The Glass

Menagerie
(1944)
Tennessee Williams
PLASTIC
THEATRE
• opposed to ''the
exhausted theatre of
realistic conventions‚‘
• stage directions:
• light, music, set
design
• atmosphere
What is the aim?
"Everyone should know nowadays
the unimportance of the
photographic in art: the truth, life,
or reality is an organic thing which
the poetic imagination can
represent or suggest, in essence,
only through transformation,
through changing into other forms
than those which were merely
present in appearance."
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.
CHARACTERS

• Tom • Laura
• Amanda • Jim
SETTING

"The apartment faces an

alley and is entered by a
fire escape, a structure
whose name is a touch
of accidental poetic
truth, for all of these
huge buildings are
always burning with the
slow and implacable fires
of human desperation."
PLOT
THEMES
• DREAMS AND REALITY
• ESCAPE
• DISILLUSIONMENT
• ABANDONMENT
• MEMORY
• AND OTHERS…
SYMBOLS