Staging implications which make 'The Glass Menagerie'.

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In this essay I will be looking at the staging implications which make ‘The Glass Menagerie’. A playwright called Tennessee Williams in 1945 wrote this play. He was born in 1911 and grew up as an American playwright whose dramas portrayed loneliness and the isolation of life. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ is a story about the narrator, Tom, who recreates the memories the memories of his sister Laura and his mother Amanda. Laura, often in the story, escapes into a fantasy world of old phonograph records and the glass animals in her ‘menagerie’. Amanda’s harsh practicality is balanced by romanticised memories of her Southern girlhood. Tom dreams of adventure and finally runs away from his family to join the merchant marines.

 

 According to Tom, ‘The Glass Menagerie’ is a memory play the whole story is shaped and based on what he remembers from his past. The play’s lack of realism (no props) and its frequent use of music are all due to its origins in memory. The scene at the dinner table for example where they are using their imagination for the cutlery and food are products of the imagination that must convince their audience that they are something else by being realistic. The narrator, Tom, is not the only character haunted by his memories. Amanda too lives in constant pursuit of her old youth, and old records from her childhood are almost as important to Laura as her glass animals. For the Wingfield family, memory is a force that prevents them from finding happiness in the present or the offerings of the future.

The reference to Guernica and the disturbance in Spain, the depression in America, establishes a tense atmosphere as the play's background. The Americans of the thirties lived in relative peace, but for the 1944-5 audience of the play's first production, the thirties would have been seen as the calm before the storm of World War II.

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 Tom is a character who exists outside (being the narrator) and inside the play's action at the same time. What this means is The narrator breaks the ideal "fourth wall" of the drama by addressing the audience directly. Tom also tells us that he is going to give the audience truth disguised as illusion, making the audience conscious of the deceptive quality of theatre. 

 When you see him standing on the fire escape close to the Wingfield apartment, Tom is the narrator. He is outside the action. He can be funny, as when he describes his runaway father as ...

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