But it captures the eye and the mind like one of Laura’s glass figurines-something you turn this way and that in order to catch the light of your own memories of family and heartache and all the changes that led up to that moment in which you had to leave, the better to become yourself. ![]() (He called it a “memory play.”) “The Glass Menagerie” doesn’t move with the logic of a dream it tells a linear story, clearly and effectively. You can hear his wistfulness in the opening monologue, when Tom tells us that what we are about to see is a “memory,” and therefore “not realistic.” Williams turned his back on the realism of the times-the war was still going and conventional attitudes were running high, both on and off the stage-to craft a nearly plastic art out of a moribund form. In the family’s small, dark sitting room, Laura spends hours polishing her collection of delicate figurines, which Amanda calls her “glass menagerie.” To create the handicapped, self-conscious Laura, Williams drew on his love for and understanding of his mentally unstable older sister, Rose. What she likes to do most is stay home and play old records on the Victrola that her father, a worker with the telephone company, left behind when he “fell in love with long distance” and split. Laura doesn’t like the world because she doesn’t feel it can accept her difference. Together, Amanda and Tom look after Tom’s sister, Laura (Madison Ferris), a painfully shy young woman whose bout of pleurisy as a teen-ager has left her with a limp. Williams based Tom’s mother, the redoubtable Southern-born Amanda Wingfield (Sally Field), on his own mother, who was also controlling, reality-challenged, and needy-a formerly vivacious belle now living in a world that is circumscribed by the poverty of reality and by children she cannot understand. Like the pre-success Williams, the play’s narrator, Tom Wingfield (Joe Mantello), is a writer who earns a marginal living in a shoe factory. He carved the manuscript out of his own bones. Tennessee Williams was thirty-four years old when his exquisite four-character study about family, memory, and love-as-chance premièred on Broadway. He is unwaveringly devoted to goals of professional achievement and ideals of personal success.The despair and disgust I felt after seeing the director Sam Gold’s rendition of Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play, “The Glass Menagerie” (at the Belasco), was so debilitating that I couldn’t tell if my confused, hurt fury was caused by the pretentious and callous staging I had just witnessed or if my anger was a result of feeling robbed of the beauty of Williams’s script. Jim was a popular athlete in high school and is now a shipping clerk at the shoe warehouse in which Tom works. JIM O’CONNOR- An old acquaintance of Tom and Laura. He is frustrated by the numbing routine of his job and escapes from it through movies, literature, and alcohol. An aspiring poet, Tom works at a shoe warehouse to support the family. Amanda’s son and Laura’s younger brother. Painfully shy, she has largely withdrawn from the outside world and devotes herself to old records and her collection of glass figurines. Laura has a bad leg, on which she has to wear a brace, and walks with a limp. Amanda’s daughter and Tom’s older sister. She is simultaneously admirable, charming, pitiable, and laughable. A proud, vivacious woman, Amanda clings fervently to memories of a vanished, genteel past.
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