The Glass Menagerie
“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the
pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn bark time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis. . . .This is the social background of the play.
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 of the play, and also a character in it. The other characters are my mother Amanda, my sister Laura and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scenes. He is the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from. But since I have a poet’s weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for. There is a fifth character in the play who doesn’t appear except in this larger-than life-size photograph over the mantel. This is our father who left us a long time ago. He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town. . . .The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words -‘Hello – Good-bye!’ and no address. I think the rest of the play will explain itself ….”
This, along with Streetcar Named Desire, is the Tennessee Williams plays I’ve read the most often, and even one that I directed a scene from in a theater class in college. We had to use the classroom to do that, and I ended up using an adjustable halogen lamp to dim the lights, as the stage directions call for in the opening moments. I also think this is the play that is most connected to the life of Tennessee Williams, at least in as much as he is a Tom figure here. Tom is the younger brother of Laura, a woman in her 20s who is unmarried and disabled from pleurosis, a lung disorder that has also affected her walking. But more so, she’s disabled from the death of her father and the interminable meddling for her mother. Tom is also afflicted with these latter issues. Her mother is still living in her past, as a debutante who got a lot of attention, but as she’s living in an apartment in St Louis with her two adult children, the ghost of a dead husband, and getting by with her son’s wages and her part time work re-upping magazine subscriptions by mail, the dreamy memories are treated her as pathetic. The plays centers around two events primarily, three really. One, Laura has recently been found out as having dropped her typing classes, meaning that not only does she not have a job, she’s no longer working toward any hirable skills. Two, one of Tom’s friends from work is coming over for dinner, and he doesn’t realize it’s to meet Laura; we also find out that Laura knew him in high school and had a crush on him. His visit is also sad because while he and Laura get along very well, it’s revealed late that he’s already engaged. And three, Tom desperately wants to leave, to go anywhere. The play has a lot of purposeful artifice to it with lighting and music, based on Tom’s narration as being a play about memory. And well, like plenty of other Williams plays, there’s plenty of great dialog and hamfisted symbolism.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The title of this play refers to our central character, or at least one of them, describing herself as a cat on a hot tin roof, because her husband won’t sleep with her. Why won’t he? Well, he’s a drunk mainly, but why is he a drunk? Well, he’s a Southern man in a Southern family married in a Southern marriage to a woman he doesn’t love, and mainly because of all these things and he’s Queer. He might not fully know it, but the play does, and his father is starting to suspect it. The circumstances here is that the patriarch of the family, the one the son is trying to drink his way into ignoring has just come back from the doctor and he believes he’s received a clean bill of health. In fact his health is so bad, that his doctors basically tried to bypass him altogether to get his family ready to deal with his impending death.
So this leaves things in a bad place because his would be heir doesn’t really want to deal with any of this, and only wants to drink. When his mother asks him why he drinks, his answer? The lies. What lies? The lies about everything, life, everything. Why doesn’t he kill himself? He likes to drink.
So what makes this a Tennessee Williams play and not a Eugene O’Neill play? The black humor that circulates the ridiculousness of the situation. However bad it is, there’s always a joke to be made.
Night of the Iguana
Our lead character here is a defrocked minister who is giving tours to Mexico to Texans. All seems all right except that in American literature the past can never just be past, and his past starts coming back to haunt him. What’s that past? He was defrocked for having “an affair” with an underage youth minister (a 16 year old girl) and people are here to remind him of this. I think the movie version turns this into a regular sex scandal, but the play emphasizes the underage part of it, to make it very clear of the exploitation. I know that Tennessee Williams spends a lot of his plays in places like Mexico, but this one is interesting to me in how much it feels very much less like a Tennessee Williams play and more like a Graham Greene novel.
The Rose Tattoo
Our protagonist here is Serafina, an Italian immigrant living on the gulf coast, who is asked to make a silk shirt one day for a friend to give to her lover, her friend has also gotten a rose tattoo to celebrate this love. Incidentally later on this day Serafina’s husband (with whose child she is currently pregnant with) is killed in a police chase during a smuggling run. Serafina falls into a fit of despair and loses her baby, and the play commences a few years later. In the latter parts of the play Serafina’s teen daughter begins getting courted by a visiting sailor, a little older, but still fairly young, and Serafina is rightfully worried that if he and her daughter get together he will disappear the moment the daughter gets pregnant. Whether this is because he will jump ship, so to speak or die, or some combination. Around the same time, Serafina herself starts getting some attention from a new man in town, a little younger than her, but seemingly very interested in her. He’s a bit of a ne’er-do-well, but obviously she likes those. He’s probably not a safe bet, but he could be fun, and his shiftlessness might give her a bit of control as well. And well, that rose tattoo from the title still needs to make its exact presence known here too, as you would guess, and boy does it.
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real
This is an early version of a more famous play from another part of Tennessee Williams’s career. The longer version is just called Camino Real, but here, we spend time with a man tooling around a Mexican town walking down the central street on a night out having little conversations with the people he meets there. There’s some fetishizing Mexico here with Day of the Dead imagery and tourism, but there’s also some little strange moments of connections. The play has an air of symbolism running rampant as every little thing is clearly a little thing.
