transforming his lived escape impossible until his success mornings when I walked in to experiences into fiction. As part as a playwright also brought his wake him for work, I would find writing exercise and part personal freedom. When he discovered he him sprawled fully dressed across exorcism, Williams wrote multiple

was too old to submit work to a the bed, too tired to remove his iterations of his family narrative, WILLIAMS; DAKIN EDWINA BY TOM JOHN LAHR; REMEMBER ME TO OF THE FLESH BY WILLIAMS: MAD PILGRIMAGE TENNESSEE PHOTOS: LEVERICH LYLE WILLIAMS BY TENNESSEE THE UNKNOWN TOM:

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“Every artist is born in jail and Tennessee Williams’ jail was called St. Louis. If you’re the creative type, the first thing you do when you’re born in jail is decorate your cell. The next thing you do is plan your breakout. Every major artist is full to bursting, looking for the mud and paint and music needed to execute an escape from the initial circumstances of his life. Some call this escape transcendence. When Tennessee decorated his cell, the play was entitled The Glass Menagerie.” Rose, Edwina and Tom – Playwright John Patrick Shanley, 2010

“I am back in St. Louis, writing furiously with seven wild-cats under my skin, as I realize that completing this new play is my only apparent avenue of escape. … My attack is purely emotional: under good direction could prove very effective but without it is in danger of spending itself in a lot of useless explosions. … My whole life has been a series of escapes, physical or psychological, more miraculous than any of Houdini’s, but I do at the present moment seem to be hanging by that one thread: obtaining a

Rose and fellowship and/or producing a successful play.” Tom in – Tennessee Williams, in a letter to Molly Day Thacher at Group Theatre, 1939 St. Louis including the short story “Portrait it. The stage play ends in defeat — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), both of a Girl in Glass” (1941) and the which she rejects at the very end honored with the Pulitzer Prize play The Gentleman Caller, which and prepares to continue beyond. for Drama, and wrote many other he adapted into a movie script The film story would have a softer remarkable plays that are well during his short-lived stint as a ending, I think.” loved within the American canon. writer for MGM Studios in 1943. Williams wrote to his agent, Audrey His family’s story found its most Aspects of Rose, Edwina and Wood, about his ideas for the film, complete and famous form in The Tom appear as shadows, glints saying that “the central and most Glass Menagerie, which premiered or glimmers in other characters interesting character is certainly in Chicago in 1944 before its from Williams’ work: Blanche Amanda, and in the writing, the Broadway opening in March 1945. DuBois, Brick Pollitt, Serafina Delle focus would be on her mainly. A The play’s success at first left Rose, Mrs. Venable and Catherine conventional woman, a little foolish him disoriented, an experience Holly. Yet these characters are and pathetic, but with an heroic he wrote about in the essay “The more abstracted and less directly fighting spirit concentrated blindly Catastrophe of Success.” When he connected to Williams’ own life. on trying to create a conventionally regained his traction, he produced It is in The Glass Menagerie alone successful adjustment for two two more masterpieces in A where Tennessee portrayed Tom children who are totally unfitted for Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and and Tom created Tennessee.

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In Williams’ Own Words

in their own performances to suit her, so she stretched out her skinny arms and threw back her skinny neck and shrieked to the deaf heavens and her equally oblivious playmates, “Look at me, look at me, look at me!”

And then her mother’s high-heeled slippers threw her off balance and she fell to the sidewalk in a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net, and still nobody looked at her.

I wonder if she is not, now, a Southern writer.

Of course it is not only Southern writers, of lyrical bent, who engage

PHOTO: JENNIFER VAN DYCK AND REMY AUBERJONOIS IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) in such histrionics and shout, “Look at me!” Perhaps it is a parable of I was at sixteen a student at ornaments on the shelves. They all artists. And not always do we University City High School in St. were mostly little glass animals. topple over and land in a tangle of Louis and the family was living By poetic association they came trappings that don’t fit us. However, in a cramped apartment at 6254 to represent, in my memory, all it is well to be aware of that peril, Enright Avenue. the softest emotions that belong and not to content yourself with a to recollection of things past. demand for attention, to know that University City was not a They stood for all the small and out of your personal lyricism, your fashionable suburb of St. Louis tender things that relieve the sidewalk histrionics, something and our neighborhood, while a cut austere pattern of life and make it has to be created that will not only better than that of the Wingfields endurable to the sensitive. attract observers but participants in Menagerie, was only a little cut in the performance. better: it was an ugly region of “The Author Tells Why It Is Called The Glass hive-like apartment buildings, for Menagerie” I try very hard to do that. the most part, and fire escapes and pathetic little patches of green I once saw a group of little girls on “Williams: Person-to-Person,” The New York among concrete driveways. a Mississippi sidewalk, all dolled up Times, March 20, 1955 in their mothers’ and sisters’ cast- From Memoirs, started in 1972 and finished off finery, old raggedy ball gowns There is a horror in things, a horror in 1975 and plumed hats and high-heeled at heart of the meaninglessness of slippers, enacting a meeting of existence. Some people cling to a When I left home a number of ladies in a parlor with a perfect certain philosophy that is handed years later, it was [my sister’s] mimicry of polite Southern gush down to them and which they room that I recalled most vividly and simper. But one child was not accept. Life has a meaning if you’re and poignantly when looking satisfied with the attention paid bucking for heaven. But if heaven back on our home life in St. her enraptured performance by is a fantasy, we are in this jungle Louis. Particularly the little glass the others, they were too involved with whatever we can work out for

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ourselves. It seems to me that the The story of my sister Rose’s When I write I don’t aim to shock cards are stacked against us. The tragedy begins a few years before people, and I’m surprised when I only victory is how we take it. I commenced my three-year do. But I don’t think that anything break from college to work for the that occurs in life should be Quoted in “The Angel of the Odd” by Ted Continental Shoemakers branch of omitted from art, though the artist Kalem, TIME, March 9, 1962 the International Shoe Company. should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I don’t know why I find it much I have mentioned that Rose easier, much more interesting to suffered for several years from I set out to tell the truth, and write about women. My sister mysterious stomach trouble. She sometimes the truth is shocking. and my mother were both very was several times hospitalized for articulate women. They talked with this digestive trouble but no ulcer, In an interview with Dotson Rader in fall 1981 great charm. In most of my writings no physical cause for the illness, for Playwrights at Work, edited by George I try to recapture the charm of the could be determined. At last it was Plimpton way they talked. recommended that she have “an exploratory operation.” The turbulent business of my In an interview with John Gruen, nerves demanded something more Close-Up, 1965 Luckily our family doctor, a animate than written language brilliant physician, intervened at could be. It seemed to me that My own creativity, I believe, has this point and told my mother, even the giants of literature, such tended to mirror reality. Certainly, much to her dismay, that it was his as Chekhov, when writing narratives the language used has always (quite accurate) opinion that Rose were only describing drama. And been realistic. For some people, needed psychiatric attention, the they were altogether dependent back with the earlier productions, mysterious digestive upset being on the sensitivity of their readers. the lines were quite shocking. But due, he thought to psychic or Nothing lived of what they had compared to today, those lines psychosomatic reasons that could created unless the reader had the were mild. Now, you see a play on be determined only through the stage inside him, or the screen, on Broadway and they’re saying things course of analysis. which their images could be visibly like motherfucker and cocksucker, projected. However with a play, a and nobody arches an eyebrow. You can imagine how this struck play on the stage — let any fool Miss Edwina. I am afraid that dear come to it! It is there, it is really and And as far as my motivation is Mother has at times seemed to truly there — whether the audience concerned, well, I suppose it me to have been a moderately understands it or not! has, of course, been a form of controlled hysteric all her life — and compensating for something else. in her family tree (on both sides On his transition to writing for the stage, When I was a very small child, my of it, Dakins and Ottes) have been quoted in John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: mother managed to alienate me alarming incidences of mental and Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, 2014 from my father, who wanted me to nervous breakdowns. play baseball. I loved him only after he was dead. A sad thing to say, From Memoirs, started in 1972 and finished maybe, but by that time I could at in 1975 least try to understand him. My mother never wanted me to go out with the boys, so to speak; she wanted me only to have friends who were girls. Consequently, I grew up being a sissy.

In an interview with Don Lee Keith, The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, 1970

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Responses to Williams

Williams trades in nostalgia and hope, the past and the future, obsessions which we associate most strongly with the great female characters — Marguérite Gautier, Cleopatra, Hedda Gabler and Chekhov’s women, none of whom cares for today half as much as she cares for yesterday or tomorrow. His plays thus have the static quality of dream rather than the dynamic quality of fact; they bring the drama of mood to what may be its final hothouse flowering. …

Perhaps when Quixote and Kilroy [in Camino Real] reach the snowy upper air of the unnamed mountains, they will become subjects for a play by Miller, whose artistic life is dedicated, like Shaw’s, to a belief in progress towards an attainable summit. Williams’ aspirations are imaginative and hence unattainable; and therein lies the difference between them.

Complementary, yet irreconcilable, Miller and Williams have produced the most powerful body of dramatic prose in modern English. They write with equal virtuosity, Williams about the violets, Miller about the rocks. The vegetable reinforces the mineral; and the animal, a dramatic element feared or ignored in the English theatre, triumphantly reinforces both. PHOTO: CAREY COX AND JENNIFER VAN DYCK IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON)

Kenneth Tynan, “American Blues: The Plays its presence, but it is practically Circle Awards, is a consummate of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams,” impossible to remain indifferent to it. master of theater. His plays beat 1954, reprinted in Curtains, New York: with the heart’s blood of the drama: Atheneum, 1991 Wolcott Gibbs, “Oddities, Domestic and passion. … Imported,” The New Yorker, January 18, 1958 Williams has peopled the U.S. stage Considering all its manifestations, with characters whose vibrantly Mr. Williams’ talent is one of the The fact is that Tennessee Williams, durable presences stalk the most singular of our time. You winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and corridors of a playgoer’s memory: may not always be quite easy in three New York Drama Critics’ Amanda Wingfield, the fussy,

GUTHRIE THEATER \ 15 THE PLAYWRIGHT garrulous, gallant mother of Glass growth. … The influence of his has been condemned it has been Menagerie; Streetcar’s Blanche concept of drama, particularly that on the grounds that the profundity DuBois, Southern gentlewoman of his interpretation of character was spurious. Those who do the turned nymphomaniac, and its and plot, has materially affected condemning should, however, Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in the work of such recent playwrights hasten to add that Williams has a a T shirt; Maggie, the scrappy cat as William Inge and Edward fine comic sense and knows how on a hot tin roof, and Big Daddy, Albee. Of equal importance has to use it. The Father in Cat on a the bull-roaring lord and master been the impetus which Williams Hot Tin Roof is a comic figure in of “28,000 acres of the richest and his interpreters have given far more than the fact that he uses land this side of the valley Nile.” to the development of a singular scandalous language. Comedy is Williams’ dialogue sings with a dramaturgy, to the refinement of a here used for its classic purpose: lilting eloquence far from the drab, distinctively American art of acting, to place people in their society, to disjunctive patterns of everyday staging and designing. … define them as what Karl Marx talk. And for monologues, the said they are: the sum of their theater has not seen his like One of the most important social relationships. since the god of playwrights, measures of his competence has William Shakespeare. been his ability to win and to Is it not largely wit and humor sustain the artistic loyalty of the that prevent both Streetcar and Williams is an electrifying theatrical profession. Because The Glass Menagerie from being scenewright, because his people of the exceptional effectiveness unbearably sentimental? The are the sort who make scenes, of his plays in performance, he confrontation of Blanche Dubois explosively and woundingly. … In an has been able to attract artists and Stanley Kowalsky [sic] is age that suppresses its tantrums of extraordinary skill. Moreover, a brilliant comic idea, worked as impolite, part of Williams’ because of his commitment out, to be true, to a pathetic cathartic appeal for an audience is to the principle of artistic conclusion. Even so, the pathetic to allow it to act out its hostilities collaboration between playwright, conclusion is, artistically speaking, vicariously. Above all, Williams is director, designer and performer, the least valuable part of the a master of mood. Sometimes it opportunities to interpret his plays story. Of the Mother in The Glass is hot, oppressive, simmering with are highly coveted by workers Menagerie, the same may be catastrophe (Streetcar, Cat); at in the theater. The effect of this said as of the Father in Cat on a other times it is sad, autumnal, widespread professional admiration Hot Tin Roof: she constitutes a elegiac (Menagerie, Iguana). To for Williams’ sense of theatricality splendid social portrait. The same achieve it, he uses the full orchestra has been that he has had the forthright method is used too — of theatrical instruments: setting, advantage of a consistently high monologue, virtually — a torrent lighting, music, plus the one level of production. This excellence of characteristic words which impalpable, indispensable gift, the in production has in turn enhanced define the character socially — by genius for making an audience his reputation as a popular artist. jokes. Conversely the bad plays of forget that any other world exists Williams have good passages, and except the one onstage. Esther M. Jackson, “Tennessee Williams,” The these passages are all very funny. American Theater Today, edited by Alan S. Ted Kalem, “The Angel of the Odd,” TIME, Downer, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1967 Eric Bentley, What is Theatre? Incorporating March 9, 1962 the Dramatic Event and Other Reviews 1944–1967, New York: Atheneum, 1968 The comic element is often the best When Tennessee Williams’ poetic part of plays that, as a whole, are drama The Glass Menagerie opened not considered comedies. This is in New York in 1945, a new epoch in particularly true of American plays, For the next twenty years [after the the history of the American theater and most particularly, of those of success of The Glass Menagerie], began. As Eugene O’Neill had the two most prominent American Tennessee’s writing career would dominated the first quarter-century playwrights of the present moment, be marked by a steadily mounting of the American drama’s life as Tennessee Williams and Edward series of triumphs, both in the an indigenous form, so Williams Albee. Williams has often been theater and in his published works was to become the major figure in admired for other, supposedly including fiction and poetry. … the second period of the theater’s profounder elements, and when he

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If there were difficult times for Though Williams learned much of Tennessee’s intention, avowed in his him along the way, and there his craft from Chekhov, his prime notebooks, his letters and essays, were, the cause was no longer precursors were Hart Crane and and manifest in his plays, stories any economic stress. His health D.H. Lawrence. Crane killed himself and poems, was to bring the power was often violently threatened, in 1932; Lawrence had died of of intense fragility center stage and he underwent serious bouts tuberculosis in 1930. Williams, a in the American theater to give it with various infections. But never young man when they died, fell representation, to parse its essence once did this remarkably talented in love with Crane’s poetry in and proclaim it as an essential writer stop working for more 1936, and with Lawrence’s writing component energy in the dynamics than a brief time. Certainly, there soon after; in 1939 he visited of human life. He also gave would be dark periods in which Frieda Lawrence in New Mexico. representation to the adversary he might give way to momentary The influence of Crane and of of fragility, to the aggressive, depression, but invariably, wherever Lawrence upon Williams was more steamrolling, bullying violence so he might be, no matter what the than textual, indeed more than familiar from life with his father, cause of his problem, whether literary. It was personal, and in and which alone was recognizable it be emotional involvements or Crane’s instance approached total to his country and his historical whatever, the following morning identification. As a poet, Williams period as power and strength. would find Tennessee hard at work. was cancelled by Crane; as a writer He knew himself and the fugitive No socializing, no telephone calls, of prose fiction, drowned out kind for whom he felt appointed nothing could intrude until he had by Lawrence. to speak to be at odds with, even done enough writing — or rewriting locked in battle against, implacable — he would never cease to find Fortunately, Williams was a lyrical forces of history ascending, as ways to improve his works — so dramatist, and free to find his own he labored on Menagerie, to that he could feel justified that day. voice in his best plays: The Glass an apotheosis of savagery and Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar barbarism. His championing of the Audrey Wood with Max Wilk, Represented by Named Desire (1947), Summer power of intense fragility was as Audrey Wood, New York: Garden City, 1981 and Smoke (1948), and Suddenly radical as his faith in the power Last Summer (1958). The plays of that intensely fragile thing, art. of his remaining quarter-century Frailty and art were, for Tennessee, For a play to [change the world] it represent a falling away, and while intrinsic to one another. He was an had to reach precisely those who he did not outlive his genius, he aesthete, of sorts. accepted everything as it was; seemed more and more alienated great drama is great questions or from it. Yet even in his later phase, Tony Kushner, in the introduction to The it is nothing but technique. I could Williams writes more memorably Glass Menagerie: The Deluxe Centennial not imagine a theatre worth my and eloquently than any other Edition, New York: New Directions, 2011 time that did not want to change American dramatist. Crane’s the world, any more than a creative rhetorical arc had a benign and scientist could wish to prove the invigorating effect upon Williams’s validity of everything that is already language. The taking of Crane’s known. I knew only one other writer identity into his own was so with the same approach, even if comprehensive on Williams’s part he surrounded his work with a that l can think of no real parallel to far different aura. This was it in all of literary history. Hart Crane Tennessee Williams. himself, when intoxicated, would identify himself with Christopher Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, New York: Marlowe and with Rimbaud. Grove Press, 1987 Perhaps in that dangerous mode also he was Tennessee Williams’s paradigm.

Harold Bloom, “Tennessee Williams,” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, New York: Warner Books, 2002

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St. Louis, Missouri

A BRIEF HISTORY IMMIGRATION TO ST. LOUIS FROM THE 19TH St. Louis, Missouri, “the Gateway to the West,” stands CENTURY TO THE DEPRESSION at the junction of two great rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri. Founded by a grant to Pierre Liguest The town burgeoned into a full-blown city in the first Laclède by the French crown in 1764, he named half of the nineteenth century. The population of St. it for the king’s patron saint, St. Louis. Although Louis increased 228 percent between 1810 and 1820. ownership of the city had changed hands, from It doubled between 1835 and 1840, and again by 1845; French to Spanish, back to French and American (all in ten years St. Louis went from half to twice the superseding Native Americans), it has remained an size of Pittsburgh. Earliest arrivals were from farther important economic and cultural entity, the economic east or England, followed by Irish and, soon after, center of the Mississippi basin. … Germans. They joined large numbers of transplants from other parts of the country. Some seventy percent St. Louis was only a small town of about fifteen of American-born St. Louisans in 1850 were from hundred when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia. On and their Corps of Discovery stopped on their way the eve of the Civil War, St. Louis led the United States west in 1804 and upon their return in 1806. By 1860 in percentage of its population not born in the it had a population of 160,000 and by early in the United States. … twentieth century the city held three-quarters of a million (in 2009 the population numbered 357,000 By 1850, 43 percent of all St. Louisans were born in the city proper). Immigrants poured into St. Louis in either Ireland or Germany. Irish immigrants often and its surrounding areas because of economic brought limited skill levels, putting them into direct opportunities. The city is set amid rich farmland competition with free blacks in cities for lower level on either side of the Mississippi River, the famous jobs. In this case, economics drove politics; Irish American and Missouri bottoms among them. Goods immigrants in cities tended to be strongly pro-slavery, sent down the river to New Orleans were carried by out of fear that liberating African American slaves very large numbers of steam boats: a young Samuel would create a glut of unskilled labor, driving wages Clemens from Hannibal, just up the river, celebrated even lower. … the traffic as the writer Mark Twain. St. Louis was also the point at which the smaller vessels of the upper The first wave of Germans came in the mid-1830s. Only river transshipped goods to the larger boats that eighteen German families lived in St. Louis in 1833, went down the river. Well located, St. Louis developed but some 6,000 German souls lived here four years industries that endured for more than a century and a later. Most came looking for land to escape crowding, half. Unfortunately, the city never fully developed its lured to Missouri by romanticized descriptions of the rail system, the famous Eads Bridge (1874) across the state through the Giessen Emigration Society which great river notwithstanding, and it lost out to Chicago described it as the American Rhineland. Within two as the Great Midwestern capital. years, Saxony Germans started stepping off riverboats too. … From The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America by Bruce Kraig A rising demand for factory workers and increased dissatisfaction at home attracted a great migration of Southeastern Europeans starting in the mid-1870s. They lived in crowded tenements, worked long hours in factories or sweatshops and clustered in large

18 \ GUTHRIE THEATER CULTURAL CONTEXT cities such as St. Louis. Tenements on the near south side of St. Louis were filled with German and Czech immigrants who had jobs in nearby foundries, cotton factories and breweries. ...

A large influx of Italians came to St. Louis in the 1890s to work in clay mines in the Fairmount area. Factory expansion nationally increased demand for fire brick, including that made in St. Louis. Many of these Italians came to St. Louis via the Illinois coal fields, replacing German and African American clay miners.

From “Peopling St. Louis: The Immigration Experience,” The bird house at the St. Louis Zoo A Preservation Plan for St. Louis, www.stlouis-mo.gov

glowing. In additional to permanent floral displays, it REFERENCES TO ST. LOUIS IN also features seasonal flowers. THE GLASS MENAGERIE (in order of reference) Soldan A high school in St. Louis approximately 20 blocks Rubicam’s Business College north of Forest Park. Tom and Rose Williams both Rubicam Business School was founded in 1892 as briefly attended Soldan. Rubicam School of Secretarial & Accounting. Charles E. Rubicam financially supported his two sisters Continental Shoemakers who ran the college. The school closed in 1963 St. Louis was a major shoe-manufacturing city. when Charles Rubicam’s son Daniel died. For a long time, the International Shoe Company was the world’s largest shoe company and had its art museum headquarters in St. Louis. Williams’ father moved the The St. Louis Art Museum has been in its current family to St. Louis in 1918 to take a management job location in Forest Park since 1906. The museum at ISC after having been a traveling salesman for the currently has 34,000 objects with approximately company since 1914. Williams himself worked in the 2,700 on view. Among the highlights Laura might have typing pool at Continental Shoemakers during the visited are Vincent van Gogh’s “Stairway at Auvers,” summer of 1931 when he was home from the University which the museum purchased in 1935; Missouri artist of Missouri after his sophomore year. After his junior George Caleb Bingham’s “Raftsmen Playing Cards,” year, his failure in ROTC so angered his father that he purchased in 1934; and “Commemorative Head” by an made Williams leave college and work again at ISC. unidentified Edo artist, added to the collection in 1936 He worked there from 1932 until 1935, when he as the museum’s first sub-Saharan African artwork. had a breakdown. bird houses at the Zoo The St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 featured a flight The Jewel Box greenhouse cage that exhibited a number of bird species. Rather than see it dismantled at the end of the fair, the City of St. Louis purchased it from the Smithsonian (which commissioned its construction) for $3,500 (birds not included). The cage became the building block of a zoological garden established in the 1910s in Forest Park in St. Louis, now known as the St. Louis Zoo.

Jewel-box Also in Forest Park, east of the St. Louis Zoo, the Jewel Box is a greenhouse that opened in 1936. Its art deco building is crafted from cantilevered glass panes and arches of steel beams that (when clean) are bright and

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Hogan gang but because of unfulfilled credits in physical education A St. Louis gang headed by Edward “Jelly Roll” Hogan and Greek, he didn’t graduate. that had a longstanding bootlegging rivalry with the Egan’s Rats gang (the largest and most ruthless of the Dizzy Dean St. Louis gangs) during the early years of Prohibition. Jay Hanna Dean Besides bootlegging, Hogan’s gang was connected to (1910–1974), armed robbery and several murders. “Jelly Roll” moved an American on from gang life to politics: He was elected to the baseball player Missouri State Legislature in 1934 and the State Senate who was a in 1942, and he remained in office until 1960. pitcher for the St. Louis Purina Cardinals from Dizzy Dean An animal feed company 1930 to 1937. He founded in St. Louis in was known for outrageous behavior, butchered English 1894 as the Robinson- and incessant chatter while on the mound. He parlayed Danforth Commission his personality into endorsement contracts, tours Company by George and more. Robinson, Will Andrews and William Danforth. Alton They figured the animal A small Illinois town along the Mississippi River feed business could approximately 25 miles north of St. Louis. weather a bad economy. Two years later, a Centralia tornado destroyed its A small Missouri town in the middle of the state, mill; Danforth borrowed approximately 130 miles northwest of St. Louis.

$10,000 to build a new Ralston Purina’s Whole mill and became the Wheat Cereal Wabash depot company’s de facto The Wabash Railroad connected many Midwestern leader. He diversified the company to include people cities, including Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, St. food in 1898 after he met a miller who had a process Louis, Chicago and Detroit, upward through Michigan of milling whole wheat that prevented it from become to Frankfort and eastward to Buffalo, New York. rancid. Danforth packaged and sold this wheat in St. Centralia is a stop along the route connecting St. Louis Louis grocery stores as Ralston Purina’s Whole to Columbia, Missouri. Wheat Cereal.

Paradise Dance Hall There was a Paradise Dance Hall on the northeast corner of the Hodiamont tracks (north of Forest Park) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but Williams may have based the Paradise on the Casa Loma Ballroom, which opened in the 1920s and was known at one point as the Cinderella Dance Palace. It had a 5,000-square-foot cushioned dance floor and a 35- cent admission.

Washington U Washington University was founded in 1853 by a prominent merchant and his pastor, who were both concerned the Midwest didn’t have enough schools of higher learning. It started by providing evening classes and grew into a liberal arts college, eventually adding a law school, school of fine arts and medical school. After three years at the University of Missouri, Williams attended Washington U for his senior year,

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“The Play Is Memory”

Director Joseph Haj was particularly keen to investigate The Glass Menagerie as a memory play. “From the beginning, the creative team and I were interested in how memory works,” he told the staff and cast on the first day of rehearsal. “We talked about how we could creatively convey memory onstage using light, sound, blurred edges and areas of focus.” Below are some ideas about memory that informed PHOTO: REMY AUBERJONOIS, JENNIFER VAN DYCK AND CAREY COX IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) the production.

Every time we bring back an This means, somewhat ironically, It also fits with a growing body of old memory, we run the risk of that the remembering something evidence showing that, despite changing it. It’s more like opening a creates a critical window in what people believe, eyewitness document on a computer — the old which memories can be erased testimony is often seriously information enters a surprisingly or manipulated. Many scientists unreliable. “Say you’ve been vulnerable state when it can have done this in rodents and questioned by an investigator be edited, overwritten or even humans using drugs or conflicting and you recall the event,” says deleted. It takes a while for the information. But these experiments [researcher Jason] Chan. “In the memory to become strengthened usually manipulate single simple next 15–20 minutes, you could run anew, through a process called memories, such as a drug craving into another eyewitness or overhear reconsolidation. Memories aren’t or a fearful association between a investigators talking to each other. just written once, but every time we colour and an electric shock. … Some inaccurate information could remember them. update your memory.”

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seem to cluster around particular periods in our lives.

This is a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump, and may help explain “the good old days” and the “when I was your age” comments. The reminiscence bump means that we do not remember all ages in our life equally. In 2005, a study involving 2,000 participants … wanted to answer the question, “What remains in a lifetime of memories?”

Apparently what remains most are memories from between the ages of 10 and 30. The findings of the study supported what others had shown before them — that before the age of 5 most people report almost no memories. Then, between 5 and 10, the number of memories begins to increase, hitting a peak for both genders in the late teens. This period of increased reported memories stays quite high until the early twenties, when it begins to drop and then PHOTO: REMY AUBERJONOIS IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE (T CHARLES ERICKSON) stabilize for the remaining decades. So we seem to retain the most More positively, the study could their experiences from negative memories of our teens have implications for treating feelings. But Chan and LaPaglia and twenties. … conditions that involve unwanted suggest that such techniques memories, such as phobias or might actually be exploiting the One explanation for the post-traumatic stress disorder. reconsolidation effect to actually reminiscence bump may be that it As Chan and [his colleague rewrite the past, rather than just is related to our emergence of a real Jessica] LaPaglia say, “Humans are severing our connections from it. sense of self, which seems to be a notoriously inept at suppressing largely universal phenomenon. … unwanted thoughts.” If we try Ed Yong, “When Memories Are not to think about something, we Remembered, They Can Be Rewritten,” These are the memories that usually end up thinking about it all www.nationalgeographic.com, May 20, 2013 defined us. They are the memories the more. Instead, it may be more that made us who we are. And productive to actively remember Time-travelling through our whether or not they have been what’s troubling us and reinterpret memories, we may find that some tainted by perceptual and memory that in a new light, relying on events stick out more than others. biases, they are the memories we reconsolidation to remake the old If we think about the characteristics seem to cherish and remember memories in a less disquieting way. that these memories have in most vividly. common, we may notice that the Acceptance and commitment most vivid are the most emotional, Julia Shaw, The Memory Illusion: therapies for PTSD work along most important, most beautiful or Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science similar lines, but it’s often assumed most unexpected events of our of False Memory, London: Random House that they help people to put the lives. We may also notice that our Books, 2016 past behind them or to disconnect memories cluster. And they often

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People, Places and Things in the Play

PEOPLE

Chamberlain Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), prime minister of the U.K., met with Hitler at the Berghof in 1938 as part of the “appeasement” negotiations that led to the Munich Agreement and would hand over the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, to Germany.

Episcopalians Members of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, an independent church that succeeded the Church of England (aka Anglican Church) after U.S. Clark Gable Greta Garbo colonies gained independence from England. ECUSA remains part of the Anglican Communion, a collection of religions derived from the Church of England that Mr. Lawrence recognize the archbishop of Canterbury as the head. D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), an English author and influence on Williams. The likely “horrible novel” in Gable Amanda's opinion is Sons and Lovers, published in Clark Gable (1901–1960), a dashing film actor. It 1913, which is regarded as a semiautobiographical Happened One Night in 1934 made him a certifiable examination of a young man trying to detach himself movie star. Between 1934 and 1937, he appeared in from his mother. Edwina Williams was known to Men in White, Manhattan Melodrama, Chained, China conduct book purges. Williams wrote to his agent, Seas, Call of the Wild, Mutiny on the Bounty, Love on Audrey Wood, in 1939 as he was working on Battle of the Run and others. Angels: “If Mother doesn’t launch one of her literary purges during my infrequent absences from the attic Garbo I should be able to complete a presentable script in a Greta Garbo (1905–1990), a Swedish American film few more weeks.” actress. Her films in the 1930s included Anna Karenina, Camille, Conquest and Ninotchka. She retired from film Milton in 1941. John Milton (1608–1674), an English poet and historian, best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost. He had become completely blind by 1651, most likely from glaucoma.

GUTHRIE THEATER \ 23 CULTURAL CONTEXT

PLACES THINGS

Berchtesgaden bower A town in Bavaria in southeastern Germany. Near A reference to the card game Euchre. The two highest Berchtesgaden was Adolf Hitler’s residence, the cards are the right bower (the jack of the trump suit) Berghof, which he bought in 1933 and expanded in and left bower (the other jack of the same color), so 1935–1936. if diamonds are trumps, jack of diamonds is the right bower and jack of hearts is the left bower. Blue Mountain A town in Tippah County in northeastern Mississippi, Celotex interior approximately 340 miles from St. Louis, Missouri. The Celotex Corporation of America made construction materials. One of its subsidiary Greene County companies mined asbestos fiber, which could be A county in southeastern Mississippi along the woven into a fabric that was resistant to fire, heat Alabama border. and electricity and therefore prized and useful in manufacturing construction materials. Guernica A city in northern Spain near Bilbao that was heavily Century of Progress bombed by German planes in April 1937 during the A world’s fair hosted by Chicago during the summers Spanish Civil War. of 1933 and 1934 and visited by almost 40 million people. Originally intended to run May – November Jackson 1933, President Roosevelt encouraged the exposition The capital city of Mississippi, located in Hinds and to run a second summer because it was so successful Madison counties in the southeastern part of the state. in promoting durable goods (and encouraging spending on said goods), which complemented the Mississippi Delta federal government’s own plans to stimulate the The Mississippi Delta is usually defined as the land economy. The exposition’s theme was science and north of Natchez, Mississippi, between the Mississippi industrial development, in part to rebuild trust in and Yazoo rivers. It was formed by periodic flooding science after the horror of chemical weapons used over thousands of years, creating a flat, incredibly during World War I. The fair’s unofficial motto came fertile plain. from the Hall of Science: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” Moon Lake A crescent-shaped lake in Mississippi north of cotillion Clarksdale, not far from the Mississippi River and A formal ball in which young women, usually ages 16 Arkansas border. It’s an “oxbow lake,” fairly common in to 18, appear in society or before the public for the the area, which was created when the Mississippi River first time. Originally a young woman made her debut changed course. Moon Lake and/or Moon Lake Casino to indicate she was of marriageable age. appear in several of Williams’ plays, including Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar DAR Named Desire. Daughters of the American Revolution, a women’s service organization founded in Washington, D.C., in Sunset Hill 1890. Membership eligibility extends to any woman A Greek revival mansion in Aberdeen, Mississippi, built age 18 or older who can prove a direct line of descent in 1847. It is also known as the Reuben Davis House, from a patriot of the American Revolution. named after a prominent attorney who lived there. dissolving economy The Great Depression affected economies worldwide beginning in 1929. President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that began in 1933 helped alleviate some unemployment and instituted banking and labor reforms. Yet by 1940, 15% of the U.S. was still unemployed.

24 \ GUTHRIE THEATER CULTURAL CONTEXT fluorescent tubes The Pirates of Penzance A type of lighting in which illumination is created via An 1879 comic operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan. argon and mercury vapor enclosed in a glass tube with electrodes at either end. pleurosis Inflammation of the pleura — the membranes that jonquils surround the lungs and line the chest cavity. Also A species of daffodils known as pleurisy, the condition usually results (scientific name from an underlying respiratory infection or injury. Narcissus) often Pleurisy’s primary symptom is sharp pain, especially characterized by during breathing. Treatment involves addressing the clusters of several underlying condition and managing pain. flowers, a strong scent and tube-like foliage. radio engineering They are a spring- A field in which specialized electrical engineers work with blooming perennial and maintain equipment that emits and receives radio flower grown from Jonquils waves, often in broadcasting systems. An understanding a bulb. of electrodynamics is part of a radio engineer’s training. labor disturbances service car Among the labor activity and strikes in the late 1930s Large cars for hire, like taxis, that followed specific was the strike against General Motors by the year-old routes on a specific schedule, like streetcars. United Automobile Workers union in late 1936 that According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 500 service carried into 1937. It ultimately affected 69 GM plants. cars were in operation before World War II and This was a sit-down strike in many of those plants, charged a nickel. They were disliked by both cabbies which was a new and very effective weapon on labor’s and streetcar drivers because they siphoned off their part. In the Cleveland plant, 700 sit-down strikers customers, clogged streets and weren’t regulated. kept the whole plant from operating, affecting 7,000 employees. In Chicago, a strike against Republic Steel Shredded Wheat Biscuit resulted in four killed and 83 injured when 1,000 CIO One of the first ready-to-eat cereals, invented in 1892 strikers fought with police. This was two days after an by Henry D. Perky. almost identical action resulted in 26 injured. Spanish Revolution The Spanish revolution and subsequent civil war Mazda lamp (1936–1939) resulted from a divided Spain and the rise A brand of electric light of fascism in Europe. The Popular Front, a coalition bulb manufactured by of left-leaning, pro-democracy parties united against General Electric. fascism, narrowly won the election in February 1936. (Ahura Mazda is But it quickly met with street protests, strikes and the god of light in other turmoil. The military took action on July 17, 1936, Persian mythology.) with a rebellion that spread to many areas of Spain. It was intended to be a short coup with hopes of getting Spain under control quickly, but Spaniards in Mazda lamp favor of a republic fought back. Soon the country was Merchant Marine engulfed by civil war. In July, the Nationalists set up A nation’s commercial ships. The ships may be publicly their own government, and in September, they chose or privately owned and transport material, people and Francisco Franco as their military and political leader. goods (as opposed to provide military support) via Franco based his government on fascist principles. cargo ships, passenger ships or tankers. In March 1939, Franco took Madrid, which prompted the surrender of Republican forces elsewhere. Franco milk-fund declared the war over on April 1, 1939. Charities that fundraise to provide clean milk to families and public schools had been around since 1889. St. Louis had a Pure Milk Fund by 1910.

GUTHRIE THEATER \ 25 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For Further Reading and Understanding

EDITIONS OF THE PLAY Tennessee Williams, Memoirs, New York: Doubleday, 1975. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Deluxe Centennial Edition Audrey Wood and Max Wilk, with an introduction by Tony Represented by Audrey Wood, Kushner, New Directions, 2011 Garden City, New York: Doubleday (definitive text). & Company, Inc., 1981.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Dramatists Play Service, FILMS 1948 (acting edition). The Glass Menagerie, directed by Irving Rapper. Screenplay by Peter BOOKS Berneis. With Jane Wyman, Arthur Kennedy, Gertrude Lawrence and Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Kirk Douglas, 1950. Tischler, editors, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie, directed 1920–1945 (Volume 1), New York: by Anthony Harvey. Screenplay New Directions, 2000. by Stewart Stern. With Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Joanna James Grissom, Follies of God: Miles and Michael Moriarty, 1973. Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, New York: Alfred A. The Glass Menagerie, directed Knopf, 2015. by Paul Newman. With Joanne Woodward, John Malkovich, Karen John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Allen and James Naughton, 1987. Pilgrimage of the Flesh, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Tennessee Williams’ South, documentary written and directed Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown by Harry Rasky, 1973. Tennessee Williams, New York: Crown Publishers, 1995.

Michael Paller, Gentleman Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama, New York: Palgrave, 2005.

Matthew C. Roudané, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Edwina Dakin Williams, Remember Me to Tom, New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1976.

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