The Glass Menagerie
Ratings93
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings93
Average rating3.8
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. As Williams's first popular success, it 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, Menagaerie 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 the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 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."
(back cover)
Reviews with the most likes.
I think I can positively say that this is my favorite Tennessee Williams play! Touching, sweet, and relates to anyone whose dreams are being pushed aside in order to help the family survive. Every family will always have the dreamer, the person who lives in their memory and the person whose personality traps them from branching out and doing what they want to do. Tom, Amanda and Laura all created an atmosphere that anyone would want to step into, only if it is for a while and take in their story about what life truly is under all that false hope. In my current yearning for reading plays, this has to be one of my favorites, alongside DOUBT and FENCES (and more).
I was curious to learn more about Tennessee Williams after (finally) seeing A Streetcar Named Desire. There was something in this movie that talked to me and I wanted to know more, so I started with this one, The Glass Menagerie, that made him famous.
Being a theater piece, it's much shorter than I expected, but also very easy to read. I found a lot of the relationships I encountered in life in the relationship depicted in this piece between Laura and her mother, the same fears, expectations and all the wrong ways to handle it. Tom being the narrator was somewhat more distant and a harder character to understand.
I'm not sure it will leave me a lasting memory, but I must say I really want to see this one in real life (especially given the setting the author imagined for the stage).
"I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
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