The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams
directed by Fred Sullivan, Jr.

March 4-April 4, 2010

In a rundown apartment in a St. Louis ghetto, erstwhile Southern belle Amanda Wingfield, her painfully shy daughter, Laura, and her aspiring writer son, Tom, form a triangle of quiet desperation. Amanda, an overbearing single mother, lives on memories of her glorious flower-scented youth, while her children bear the weight of her unrealistic dreams for their future until hope arrives in the form of a gentleman caller for Laura. Winner of the 1945 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the literary masterpiece that launched Williams’ career, The Glass Menagerie continues to capture the imagination and hearts of American audiences.

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From the Director

The father of American theater Eugene O’Neill finally arrived at the deeply personal quintessential American family play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, at the very end of his career.

For Tennessee Williams, it is where he began.

Tom Wingfield, the narrator and protagonist of The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams’ portrait of himself as a young artist—trapped by a dead-end job that allowed him little time to pursue his writing; unloved by his distant alcoholic father who in life called him Miss Nancy and Sissy; pressured by his own demons of alcohol, sexuality and identity; fearing his own madness when faced with his beloved sister’s fragile mental illness; and bullied by his domineering, manic-depressive mother’s frustrations, tenacity and denial.

Tennessee poured all this and more into Glass, a story steeped in haunting guilt and love and the need to escape. It was an escape he never quite accomplished for his mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, and his sister, Rose Williams, appeared in one form or another in almost all of his great works, just as he himself can be seen in Brick Pollit, Reverend Shannon, Sebastian Venable and the extreme opposite yin and yang of Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski. Williams said about his writing that it was a plea for the understanding of the delicate people, the complex, broken people we all know, are or have within our families of origin or choice. It was his great and necessary subject as he was very much of their number.

Tom starts Glass off by telling the audience that it is a “memory play.” Williams uses this form to explore and exorcise his family’s demons with great love and startling detail and by doing so, moves closer to understanding and forgiveness of all the Wingfields.

I played Tom Wingfield when I was 27 years old and dedicated my performance to my mother, Mary Elizabeth Hanlon Sullivan. It has been a wonderful re-visitation for me, 22 years later. And in rethinking the play after more than two decades, I kept coming back to the two aspects of Tom that Tennessee gives us: the experienced, rueful narrator Tom looking back on his younger self, immersed in the present tense of the drama that unfolds before us. Approaching our production, rather than a single actor portraying both, I thought it would be thrilling to see two actors, the Old Tennessee—drunk, charming, wild and passionate—occupying the same stage as his portrait of his younger self.

This play is filled with unforgettable characters and the beautiful human complexities of denial, shame, unconditional love, abandonment, identity and survival. Written in Williams’ uniquely gorgeous poetic Southern syntax, The Glass Menagerie surprisingly contains much more laugh out loud humor and bold brash drama than easy sentiment. In an insanely busy season, every rehearsal of this pitch-perfect cast— (each of whom I have loved collaborating with in the past) reunited to perform a great truly classic play— has been an intensely personal joy.

—Fred Sullivan

Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams (1911-1981)

“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be.” —Tom, The Glass Menagerie

Play texts are mere blue prints for the final production and reading them can be a mostly unsatisfactory affair. Yet Tennessee Williams’ plays are filled with luscious multi-page evocations of mood, desperation, and desire, providing an intensely pleasurable reading experience. Fellow playwright David Mamet calls Williams “the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language.” In production, Williams’ plays are the most tactile and textured in the western canon. Sitting in the audience you imagine you feel the sensual, stifling swamp heat of a claustrophobic apartment in the quarter, or the suffocating bedroom on a large Southern plantation in which the walls have ears. You imagine beads of sweat forming on your skin. You smell the sweet stench of over-ripe magnolia and hibiscus blossom. You feel the very air vibrating with the tension and animal need simmering on stage. Haunted, intensely poetic, profoundly unhappy, Tennessee Williams was a colossus of theater who created indelible characters that define American drama. His characters (like Williams himself), are wounded by their intense sensitivity to their surroundings, their dislocation, and their place at the margins of things; but they manage, even in their specific extremes, to be universal in their reach and in their identification with the audience. Williams’ great compassion for humanity, evident in every stroke of his pen, could make a self-loathing, closeted, former football hero or a mentally-ill nymphomaniac speak to the very essence of human experience.

Williams bravely examined uncharted territory at a time when to do so was to take great artistic and personal risk. In mid-twentieth-century America, Williams depicted, without moralizing, complex adult sexuality, diseases of the mind and violence, forever altering the landscape of theater. Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman provided a ringing endorsement, hysterically categorizing Williams’ plays as, “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” Thankfully, Williams’ “standards of decency” were different. He held these delicate creatures in loving hands, neither judging nor condemning. His gentle, forgiving spirit was perhaps due to his own well-documented struggles with various dependencies and the lives he charted for his characters were fiercely animated by a personal connection, as if each were “written in tears and blood,” as his great contemporary Eugene O’Neil remarked.

Of all Williams’ plays, The Glass Menagerie is his most intensely personal, a complex portrait of a young artist (Tom Wingfield) at increasing odds with the boundaries of family, of circumstance, of a society that can’t possibly understand or tolerate who he is. It is a beautiful and painful evocation of Tennessee’s own mother, his absent father and a kind of love letter across time to his sister Rose (“Laura”), whose life-long mental illness led to institutionalization and an eventual frontal lobotomy. The play is cleverly fictive. An older Tom looks back on the crucible of these formative years, making Rose’s invisible illness physically viable in the “clump” of a bad leg that increasingly shuts her off to the outside world. But there is no mistaking the excruciating truth that animates this “pleasant disguise of illusion”. In The Glass Menagerie, Tom becomes Tennessee and we witness the birth of a poet who would use the magic of the stage to transform the personal into the universal and break new ground in form, content and the art of the possible in the American theater.

Tennessee Williams is the author of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Camino Real, Night of the Iguana, as well as many other plays, screenplays and works of fiction.

—Jennifer Madden