the glass menagerie

by tennessee williams

Photo by Michael J. Lutch

the official educational toolkit for the 2013 Broadway revival

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The Glass Menagerie

Educational Toolkit
Recommended: Grades 9-12

Welcome to The Glass Menagerie! Tennessee Williams iconic family

drama is studied in classrooms all across America, and for good
reason. Did you know that Williams play, with its demonstration of
his idea of plastic theater, was very experimental for its time?
Many theatergoers expect a realistic kitchen sink drama when they
enter a theater to see The Glass Menagerie, but Williams envisioned
the play as an artistic interpretation of how memory feels, rather
than a precise depiction of real events.
This idea of memory and its limitations forms the primary
lesson in the The Glass Menagerie Educational Toolkit. Later in the
Toolkit, youll find a biographical article about the playwright,
interviews with the cast and creative team of this production,
information about the historical setting of The Glass Menagerie, and
more.

Welcome

The educational team for The Glass Menagerie is happy to help

facilitate the lesson plan within this Toolkit and help you book your
class to see the show at a special student rate. We would also be
happy to coordinate a post-show talkback with the cast. Please dont
hesitate to contact us with questions about the production and for
talkback information.
Hope to see you at the theater soon!
Thomas Raynor
Director of Student Outreach
Jeffrey Richards Associates
(212) 489-6745 x306
Note: Material in this study guide was originally produced by the American
Repertory Theater for its run of The Glass Menagerie. Special thanks to A.R.T. staff:
Brendan Shea, Georgia Young, Alexandra Juckno, and Ryan McKittrick for their
contributions.
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Lesson Plan..3
Memory
Memory in Art5
What is Memory?.........................................................................6
Activity: I Remember10
Excerpt: Production Notes from The Glass Menagerie.12
Activity: A Memory Play Storyboard15
Wrap-Up / Before You Read18

Table of Contents

Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie: Suggested Discussion Questions..19
Things As They Were: Tennessee Williams and The Glass
Menagerie
St. Louis in the 1930s..20
From Tennessee to Tom22
The Glass Menagerie in 2013
Meet the Team27
Interview with John Tiffany & Cherry Jones..31
Post-Show Discussion Questions.34

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Objective
Students will use a classic American drama, Tennessee Williams The
Glass Menagerie, as a lens through which to discover the neurological
basis of memory and explore its artistic expression. Students will
describe their own memories, learn how Tennessee Williams hoped to
express his memories artistically, and then get a chance to try it
themselves by creating outlines for their own memory plays.
After reading the script and seeing the production, students will
discuss their response to the material, and to how this productions
cast and creative team have interpreted it.

Background

Lesson Plan

The events and characters of The Glass Menagerie very closely mirror
the playwrights life, but in the words of Tom, the character who
represents Tennessee Williams, the play gives us truth in the pleasant
disguise of illusion.
The following lesson plan uses arts-based learning to examine the
scientific principles of memory that suffuse the production, as well as
the themes and characters of The Glass Menagerie and its 2013
Broadway production. Students who participate in the lesson plan and
attend a performance will connect their experiences during a postshow conversation with members of the cast and creative team.

Materials

The Glass Menagerie Educational Toolkit

Paper
Colored Pencils
Markers

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PROCEDURE
Unit One: Memory
1. Using the examples found in Memory in Art, lead a discussion
with students about their prior knowledge of memory and of other
works with memory as a strong theme.
2. Introduce the material in What is Memory? Talk through the
article with your students to make sure they understand the types
of memory and the basics of how they are made.
3. Use the I Remember activity to get students thinking in detail
about their memories. What aspects of their memory are the most
vivid? The least?
4. Have the students read Excerpt: Production Notes from The Glass
Menagerie. How does Tennessee Williams approach memory in
his work? Discuss the theatrical devices that Williams suggest to
replicate the feeling of memory. Do these resonate with what
weve learned about memory so far? Why or why not?
5. Ask each student to create two artistic representations of their
memory, like Tennessee Williams did with The Glass Menagerie,
using the A Memory Play Storyboard activity in the Toolkit.
6. Have your students go over the Before You Read section and
answer any questions they may have before reading The Glass
Menagerie.
7. HOMEWORK: Have your students read The Glass Menagerie in its
entirety.

Unit Two: Menagerie

1. After your students have read the play, use the questions provided
to lead discussion about the text. Which elements of it did your
students respond to, and why?
2. Use the background material found in Things As They Were to
lead discussion about Tennessee Williams, the play, and its major
themes and characters.
3. After attending a performance, use the information and questions
found in The Glass Menagerie in 2013 to lead discussion about
the Broadway revivals interpretation of Williams play and your
students response to it.
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Memory in Art

Memory in Art

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie brought several innovative

concepts to the American theater, but it was far from the first work
to deal with memory as an important theme. Think back to other
works youve seen or read that dealt with memory. How is memory
important in those stories? How is it portrayed? Have the portrayals
youve seen before been effective? Why or why not?

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What Is Memory?
Before you read The Glass Menagerie, a play that deals almost
exclusively with memory, you should know a little bit about how
memory works. After you read the following material, answer the
Discussion Questions with your class.
During every moment of your life, your brain is constantly
working as the control system for your body and mind, it has to be!
One of the major tasks your brain performs is interpreting
information that your five senses sight, smell, taste, hearing, and
touch send it from the stimuli that they are experiencing. During
this lightning-fast process, your brain often stores various bits of
information about what youre experiencing in order to access them
later. These are called memories.

What is Memory?

How Does Memory Work?

Your senses are always receiving information. When a stimulus
reaches your eyes, ears, nose, touch, or taste receptors, those
receptors generate chemical and electrical signals which travel along
your nervous system to your brain. These signals travel through
special cells called neurons, and are passed from neuron to neuron in
a path until they reach your brain. When your brain reaches a
decision about what to do with the information carried by these
signals, it then sends information along a neuron path to the part of
your body that needs to respond to the stimulus. For example, if you
put your hand on a hot stove, the touch receptors in your fingers
send a signal through a neuron pathway to your brain, which then
interprets the signal and immediately sends a different signal back to
your hand telling it to move.
As these signals are flowing through your brain, the
information they carry is temporarily stored in a part of your brain
called the cortex. This storage is called memory, and can be broken
down into three types: sensory memory, short-term
memory, and long-term memory.
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Sensory memories are the most fleeting memories we

form in fact, often our brain isnt even conscious that were
experiencing them, and they are often stored for only fractions of a
second before being forgotten. Sensory memories are able to retain
information about how your senses experience stimuli, and are very
accurate, but very brief. For example, have you ever waved a sparkler
around and seen the trail of light that it leaves behind? That trail of
light is an example of a sensory memory your brain remembers
seeing the visual stimulus of the sparkler, even if the actual object
has already moved to a different place.
If the data that your senses are taking in catches your brains
attention in a certain way (a car alarm suddenly goes off) or is
important to you (a phone number), it moves into your short-term
memory. Short-term memories are pieces of information that
your brain only needs to remember for a brief amount of time,
anywhere from a few hours to a few seconds for example, when
you look up a phone number, it will be retained in your short-term
memory for as long as it takes to dial it, and then will be forgotten as
soon as your brain doesnt need the information anymore.
If a short-term memory is powerful or important enough
that your brain decides to retain it for a long time, or even
permanently, it becomes a long-term memory. All manner of
things can be retained in your long-term memory - everything from
the birthday party you had when you were ten to an important piece
of information like your home address.

Sensory
Input

Sensory
Memory

Short-Term
Memory

Long-Term
Memory

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A CLOSER LOOK: Long-Term Memory

In The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield narrates a story about events
that happened some years ago all long-term memories. Lets take a
look at the process of how a long-term memory is formed.
Long-term memories are those memories we have which
are retained for a very long time anywhere from a few months to
your entire lifetime. There are three different types of long-term
memory: procedural memory, semantic memory, and episodic
memory. Procedural memories deal with the knowledge of how to
perform tasks for example, how to ride a bike. Semantic memories
deal with general facts and knowledge, like the fact that London is
the capital of England or that there are four quarts in a gallon.
Episodic memories are those memories that you have of your
experiences, like your memory of your first day of school, or Tom
Wingfields memory of his sisters gentleman caller in The Glass
Menagerie. Psychologists still arent quite sure exactly how the three
types of long-term memory interact with each other, but all three
types are formed by the same three-step process.
To become a long-term memory, a piece of information must be
encoded, then stored, and then can be retrieved when
necessary.
When you encounter a new concept or experience, your brain
encodes it by breaking it down into parts to establish its meaning.
As an example, lets take the case of someone eating an orange for
the first time. This persons brain will break down that experience
into a number of different parts both specific (the orange color and
round shape that your eyes see, the smell, the sweet taste) and more
general information about the context of the experience (like I am
sitting at a picnic with friends eating this new fruit).
As we learned earlier, all of the different types of information
that you experience from eating an orange, both physical and
contextual, travels through neuron pathways to your brain, where
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they are temporarily stored. While everything that you experience

is at least temporarily stored in your brain, the vast majority of it is
quickly forgotten again. However, if a particular experience or piece
of information is repeated often enough or is emotionally intense or
important enough, your brain will recognize that that information
needs to move into your long-term memory and be retained for a
long time. When this occurs, a part of your brain called the
hippocampus will take the
neuron pathway that the
information originally traveled
Short-Term
Long-Term
and will send that information
Memory
Memory
down that pathway again and
again, which trains your
neurons so that the information will be able to travel that pathway
more easily in the future. Think of the neuron pathway as a dirt road
that the hippocampus paves, making it easier to drive on.
Once the memory is stored in your brain, it can be retrieved
by following the neuron pathways that your hippocampus already
established, bringing old information back into your short-term
memory. When you see an orange, that signal will travel through
your nervous system to your brain in the usual way but when it
reaches your brain, it will follow the neuron pathway that the
hippocampus already paved for it. The pieces of information about
oranges that your brain already stored are kept in different places
for example, how an orange smells is stored in a different part of
your brain than how an orange looks, or what was happening around
you when you ate the orange but the neuron pathway that your
hippocampus paved links those different pieces of information
together, so that your brain knows that theyre all related to the
same experience. As the signal travels the neuron pathway, it will
activate all the different pieces of information that are associated
with oranges, even though theyre stored in different parts of your
brain which is why when you see an orange you remember not only
what it looks like, but also how it tastes, and any other memories you
may have stored that involve oranges.

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Activity: I Remember

Activity: I Remember

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play the story is told by

Tom Wingfield, a stand-in for playwright Tennessee Williams, who
draws from his memories of his mother and sister to relay an incident
in which, at his mothers request, he brings a coworker over as a
potential suitor for his sister. The play is not a complete, realistic
depiction of those events. Like all of us, the playwrights sensory inputs
were discarded, confused, or given greater emphasis based on their
importance to him when the memory was created.
Choose two memories your earliest memory, and a more
recent memory that is very vivid in your mind. Using this worksheet,
fill in parts of these memories using your five senses. Are there smells,
sounds, textures or movements, sights, or even tastes you can recall?
My Earliest Memory
I saw
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I heard
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I tasted
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I smelled
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I touched/felt
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
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My Recent Memory
I saw
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I heard
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I tasted
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
I smelled
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________

I touched/felt
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________

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Excerpt: Tennessee Williams Production Notes

Excerpt: Production Notes

The Glass Menagerie was far from the first work of art to deal with the
subject of memory; however, it was a major turning point in American
drama. Up until The Glass Menagerie, American theater was
dominated by naturalism, or kitchen-sink drama a highly detailed,
realistic style of theater that attempted to create a perfect illusion of
reality.
Tennessee Williams intended The Glass Menagerie to be an example
of a new style which he dubbed plastic theater. The following is
excerpted from his preface to the printed script for The Glass
Menagerie. Read it, and answer the discussion questions at the end.
Being a "memory play," The Glass Menagerie can be presented
with unusual freedom of convention. Because of its considerable
delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of
direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all
other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim,
and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs
unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying
to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting
experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer
approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they
are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic
ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks,
corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a
photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the
unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is
an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or
suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing
into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular
play. They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which
must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions
if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.
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Eddie Dowling, Laurette Taylor and Julie Haydon in the

original Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie.
(Photo: The Lester Sweyd Collection, New York Public Library)

The purpose of this will probably be apparent. It is to give accent

to certain values in each scene. Each scene contains a particular point
(or several) which is structurally the most important. In an episodic
play, such as this, the basic structure or narrative line may be obscured
from the audience; the effect may seem fragmentary rather than
architectural. This may not be the fault of the play so much as a lack
of attention in the audience.
THE MUSIC: Another extra-literary accent in this play is
provided by the use of music. A single recurring tune, The Glass
Menagerie, is used to give emotional emphasis to suitable passages.
This tune is like circus music, not when you are on the grounds or in
the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when you are at some
distance and very likely thinking of something else. It seems under
those circumstances to continue almost interminably and it weaves in
and out of your pre-occupied consciousness; then it is the lightest,
most delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest. It expresses
the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and
inexpressible sorrow. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass
you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be
broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune,
which dips in and out of the play as if it were carried on a wind that
changes. It serves as a thread of connection and allusion between the
narrator with his separate point in time and space and the subject of
his story. Between each episode it returns as reference to the
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emotion, nostalgia, which is the first condition of the play. It is

primarily Lauras music and therefore comes out most clearly when
the play focuses upon her and the lovely fragility of glass which is her
image.
THE LIGHTING: The lighting in the play is not realistic. In keeping
with the atmosphere of memory, the stage is dim. Shafts of light are
focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to
what is the apparent center. For instance, in the quarrel scene
between Tom and Amanda, in which Laura has no active part, the
clearest pool of light is on her figure. This is also true of the supper
scene, when her silent figure on the sofa should remain the visual
center. The light upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having
a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits
of female saints or madonnas. A certain correspondence to light in
religious paintings, such as El Grecos, where the figures are radiant in
atmosphere that is relatively dusky, could be effectively used
throughout the play. (It will also permit a more effective use of the
screen.) A free, imaginative use of light can be of enormous value in
giving a mobile, plastic quality to plays of a more or less static nature.

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Activity: A Memory Play Storyboard

Activity: A Memory Play Storyboard

In this activity, you will experiment with creating an artistic
representation of your memory, just like Tennessee Williams did in The
Glass Menagerie.
Choose one of the two memories that you described in the I
Remember activity. For this activity, you will draw two different
storyboards depicting four images of that memory, the way movie
directors storyboard their
films. See the example below.
For the first storyboard,
choose four images from your
memory. These should be the
most detailed and important
images
that
you
can
remember
from
that
experience. Draw them in the
space provided. Be as
complete and truthful as
possible, omitting any details
that you cannot remember
with certainty.

Photo Vincent Lee

For the second storyboard, you will draw the same memory again. You
can choose the same four images you used in the first storyboard, or
you can choose new ones. This time, focus less on the realistic details
of the memory, and more on how you feel about it. If there are gaps
in your memory, fill them in. Feel free to exaggerate, as long as you
are staying true to the feelings you have about that memory.
When you are finished, look at the two storyboards. Which do you find
more compelling, and why?

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Activity: A Memory Play Storyboard

Storyboard 1: Detail

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Activity: A Memory Play Storyboard

Storyboard 2: Imagination

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Wrap-Up / Before You Read

Wrap-Up / Before You Read

So far, our discussion of The Glass Menagerie has focused on
material and activities relating to memory, one of the plays major
themes. You considered other artistic interpretations of memory,
learned about the types of memory and the basics of how they are
formed, performed two activities based on your own memories, and
read an excerpt of Tennessee Williams preface to the play.
As you read The Glass Menagerie, consider the material youve
learned already. Keep an eye out for the techniques that Williams
uses to tell a story from memories, both the ones he laid out in his
Production Notes and the ones that he didnt. Think about your
experience depicting your memories in the Memory Play Storyboard
activity how were your depictions similar to Williams? How were
they different?
The rest of the material in this Educational Toolkit deals with
the play itself and the 2013 Broadway revival production. As you read
the script and then watch the play, keep all that youve learned in
mind. Is there any of the material weve covered so far that is
especially interesting after reading the play? Why?
Enjoy The Glass Menagerie!

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Discussion Questions

THINGS AS THEY WERE:

Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie
St. Louis in the 1930s

Things As They Were

Playwright Tennessee Williams lived in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, from
1918 until he moved to New Orleans in 1939. His intimate familiarity with this
Mississippi River port city that is the setting of The Glass Menagerie comes
through in the Wingfield familys daily life.
Amanda Wingfield tries to push her
children to better themselves through
education. She chides Tom for the money
he spends on cigarettes, suggesting that he
could save that money for an accounting
course at Wash U, or Washington
University, a private university in St. Louis
which Tennessee Williams attended from
1936-37. Tom tells Amanda, Id rather
smoke, and perhaps Williams came to
A Gregg Shorthand workbook like Laura studies
a similar conclusion, because he soon
in The Glass Menagerie. Photo Andrew Owen
transferred to the University of Iowa.
Amanda also enrolls Laura in a secretarial program at Rubicams Business College,
which is where Williams and his sister Rose took a course during his first summer
off from college.
Amanda and Tom hold typical jobs for urban, working-class Americans in the late
30s. Amanda works for Famous-Barr a real-life department store that has been
in operation in St. Louis since 1924, although today it has been converted into a
Macys as a product demonstrator of brassieres (bras). She also sells
subscriptions to The Home-Makers Companion, a womens magazine, to raise
extra money to support her plan to find Laura a husband. Tom works for
Continental Shoemakers, a job likely based on Williams work for the International
Shoe Company. The Williams family moved to St. Louis when the playwright was
eight, because his father was promoted to a job in the home office of International
Shoe, and after he left the University of Missouri in 1931, his father brought him
to the shoe factory. He spent three years there, his experience in the warehouse
inspiring both Menagerie and the character of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar
Named Desire. St. Louis was a major manufacturing center in the United States,
and it lost more than half its output during the Great Depression of 1929-33 Tom
would have been fortunate to have his job, even though he hates it.

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Other St. Louis landmarks feature in

the plot of The Glass Menagerie. The Jewel
Box is one of Lauras favorite destinations
when she skips her business course. Opened
in 1936 in Forest Park, on the west side of the
city, this plate glass, wood, and wrought iron
greenhouse was built as a showcase of plants
that could survive the high levels of smoke
and soot pollution characteristic of the
industrialized city. Renovated in 2002, the
Jewel Box is still open to the public. Similarly,
Soldan High School, where Tom and Laura
attended school with Jim OConnor, was the
school Williams and his sister Rose briefly
attended. In operation since 1909, it is now
a
magnet school called Soldan
International Studies High School and is
located just north of Forest Park.

The Jewel Box.

Photo Colin Faulkingham

The population of St. Louis in the 1930s was heavily Roman Catholic. When
Tom tells his mother hell be bringing Jim OConnor for dinner on Friday night, she
says That means fish, of course. Jims last name, OConnor, is Irish, so Amanda
assumes hes Catholic. Because Catholics generally abstain from eating meat on
Fridays during Lent, the four weeks preceding Easter Sunday, she cooks a salmon
loaf for the gentleman callers meal.
St. Louis is also home to one of the oldest
teams in Major League Baseball: the Cardinals. Jay
Hanna Dizzy Dean (seen to the left) the player
who catches Jims attention in the sports section
was a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cardinals. His
nickname came from his outrageous behavior and
fastball pitch, and the 1934 team which won that
years World Series was called the Gashouse
Gang, for their rough appearance.

Dizzy Dean
Photo Estate of Dizzy Dean

This material includes information adapted from research by

The Glass Menagerie dramaturg Alexandra Juckno at the
American Repertory Theater.

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From Tennessee to Tom

On the frigid December night in
1944 that The Glass Menagerie
premiered in Chicago, the woman who
created Amanda Wingfield, Laurette
Taylor, came face-to-face with the
woman who had inspired the character.
Well, Ms. Williams, asked Taylor, how
did you like yourself? Edwina Dakin
Williams, ever the Southern belle,
politely changed the subject, Oh,
Laurette, you were wonderful.
This freezing Chicago night
Williams as a child with his mother,
catapulted Amanda Wingfield to the
Edwina, and sister, Rose.
pantheon of great roles for actresses,
Source: www.southernliterarytrail.org
and also made a star of Tennessee
Williams, who had used his early years
in St. Louis as a source of inspiration for the play. With his fame grew the myth of
his domineering mother, and Edwina Williams has often become inseparable from
the character she inspired. Likewise, The Glass Menagerie is often seen as a
snapshot of Williams life, with Tennessee as Tom Wingfield and his sister, Rose
Williams, as Laura. But these comparisons can do the play a disservice; Williams
certainly used his own experiences as a framework for the play, but Menagerie
represents Williams dramatic manifesto, his first wholly successful attempt to
transmute life into art.
Fittingly, Tennessee Williams life began like a Tennessee Williams play.
Edwina Dakin, who prided herself on being the only Southern girl from Ohio and
harbored hopes of becoming an actress, fell in love with Cornelius Coffin Williams,
a travelling salesman from Memphis, in 1907. Though he was a playboy who loved
whiskey and a good poker game, Cornelius managed to win over Edwina
(triumphing over several other suitors) and her parents the Reverend and Mrs.
Walter Dakin. After the marriage, Cornelius was often on the road, leaving his
children to enjoy the indulgence and undivided attention of their mother.
Though the name Tennessee suggests otherwise, Thomas Lanier Williams
III spent most of his childhood in Mississippi, where he was born, and in St. Louis,
the city he claimed to hate. Young Tom began writing on the typewriter Edwina
Williams bought for her writin son when he was twelve. By then, his Gulf Coast
upbringing had already supplied him with many of the people, places, and events
that would populate the mythological South of his plays.
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When Cornelius obtained a permanent position with the International

Shoe Company, he moved his family to St. Louis in the brutally hot summer of
1918. The Williams children had few friends, as Edwina disapproved of many of
the neighborhood children, and their classmates mocked their Southern accents.
Poetry served as a refuge for Tom, but Rose, though vivacious and pretty,
struggled to adjust and became withdrawn, often fighting with her parents.
Cornelius ignored his daughter, and Edwina
criticized her daughters growing interest in boys,
clothes, and parties. When Tom enrolled at the
University of Missouri in 1929, Rose was left
alone.
While at ole Mizzou, Tom discovered the
work of D.H. Lawrence and Percy Bysshe Shelley
and, encouraged by his drama professor, wrote
his first play. Cornelius pulled strings to get his
son accepted by Alpha Tau Omega, and his
fraternity brothers remembered Tom as quiet
and quirky, although popular with girls as a dance
partner. Jim Connor, the inspiration for
Menageries gentleman caller and Toms closest
friend at the time, later recalled that Tom spent
much of his time writing.

Williams at the University

of Missouri, 1930. Photo courtesy of 1930 Savitar

The beginning of 1932 found Tom trapped in the Celotex interior of

International Shoe. Upset over his sons poor grades, Cornelius secured him a job
as a clerk, forcing Tom out of college. Tom chafed at the job, recalling later that
the three years he spent in the warehouse felt like the same day played over and
over again. He ultimately found release in 1935 after heart palpitations caused a
nervous breakdown. This incident inaugurated a lifelong fear of dying and
madness that Williams would see reflected in Rose. After a disappointing social
debut, she had begun experiencing unexplained stomach pains. The night of the
breakdown that saved her brother from International Shoe, Rose wandered into
his room and declared that Tom, Rose, and their younger brother Dakin should
all die together.
While Tom recovered in Memphis, Rose began seeing a therapist, who
diagnosed her pains as stemming from a fear of sex. Edwina Williams
subsequently orchestrated a parade of gentleman callers. Tom returned to St.
Louis and enrolled in Washington University, where he met poet Clark Mills
McBurney and began writing social plays for the Mummers, a St. Louis theater
troupe. Toms success with the Mummers and friendships with the young literati
of St. Louis strained his relationship with his sister. He criticized Rose to her face
and in his diaries, calling her habit of wearing negligees in the house and her
desperate behavior toward men disgusting. Rose, ignored by the brother who had
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Tennesse Williams at his typewriter.

Photo Alfred Eisenstaedt

formerly been her most loving companion, slipped further into her delusions.
Cornelius and Edwina admitted her to a sanitarium in 1937, after which Cornelius
gave his daughter up as a lost cause. Tom, already afraid that he, too, would go
mad, had a nervous attack upon visiting her, and after a brief visit in 1939,
wouldnt see his sister again until 1943.
Tom finally completed his college studies with the prestigious University of
Iowa playwriting program. One play, Not About Nightingales, revolved around a
war-torn family crushed by poverty, and another, Me, Vashya! featured a heroine
driven mad by her blood-thirsty arms dealer husband. Though both deal with the
major social problems of the day the Depression and looming war both show
a young playwright struggling to depict the private tragedy of a family unfolding
against a larger societal tragedy.
Eager to take flight from St. Louis, Tom decamped to New Orleans in 1939
and along the way became Tennessee Williams. He mailed several plays to the
Group Theatres new play contest, knocking three years off his age to qualify for
entry and impulsively signing the works Tennessee. The plays won him $100,
enough to support himself through his writing, and the patronage of Audrey
Wood, a powerful New York agent.
The next five years in Williams life are a restless whirl of travelling and
writing. His notebooks and diaries of this period are part portrait of the artist as a
young man, part pillowbook, and part travelogue. Okay again. Writing really good
scenes. Sex ok, reads a typical entry. Williams wanderlust carried him across the
country through New Orleans, Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Hollywood, and New
York.
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Despite Tennessees stated desire to break away from his family, the
Williamses bleed into his work. Williams wrote stories about brothers and sisters,
drafting Apt. F, 3rd Flo. So., set in a white room like Rose Williams Enright Avenue
room; If You Breathe, It Breaks about a front porch girl with two brothers who
refuses her mothers offer of gentleman callers; The Spinning Song, which deals
with a decaying Southern family that contains seeds of both The Glass Menagerie
and A Streetcar Named Desire; and The Purification, a verse play about an
incestuous relationship between siblings.
In these stories, the kinship between the brother and sister represents the
divide Williams saw in himself between the artist and the lunatic. In his sister,
Williams saw a mind ravaged by what he called blue devils, which had turned
his father into a drunk and threatened to destroy the young writers own mind.
Writing became his salvation. A diary entry from Williams time in Macon, Georgia
showed his determination to overcome this shadow of madness: I have to
consider my family and their love and be brave and enduring as long as it is
humanly possible messy and prolonged. What happened to my sister. Without
writing to save him, Williams feared his mind would fail as had his sisters.
The Glass Menagerie frequently receded in Williams priorities as he
worked on Battle of Angels, Camino Real, You Touched Me! and a cavalcade of
poems and short stories. It surged ahead in January of 1943, when Edwina broke
the news that Rose had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy to pacify her delusions.
A devastated Williams returned to St. Louis; Edwina Williams thought her son
never forgave her for the decision, which doctors had assured her was the best
way to treat Roses schizophrenia.
What playwright and Williams scholar Tony Kushner calls ur-Menageries
began to take shape during this period. Williams first tried a short story, Portrait
of A Girl in Glass, in which Laura is the central character and has no physical
defects. The unnamed Mother is a charming nag, but lacks the force of Amanda
Wingfield. Tennessee called the story dismal, and abandoned it to pen Daughter
of the American Revolution: A Dramatic Portrait of An American Mother (A
Comedy). Infused with Edwinas Southern mannerisms, this Amanda hawks
magazine subscriptions to genteel Christian ladies. Audrey Wood and Williams
agreed that the mother was the strongest character of these disparate drafts, but
Williams thoughts kept returning to Laura.
These embryonic drafts led to The Gentleman Caller, which Williams
adapted into a film treatment for MGM during the summer of 1943. In this
version, Tom Wingfield and Amanda gain primacy, Laura is made lame, and the
role of the caller is expanded. Tennessee assured Wood that he would soften
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the ending of the film to make it palatable to the Hollywood starlets who may fill
the role of Laura. This soft ending can be seen in The Pretty Trap, a one-act in
which Jim, single and charmed by Lauras strange beauty, invites her out for a walk
at the end of the play. The curtain falls on a triumphant Amanda, who gives her
son her blessing to leave his family.
When the film studio dismissed Williams treatment, he finished his stage
version of The Glass Menagerie. Williams accidentally left the manuscript in the
dorm room of a Harvard student he hoped to seduce, but the student kindly
mailed it back to him. The play finally made its way to his agent, Audrey Wood, in
autumn of 1943. (She was horrified that Williams sent his only copy through the
post; he replied that if the play were lost, he could just rewrite it.) The play was
then picked up by Chicago producer Eddie Dowling. The former stage star Laurette
Taylor insisted she play Amanda, and the cast began rehearsals in Chicago in
December 1944. Taylor frustrated the cast by mumbling and appearing
uninterested in rehearsals. When Tennessee admonished her My God, what
corn! she threw herself into the role full force, moving Williams and Julie
Haydon, who played Laura, to tears. Taylor had been biding her time studying the
other actors performances; Williams loved her performance so much that he
allowed Dowling to cut the screens and slide projections indicated in the script in
order to focus on the power of the performances. After a successful Chicago run,
the play opened on Broadway in March 1945.
From the life and memory of Tom Williams, Tennessee Williams had
created one of the most enduring portraits of a family ever staged. While Tom
Wingfield runs from his memories, the playwright had used his own past to create
something never before seen on the American stage a lyricism born of truth in
the pleasant disguise of illusion.
Written by Alexandra Juckno, dramaturg for the A.R.Ts production of The Glass Menagerie

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The Glass Menagerie in 2013

Meet the Team

(L-R) Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, and Celia Keenan-Bolger in the A.R.T. production of The Glass Menagerie.
Photo by Michael J. Lutch

Meet the Team

Directed by John Tiffany
Movement by Steven Hoggett
Set and Costume Design by Bob Crowley
Lighting Design by Natasha Katz
Sound Design by Clive Goodwin
Music by Nico Muhly

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Amanda Wingfield
A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging to her past in Blue Mountain,
Mississippi. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is much to admire
in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at. Certainly she has
endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her
unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her.

Played by Cherry Jones

Im from Tennessee, so I probably was aware of Tennessee Williams earlier than
many children just because I was captivated by his name. My mother was an
English and American literature teacher so Im sure she must have taught The
Glass Menagerie, and I must have heard his name. The first time I saw The Glass
Menagerie was probably in a regional theater production in Syracuse, New York
on a very snowy night. I took the train from New York City to Syracuse to see my
friend Victoria Boothby as Amanda. And Id probably at that point already
auditioned for Laura, one of the many, many times I auditioned for Laura with no
success. I think I was a little too large for most LaurasI was tall and big-boned. I
never wanted to play Amanda, ever. Ever. But here I am with an extraordinary
group, blessed to play this part.

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Laura Wingfield
A childhood illness has left Laura crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other,
and held in a brace. Stemming from this, Lauras separation from reality increases
until she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move
from the shelf.

Played by Celia Keenan-Bolger

I first read Tennessee Williams on a trip with my dad to Tulum, Mexico. I
borrowed a Tennessee Williams anthology from the library and read Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire. I remember, as a
high school student who was obsessed with musicals, thinking how much I could
hear the music of The Glass Menagerie, both in the music cues that Tennessee
Williams had included in the script and also in his characters language. Ive
admired Cherry Jones for as long as I can remember, and I remember seeing Black
Watch and thinking that if I ever got to work with John Tiffany or Steven Hoggett,
Id go anywhere and do anything. So when I found out that all of those people
were going to be working together on a production at A.R.T., I just wanted to be a
part of it so badly.

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Tom Wingfield
The narrator of the play. A poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is
remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity. Tom yearns to
escape.

Played by Zachary Quinto

My first experience with Tennessee was in high school reading A Streetcar Named
Desire and then in college watching people work on little snippets of his plays. But
I somehow always felt distant from what was underneath the work until it became
clear that I was going to be working on this play, and I started to learn more and
more about him. I realized how many echoes there were for me in his experience
and in what he was trying to unlock inside of himself. Playing this character has
necessitated a deep delving into his personal life and experiences, so I feel like my
biggest connection to him is through this production and playing what is ultimately
the most autobiographical character in his canon. Theres something about
coming to this play at this particular time in my life that has allowed me to really,
really understand him, his work and his poetry on a much more intrinsic level.

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The Gentleman Caller

Jim OConnor, a nice, ordinary young gentleman. Charming and ambitious, he was
a popular athlete in high school and works with Tom at the warehouse, while
dreaming of bigger things.

Played by Brian J. Smith

I remember studying The Glass Menagerie in high school. We watched the movie with
John Malkovich, and I just remember lots of amber light and gauze and fog. I think
Tennessee Williams really started becoming meaningful to me when I started reading his
notebooks, and started drawing my own connections to his life and why he wrote plays
and the struggles that he went through writing them. The thing I always take away from
The Glass Menagerie is that theres a price for freedom. Anything I read by Tennessee
Williams always makes me want to go out and live my life. I want to go on an adventure.
I want to meet new people, go to new places, use parts of myself I havent used before,
and just explore being alive. Thats what is great about this play, that its a call to do that,
even if there is a price for it, and even if it does hurt a little bit.

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An Interview with John Tiffany and Cherry Jones

Ryan McKittrick, dramaturg of the American Repertory Theatre,
interviewed director John Tiffany and actress Cherry Jones, who plays
Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.
RYAN MCKITTRICK: John, when you and [A.R.T. Artistic Director] Diane
Paulus started talking about what you might direct at the A.R.T., you
told her that The Glass Menagerie was your favorite play. What do you
like so much about this play?
JOHN TIFFANY: Its a staple of great twentieth-century American plays.
Its a great family drama where everything is within a family and within
one living room. The architecture of the United States and even the
whole world gets created within a living room. I feel very connected to
what Tennessee Williams writes in The Glass Menagerie because its
about fragility and its about people. What hes trying to say is that the
world should be a place where damaged people like these can live, and
its a disaster that it isnt. Because Williams was a damaged, fragile
person himself, I find the way he writes about damaged people deeply
moving.

Interview

RM: What was the experience of reading the play out loud like for you,
Cherry?
CHERRY JONES: I realized that Im one of the last people who is the
right age to play that part who actually knew those kind of women. I
was born in Tennessee in 1956, which means that when I was ten years
old, the women who were Edwina [Tennessee Williamss mother] and
Amandas age were in their late 70s and still vital to our community. I
knew them well. They were the choir directors at the church, they
were the little ladies who would invite us over for cheese biscuits and
hot chocolate out of demitasse cups. They were women whose
grandfathers had fought in the American Civil War. Only they didnt
say Civil War, they said See Ah Vul Wa Wah [with a pronounced
Southern accent]. They all had marvelous namesthey were Aunt
Margaret Porter and Miss Lorraine Davis and Miss Annie Warren Mills,
whose favorite prayer was Dear Lord, I cant. You can. Please do!
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And then I realized that Blue Mountain [the place where Amanda
Wingfield used to receive her gentleman callers] is in Mississippi, just
two hours from where I
grew up in Tennessee. So
I started to feel some
kind of responsibility to
take this role because Im
a dramatic actress and
Im from that part of the
world. And I always loved
Tennessee Williams.
RM: What is it you love
about him?
CJ: I love that he figured
John Tiffany and Cherry Jones at the A.R.T. in Boston.
Photo by Aram Boghosian for the Boston Globe.
out a way to survive.
Because he shouldnt have
survived. Genius doesnt count for much, but he made it work for him,
and he had enough stability through his grandparents.
JT: There was a period when Williams was still living in St. Louis when
he felt like the failed son of a failed man. Thats how he puts it: the
failed son of a failure. Because his father, Cornelius, was a complete
failure.
CJ: And the gay son of a failed straight father.
JT: Exactly. And his sister, Rose, experienced the same sense of failure.
But she didnt have an outlet like her brother. So she absorbed it all
and it sent her mad. But the writing saved Tennessees life. And it just
makes you realize how many of us have actually been saved by this
thing called theaterthis outlet that we have.
RM: Could you talk about the conversations youve had with the set
designer, Bob Crowley?

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JT: We realized that the exciting thing is how Amanda and Laura are
still there when Tom takes us back to the house. Its like the molecules
of Amanda and Laura are still there, and the water of Tom makes them
appear and take form again. So then we started thinking about the
floor. We knew we wanted an infinity curve, like they were in the
middle of a galaxy. And then Bob and I looked at an artist called
Richard Wilson. He has a piece at the Saatchi Gallery called Oil where
hes coated the entire floor with black sump oil. The smell is incredible.
And we started thinking that we could have two hexagonal platforms
floating like a hydrocarbon molecule, with the fire escape coming out
of the floor like a unicorns horn. Or a lightning bolt. The reflection on
the surface will be absolutely stunning. It will look like they are floating
in a galaxy.
RM: Cherry, what kind of preparation have you been doing for this
role?
CJ: I love to familiarize myself with the text and go to the first table
read knowing it well. But I dont want to know this play too far in
advance because I want to be able to be alive to the experience.
Amanda is a woman who leans forward, as all great theater characters
must. They dont lean back and wait for something to happen. I knew
Southern women like her who never stopped talking. Theyd say, Oh
Cherry, Im just ever so glad that youre here today and your mother
and I were just talking the other day, and I heard about that show that
you were doing up in so and so and did you know that Bobby Joe came
back the other day and would you like a little something in that?
Would you like a little cream in that? Would you like a little sugar?
You know, all that mindless stuff. Amanda is purposeful, but theres
that engine in her you just want to hear Tom scream, SHUT UP!
JT: Shes a peacock.
CJ: She is a peacock, but shes also an engine of a woman who has
survived the twenties without a man. When the rest of the world was
prospering, her family wasnt. They were barely getting by and then
they were laid low by The Depression. To me, the most profoundly
moving of all Amandas lines is when she says to Tom, You are my
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right hand bower. She means that, because it has been virtually
impossible for this Southern woman living in the godforsaken North in
a world that has just changed forever for the dire worse. All the beauty
is gone. It is gray and it is bleak. So now Im trying to figure out what
that engine in her is.

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