Tennessee Williams was born in
Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. The name
given to him at birth was Thomas Lanier Williams III. He did not
acquire the nickname Tennessee until college, when classmates began
calling him that in honor of his Southern accent and his father’s home
state. The Williams family had produced several illustrious politicians
in the state of Tennessee, but Williams’s grandfather had squandered
the family fortune. Williams’s father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling
salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a
Mississippi clergyman’s daughter and prone to hysterical attacks.
Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose,
and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi.
After that, the family moved to St. Louis. Once there, the family’s
situation deteriorated. C.C.’s drinking increased, the family moved
sixteen times in ten years, and the young Williams, always shy and
fragile, was ostracized and taunted at school. During these years,
he and Rose became extremely close. Rose, the model for Laura in The
Glass Menagerie, suffered from mental illness later in
life and eventually underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive
brain surgery), an event that was extremely upsetting for Williams.
An average student and social outcast in high school,
Williams turned to the movies and writing for solace. At sixteen,
Williams won five dollars in a national competition for his answer
to the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?”; his answer was
published in Smart Set magazine. The next year,
he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird Tales, and
the year after that he entered the University of Missouri as a journalism
major. While there, he wrote his first plays. Before Williams could
receive his degree, however, his father, outraged because Williams
had failed a required ROTC program course,
forced him to withdraw from school and go to work at the same shoe
company where he himself worked.
Williams worked at the shoe factory for three years,
a job that culminated in a minor nervous breakdown. After that,
he returned to college, this time at Washington University in St.
Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced
his plays The Fugitive Kind and Candles
to the Sun. Personal problems led Williams to drop out
of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While
he was in Iowa, his sister, Rose, underwent a lobotomy, which left
her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite this trauma,
Williams finally graduated in 1938. In the years
that followed, he lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and
wandering from city to city. He continued to work on drama, however,
receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New
School in New York. During the early years of World War II, Williams
worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter.
Around 1941, Williams began the
work that would become The Glass Menagerie. The
play evolved from a short story entitled “Portrait of a Girl in
Glass,” which focused more completely on Laura than the play does.
In December of 1944, The Glass Menagerie was staged
in Chicago, with the collaboration of a number of well-known theatrical
figures. When the play first opened, the audience was sparse, but
the Chicago critics raved about it, and eventually it was playing
to full houses. In March of 1945, the play
moved to Broadway, where it won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award. This highly personal, explicitly autobiographical play earned
Williams fame, fortune, and critical respect, and it marked the
beginning of a successful run that would last for another ten years.
Two years after The Glass Menagerie, Williams won another
Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar
Named Desire. Williams won the same two prizes again in 1955,
for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The impact of success on Williams’s life was colossal
and, in his estimation, far from positive. In an essay entitled
“The Catastrophe of Success,” he outlines, with both light humor
and a heavy sense of loss, the dangers that fame poses for an artist.
For years after he became a household name, Williams continued to
mine his own experiences to create pathos-laden works. Alcoholism,
depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of purpose, and
insanity were all part of Williams’s world. Since the early 1940s,
he had been a known homosexual, and his experiences in an era and
culture unfriendly to homosexuality certainly affected his work.
After 1955, Williams began using drugs, and
he would later refer to the 1960s as his
“stoned age.” He suffered a period of intense depression after the
death of his longtime partner in 1961 and,
six years later, entered a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis. He
continued to write nonetheless, though most critics agree that the
quality of his work diminished in his later life. His life’s work
adds up to twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over
seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry,
and a memoir; five of his plays were also made into movies. Williams
died from choking in a drug-related incident in 1983.
The Glass Menagerie in Performance
When The Glass Menagerie was first produced
in Chicago in 1944, Tennessee Williams was
an obscure, struggling playwright. He had recently quit a job in
Los Angeles writing screenplays for MGM,
an experience he had not considered positive. An adaptation he had been
assigned to do for the famous actress Lana Turner was rejected as
unsuitable for her; Williams described Turner in his Memoirs as unable
to “act her way out of her form-fitting cashmere.”
Thanks to the efforts of Williams’s faithful agent, Audrey
Wood, The Glass Menagerie was picked up by Eddie
Dowling, an actor, director, and producer. Dowling grabbed the role
of Tom for himself and persuaded Laurette Taylor to take on the
role of Amanda. Taylor, who had become a darling of the American
stage for her performance as the title character in Peg
o’ My Heart in 1912, had been living
in semi-reclusion since the death of her husband in 1928. Bringing
her into The Glass Menagerie was both a great coup
and a substantial gamble. A shadowy Chicago entrepreneur whose main business
was running seedy hotels financed the production. Legend has it
that the rehearsals for the play did not inspire optimism; for one
thing, Taylor seemed in constant danger of forgetting her lines.
Opening night was December 26, 1944.
Not long before the curtain rose, the cast and crew panicked when
they could not find Ms. Taylor. She was quickly discovered, however,
in the bathroom, attempting to put on a bathrobe that she was to
wear later in the play. Taylor, along with the other cast members,
went on to give a magnificent performance. The next day, newspaper
critics raved about the play and its cast. Oddly, though, attendance
was sparse for the remainder of the first week. The financial backer
was on the verge of closing the play, but Chicago’s theater critics
mounted an all-out campaign to save it, begging readers of their
daily columns not to miss the play. Within another couple of weeks, The
Glass Menagerie was playing to full houses.
In March of 1945, the play opened
at the Playhouse Theatre in New York. The cast was the same one
that had played in Chicago, with Julie Haydon as Laura and Anthony
Ross as Jim. The play’s reception in New York was every bit as strong
as in Chicago. It ran for 561 performances
and was named best American play of the year by the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle.
Laurette Taylor’s performance as Amanda went on to become the
stuff of myth. When The Glass Menagerie was revived
on Broadway in 1956, Helen Hayes’s interpretation
of the role was judged as acceptable but lacking Taylor’s magic.
Maureen Stapleton met the same fate playing Amanda on Broadway in 1965.
In 1973, the American Broadcasting Corporation
staged The Glass Menagerie for television, with
Katherine Hepburn as Amanda. Hepburn’s performance was praised to
the skies, as was the production as a whole, with Sam Waterston
as Tom, Joanna Miles as Laura, and Michael Moriarty as Jim (Moriarty’s
performance was said to mark a watershed in the interpretation of
Jim’s character).
The success of the ABC production
points to an important aspect of the play: the cinematic quality
of its staging. Its use of music to enhance atmosphere and drama
is reminiscent of film technique, and its use of lighting to emphasize
a character’s reaction or to show his or her face in a new light
resembles the way in which movies use close-up shots to create the
same effects. Even the words that appear on the screen have something
in common with the titles of silent films. Nonetheless, the two
film versions of the play were relatively lackluster. A 1950 film
version, directed by Irving Rapper and starring Gertrude Lawrence
as Amanda, manufactured a happier ending for the story; critics
and Williams himself hated it. In 1987, Paul Newman
directed a talented cast (John Malkovich as Tom, Joanne Woodward
as Amanda, Karen Allen as Laura) in another film version, which
met with reviews that ranged from lukewarm to hostile.
Almost all performances of The Glass Menagerie have
followed the Acting Edition of the play, created to reflect the
dialogue and staging of the first production. The Acting Edition
varies a fair bit from the Reading Edition, which is the version
that is anthologized in collections of Williams’s works and the
version he preferred to hand down to posterity. The Acting Edition
calls for more realistic lighting and over 1,000 minor
changes in the dialogue. Its most significant difference from the
Reading Edition, however, is its elimination of the screen on which
words and images are periodically projected. Eddie Dowling, the
director of the first production, found the screen device awkward,
and subsequent directors have largely concurred, calling it pretentious
and condescending, choosing to stage the play without it. In general,
staged productions of the play tend to downplay its expressionist,
symbolic, and blatantly nonrealistic elements, opting instead for
a more realistic, natural interpretation of Williams’s dialogue.
One of the few productions to follow the Reading Edition, leaving
the screen intact, was directed by the theater critic Geoffrey Borny
in Australia.
