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 Guthrie Theater, 818 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415 All rights reserved. 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Board received additional funds to support this activity from the National Endowment for the Arts. 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 GUTHRIE THEATER \ 3 THE PLAY 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 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY 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 GUTHRIE THEATER \ 5 THE PLAY 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.