The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tennessee WilliamsIntroduction: Robert Bray
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-06-17
ISBN: 0811214044
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780811214049
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Glass Menagerie
Book Review: An American Classic That Has Stood the Test of Time!
Summary: 5 Stars
There is some controversy surrounding "The Glass Menagerie," folks, if only that certain people who do not understand the theater or literature in general find fault with this play. Don't believe them. This play has stood the test of time for over half a century and has earned a special place in American Literature. "The Glass Menagerie" won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945 for the best new drama in the country, and launched the brilliant career of Tennessee Williams. Virtually every important drama critic and major playwright in the last 50 years has acknowledged "The Glass Menagerie" as one of the hallmark plays of the 20th Century, including Arthur Miller, David Mamet, George Bernard Shaw, Lanford Wilson, Edward Albee, and dozens of others. Why? Simply, because it's a fantastic play.
"The Glass Menagerie" is a simple story of three people, the Wingfield family, trapped in their own illusions. Set in St. Louis, the story is narrated by Tom (a transparent stand-in for Tennessee Williams, whose given name was Tom), his sister Laura, and their strong-willed mother Amanda. It has been suggested by some the Laura is not an interesting character because she is "shy" and "lazy" and "self-absorbed." However, anyone with half a heart and several ounces of brain matter will see that she is much more than that--a lost soul on the verge of a breakdown, unequipped to handle the vicissitudes of her crumbling reality. In this most autobiographical of Williams' plays, Laura is the mirror image of his sister Rose, who was so severely disturbed as a young woman that she received one of the first lobotomies in America, and spent the rest of her life institutionalized, for which her brother paid and to which he made frequent pilgrimages until his death.
Tennessee Williams has always been one of the great writers of female roles, with Amanda Wingfield and Blanche Dubois leading the pack. As Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books: "Williams' women and girls manage to be both memorably, even frighteningly, extreme and sympathetic at the same time. Even when they do repellent things, these characters successfully gain our sympathy by their ability to articulate, or in some way to represent, everything that has been left out of the worldview of the men with whom they come into conflict on stage: delicacy of feeling, spirituality, nostalgia, fantasy, and art." So is it with Laura, and so too, to a greater degree, with Amanda, one of the universally acknowledged great female roles in the American Theater. Is she, to use Mr. Mendelsohn's term, an "extreme" character? Without a doubt.
And yet we must ask ourselves: What is drama other than passion and dramatic outbursts? Get rid of that and you get rid of--in Shakespeare's case alone--Falstaff, Beatrice and Benedict, Hotspur, Laertes, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Lady Macbeth, The Three Weird Sisters, Titania, Puck, the Rude Mechanicals, and most of the rest of the canon. Plus, in other plays-Death of a Salesman, Curse of the Starving Class, The Misanthrope, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and A Zoo Story, A Raisin in the Sun, Medea, Oedipus, The Odd Couple, The Importance of Being Earnest, Dr. Faustus, and Cyrano de Bergerac, to name just a few. Yes, Amanda Wingfield is extreme; and that is exactly what rivets our eyes to her throughout this play.
But isn't extremity what performance is all about? For example, some people like the singing of Celine Dion. I'm serious! Some people put her right up there with Shania Twain. I've always thought her singing had all the subtlety of a freight train, with two volume settings--loud and louder. She's womankind's answer to Michael Bolton. But some people like that kind of singing. Which begs a question. Is Amanda Wingfield any more hysterical than Celine Dion? I think not. At least we don't see the veins popping out on her neck.
Some have mentioned that "The Glass Menagerie" cannot be considered a classic because Williams was a drunk and a drug addict. No, I'm not making this up--even at this late date, in this new millennium, there are poorly-read Neanderthal's unaware of addiction science who equate substance abuse with morality. Some literary critics (the lesser ones) go so far as to read the author's biography first, looking for ways to dismiss the book under consideration before even reading it. Now, I personally don't use drugs, and I am not promoting their use here, but I was taught in college to evaluate the text, not the author. There is no question that Williams had problems with "substances"; he would probably be the first to admit it. And yet, does this negate his genius? If we go that route, we might as well get rid of all of them--Coleridge, Poe, Plath, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Steinbeck, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, Ginsberg, Chaucer, Cervantes, Marlowe (who was killed in a bar), Blake, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Conrad, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and probably Shakespeare too. In music, let's jettison The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, John Cage, Tom Waits, John Prine, John Hiatt, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, David Bowie, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Eric Clapton, and virtually every way major musical act of the twentieth century. In art, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Rodin, Salvador Dali, Picasso and hundreds of others would go into the trash can. See, it never ends.
You know, when I was in college studying this play, I had an interesting debate with one of my classmates. His name was Baron; he was Hungarian, a good-looking but ignorant man. He was a theater major who worshipped Laurence Olivier, and he pointed out that Olivier hated Tennessee Williams' work, to the point where he insisted his wife, Vivien Leigh, not take the role of Blanche Dubois that was offered to her for the movie version of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Now, this gave me pause, because Sir Lord Olivier was without question one of the greatest actors we have ever known. But does that make him a good judge of writing plays? No. He's an actor. He acts. As with some other supposed "experts"--including Baron--he'd never written a play. Plus, Olivier was British, really British, with an expertise in performing Shakespeare. He understood the milieu Tennessee Williams was working in--the decaying post-Cival War South--about as well as a turtle knows backgammon. More importantly, though, Baron didn't finish his story. He stopped short. So I finished it for him. Yes, Olivier repeatedly dissuaded his wife from doing the film version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" I told him, but Vivien Leigh ignored his advice, took the part, and turned in one of the great performances in the history of American cinema, for which she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. (Incidentally, the original stage production of Streetcar won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.) So I said to my theater major friend, "Baron, I believe Shakespeare would call this "hoisted by your own petard."
"The Glass Menagerie" is one of the supreme achievements in world drama. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. In fact, don't even take my word for it. Purchase a DVD copy of the 1973 PBS production starring Katherine Hepburn as Amanda Wingfield--also available for sale here at Amazon.com--or rent it at Blockbuster, or check it out from your local library, and let the play speak for itself. It's a thrilling, funny, passionate, and deeply moving experience. If scene seven, the final scene where Laura meets Jim, doesn't break your heart, I suggest you call a cardiologist to check your pulse. This is a terrific, world-class play that should be read and/or seen by anyone interested in great theater and the struggles of other human beings trying to find meaning in their lives.
As I said at the beginning, "The Glass Menagerie" has stood the test of time. You won't regret reading it. Unless you'd rather listen to Celine Dion.
Summary of The Glass Menagerie
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.Entertainment Books
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