Blog Post # 5 - The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams, author of The Glass Menagerie and many other important dramatic works, defies the audiences’ expectations with the aforementioned masterpiece. A conventional play (or what Williams refers to as, a “realistic” play) relies on a sort of photorealistic setting, populated with believable and true-to-life characters and a, well, conventional approach to chronology. Williams however, employs things such as an unconventional timeline by making The Glass Menagerie a “memory play,” unusual lighting, and musical underscores to totally break the comfortable and long-accepted mold. In doing so, he questions just how true to reality these conventional dramatic works were and are, and attempts to create an alternative way in which to present plays so as to make them even closer to reality.

Williams himself says that, because The Glass Menagerie is a “memory play,” it should not and does not stray away from its “responsibility of dealing with reality,” but that it instead “should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.” I feel that he succeeded in doing so with The Glass Menagerie, despite its off-putting challenges to theatrical norms mentioned above. In fact, it is because of these challenges that this success is possible. Take the very nature of the play for example - what does Williams mean by “memory play”? The narrator, Tom, explains this to the audience in the first monologue of the show:

TOM: The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.

I am the narrator in the play, and also a character in it.

This may seem to challenge what was previously asserted by his claiming that “it is not realistic,” but that he breaks the fourth wall and levels with the audience has the opposite effect. Now we know (as if we didn’t before) that it’s just a play, that it’s just a memory, but Tom does not say that he is but an actor. What he has set up now, particularly in the latter portion of his monologue by referring to himself as a poet with a “weakness for symbols,” is that he is very real. From this point onward, the play can be read (or viewed) as a conversation between Tom and the audience - a conversation one might have at a bar with a stranger after asking why they’re there and receive an answer which neither were expecting. The setting and timeline choices now all appear to be logical and manipulated specifically to make the play seem as a real memory does. That Williams chooses to use dim, unexpected, and unconventional lighting choices to highlight certain characters (for instance, Laura as she sat on the couch in the dinner scene with Jim) only underscores this. In memories, often times the oddest things are what stand out, what appear the most important after the fact. The dim and spotty lighting show the audience exactly how he remembers it, and the music we hear in the background serves to do the same.