The Irrelevant Masterpiece: The lessons of the enduring success of The Glass Menagerie
Terry Teachout
Commentary. 129.6 (June 2010): p59. From Literature Resource Center.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Jewish Committee
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Full Text: Of the 10 plays most frequently produced by professional American theater companies in the past decade, only one
(not counting the works of Shakespeare) was written prior to 1990. What was it? Not Arthur Miller's Death of a
Salesman , not Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night , not even Thornton Wilder's perennially popular Our
Town . No, the prize goes to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie , which was first performed in 1944 and
has received 23 professional productions in this country since the turn of the 21st century.
This ubiquity may come as a surprise to those who take for granted that Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the
better play. In 1998, London's Royal National Theatre invited a group of critics and theater professionals to list 10
English­language plays written in the 20th century that they regarded as "significant": Streetcar was the third most
frequently cited (after Death of a Salesman and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the No. 1 pick). The Glass
Menagerie , by contrast, was ranked 25th. Yet of the two Williams plays, it is The Glass Menagerie that continues to
consistently command the attention of American performers and audiences.
Indeed, the more one considers the matter, the more puzzling is its relative lack of critical status. For one thing, an
entire dramatic genre, the "memory play" has been named after the phrase used by Tom Wingfield, the narrator of
The Glass Menagerie , to describe the harrowing tale of three lost souls who long to change their pinched, cramped
lives but have been drained bone­dry by the inexorable loss of hope. That alone marks it as a more "significant"
theatrical achievement than Streetcar .
Moreover, The Glass Menagerie has turned out to be a hardier theatrical plant than its reputation for being "lyrical"
and "poetic" (the two adjectives most often used to describe the play) would suggest.
A joltingly unsentimental production directed by Gordon Edelstein that opened at New York's Roundabout Theatre in
March flew in the face of received ideas about how to stage The Glass Menagerie , yet it was every bit as effective
as more traditional stagings.
Part of the appeal of The Glass Menagerie to theater companies has to do with its relative simplicity. It requires only
a simple set and a cast of four, ever­relevant considerations that have grown even more important now that most
regional theater companies are strapped for funds. Far more important, though, is the universality of its three
principal characters­­all of whom were drawn directly from Williams's life.
Born in Mississippi in 1911, Williams was the sickly, effeminate son of an unhappily married couple whose
schizophrenic daughter was lobotomized in 1943 and thereafter lived in nursing homes. The Williamses moved to
St. Louis in the 20s, and their life there became the raw material of The Glass Menagerie , which Dakin Williams, the
playwright's younger brother, called "a virtually literal rendering of our family life." In fact, Williams wrote his father
out of the onstage action of the play and turned his sister's mental illness into mere shyness exacerbated by a
physical handicap.
In Williams's poetically heightened version of his own story, Tom (Tennessee's actual name) is a merchant sailor and
aspiring writer. Deserted by her husband, Amanda Wingfield lives off the charity of her angry, frustrated son. Laura,
Tom's sister, finds it impossible to hold down a job or attract suitors, preferring instead to play with the "menagerie"
of fragile glass figurines she collects. Though Amanda longs to retreat into her own dreams of her genteel Southern
youth, she is unable to forget that if her son should abandon her as her wayward husband did, she will be left alone
to support herself and her unmarriageable daughter. Hence she clings to Tom with a suffocating love that, though
genuine, is as morbid­­and destructive­­as Laura's shyness.
The plot of The Glass Menagerie hinges on Tom's decision to bring home a "gentleman caller," a friend named Jim
O'Connor whom he and his mother hope will take an interest in Laura. When Jim comes to dinner, he proves to be
an affable (if ineffectual) young go­getter. Thrown off­guard by his charm, Laura sheds her fears and allows herself
to open up to him. But Jim tells her that he is engaged, and Laura, crushed by his confession, retreats into her shell,
presumably for good.
The dinner's disastrous outcome leaves Tom certain that unless he abandons Laura and Amanda and makes his
own way in the world, their neediness will devour him. Still, he knows that he will be haunted ever after by the
memory of the helpless sister he loves:
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to
leave you behind me, but I am
more faithful than I intended
to be! I reach for a cigarette, I
cross the street, I run into the
movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I
speak to the nearest stranger--anything
that can blow your
candles out!
The Glass Menagerie takes place in the mind of Tom, who recalls the events of the play and comments on them in a
first­person narration addressed directly to the audience. This device was relatively common in Hollywood movies of
the period, but very few American playwrights other than Thornton Wilder had made use of it prior to 1944.
Though Williams's decision to use a narrator was probably influenced by cinematic practice, The Glass Menagerie is
in some sense the opposite of a "staged movie," as has been demonstrated by numerous unsuccessful attempts to
adapt it for the screen, starting with the wooden Hollywood version of 1950. Film is an essentially naturalistic
medium, one that purports to show things as they are. Even the most realistic­looking stage set, by contrast, is
palpably unreal, and instead of trying to paper over that fact, Williams reveled in it. Indeed, Williams called for the
use of "magic lantern" slides that would be projected on a wall of the set, which were intended to heighten the
audience's understanding that there was something dreamlike and subjective about the events it was witnessing.
Such an approach was highly unorthodox in 1944. American theater was then dominated by "well­made" plays
whose authors and scenic designers sought to foster the illusion of reality as seen through the "fourth wall" of the
proscenium stage. But Williams, as he explained in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie , sought to break
free from these conceptual shackles and seek a higher truth: "The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire
and authentic ice­cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic
landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness."
Eventually, the magic­lantern slides were dropped from the original Broadway production. But Jo Mielziner's
innovative set, with its "translucent and transparent scenic interior walls" (as the designer described them), helped to
conjure up the anti­naturalistic atmosphere imagined by the playwright, as did the delicate incidental music of Paul
Bowles.
The Glass Menagerie ran for 563 performances and made Tennessee Williams a celebrity. Two years later, A
Streetcar Named Desire cemented his reputation as the most notable American playwright of his generation. Long
after the fact, Arthur Miller remarked that "it is usually forgotten what a revolution [Williams's] first great success
meant to the New York theater." So it is­­and so it did. Within a few years of the opening of The Glass Menagerie ,
fourth­wall naturalism had become passé in the American theater, and to this day authors throughout the world
continue to employ its storytelling techniques. But had The Glass Menagerie only served as an influence on others,
it would now be little more than a historical curiosity. Instead, it remains as vital today as it was in 1945. And there is
a reason­­one might say a significant reason­­for this.
The Glass Menagerie , unlike less skillfully wrought plays, does not insist on its own meanings. Williams takes care
not to present Tom's decision to abandon his family as either heroic or selfish. Similarly, the poetic symbols that he
introduces into the play, like the glass unicorn whose horn is accidentally broken off by Jim when Laura hands it to
him, are all sufficiently open to allow for multiple interpretations.
The same is true of the play's autobiographical aspect. Are Tom Wingfield and his creator one and the same?
Probably, but one need not think so in order to perform the role effectively. In Gordon Edelstein's production, for
instance, we actually see Tom writing The Glass Menagerie in a seedy New Orleans hotel room, and Patch Darragh,
the actor who plays him, discreetly suggests that he, like Williams, is a homosexual.
Yet an equally plausible characterization of Tom results when he is (so to speak) played straight, and the text can
support either reading. This openness of meaning was already distinctive in 1944, at a time when such authors as
Miller, Bertolt Brecht, and Clifford Odets were writing political plays whose authorial intentions were presented in a
largely unvarnished way. It has grown even more distinctive now that so many prominent playwrights and other
theater artists, including Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Tony Kushner, and Wallace Shawn, use their work to articulate
explicitly political and quasi­political points of view.
Not only does Williams steer clear of such explicitness in The Glass Menagerie , but he also contrives to hold the
play's myriad components in perfectly balanced counterpoise. The language is at once colloquial ('You can't put in a
day's work on an empty stomach") and subtly poetic ("The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were
brightly colored but torn away from the branches"). The anti­naturalistic elements are similarly offset by the play's
precisely limned setting, a rundown tenement apartment whose impoverished occupants are struggling to preserve a
semblance of shabby gentility. And though the plight of the Wingfields is tragic, it is presented with a bracing mixture
of sympathy, clear­eyed harshness, and an astringent humor that leavens the loaf of despair.
"I must have known unconsciously that I would never write that kind of tender play again" Tennessee Williams would
say of The Glass Menagerie . He was unable to recapture its fine balance between tough­minded realism and the
florid romanticism that he subsequently found increasingly difficult to control. Indeed, the gap in quality between The
Glass Menagerie and such later Williams plays as Suddenly Last Summer and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here
Anymore is so wide that it is tempting to suppose in retrospect that his first success might have been overrated as
well. But to see a revival of The Glass Menagerie is to be reminded anew that it is, indeed, as good as its reputation,
one of a handful of American plays that can stand up to direct comparison with the permanent masterpieces of
European theater.
I wonder how many of today's playwrights would be willing to make so sweeping a claim for The Glass Menagerie .
The last essay in The American Stage , the Library of America's newly published anthology of writings about the
American theater, is Tony Kushner's 2005 tribute to Arthur Miller, in which the most critically admired American
playwright of our day makes clear his own priorities as an artist: "Arthur Miller's was a great voice, one of the
principal voices, raised in opposition, calling for resistance, offering critical scrutiny and lamentation­­in other words,
he was politically progressive, as politically progressive is best defined in these dark times."
That so hectoring an essay should have been given pride of place in so prestigious a volume says much about
today's theatrical culture. So does the fact that The Glass Menagerie , that least politically "relevant" of plays, is
mentioned only in passing in the pages of The American Stage . But for those who believe that the ultimate purpose
of art is not to coddle the prejudices of true believers but to show us human behavior in all its proliferating,
irreducible complexity, Tennessee Williams's youthful masterpiece will always stand as a model of what theater at its
very best can do. Like The Seagull or Waiting for Godot ­­or Our Town ­­it is as true to life as a broken heart.
TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S chief culture critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is the
author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Teachout, Terry
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Teachout, Terry. "The Irrelevant Masterpiece: The lessons of the enduring success of The Glass Menagerie."
Commentary, June 2010, p. 59+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=asuniv&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA227631724&it=r&asid=9f0057eae822bc03be7393947997e4cb.
Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
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