General

Tennessee Williams work, The Glass Menagerie, he uses the idea of image versus reality. Williams writes the play carefully and constructs the stage directions to guide the performance of the play toward a less realistic interpretation. The play takes place in the thirties. The play consists of four actors. Amanda Wingfield is the mother of Tom and Laura and often digresses back to memories of her former days on the southern plantation farm and her night with 17 gentlemen callers. Laura Wingfield is crippled and very shy daughter of Amanda who keeps her hard pressed to finding a husband. Tom Wingfield, as Laura's brother, he is also pressed by his mother to find his sister a gentleman caller, and to his keep the job at the shoe factory to support the family.

The play is written in 1944 filled with realistic of feelings and most inner truth. The audience is seated in the heart where images are less distinct than reality demands as well as exaggerating and diminishing truth to its own purposes throughout. The play begins with Tom's voice being the narrator as well as the actor followed by the music, the private world of Laura, that brings him back to the night of the gentleman caller. Dim lights fills the Wingfield's apartment to maintain the destortion memory brings. The other characters seem to be lost in physical space in relation to moving in response to Tom's memory.

Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife and dominating mother, hopes to match her daughter with an eligible "gentleman caller" Jim O'Connor, Tom's friend at the shoe factory. Tom, Amanda's son, supports the family. Laura Lame and painfully shy, evades her mother's scheme's and reality by retreating to the make believe world of her glass animal collection.

We are first introduced with the street where the Wingfield's apartment used to be in the rear of a building in an over crowded urban city. The apartment is in front of an alley that faces a fire escape. The fire escape is the only entrance to the apartment the fire escape steps is what we see on the setting of the play. Williams says: "at the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement" (1780) The introduction of the play where Tom takes us back in time to see what he saw before he left his mother and sister behind; yet time is not interpreted in the play.

Amanda is eating at the dinner table with Tom and Laura while she brings up her story about in "blue mountain" she receive 17 callers in one night "your