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yracuse Stage is committed to providing students with rich theatre experiences that explore and examine what it is to be human. Research shows that children who participate in or are exposed to the arts show higher academic achievement, stronger self-esteem, and improved ability to plan and work toward a future goal. Many students in our community have their first taste of live theatre through Syracuse Stage’s outreach programs. Last season more than 30,000 students from across New York State attended or participated in the Bank of America Children’s Tour, artsEmerging, the Young Playwrights Festival, and our Student Matinee Program. We gratefully acknowledge the corporations and foundations who support our commitment to in-depth arts education for our community. Children’s Tour Naming Sponsor
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Lori Pasqualino as “Annabel” in the 2010 Bank of America Children’s Tour: Annabel Drudge... and the Second Day of School. Photo by Michael Davis
Content collection and layout design by Kate Laissle; Portions written by Len Fonte
Timothy Bond
Producing Artistic Director
Syracuse Stage and SU Drama
4.) Production Information
13.) St. Louis in the Thirties
820 E Genesee Street Syracuse, NY 13210
5.) Introduction
14.) Tennessee Williams on The Glass Menagerie
www.SyracuseStage.org
6.) Teaching Theatre
Director of Educational Outreach
8.) Letter from the Director
Lauren Unbekant (315) 443-1150
9.) About the Playwright
Manager of Educational Outreach
11.) About the Play
Kate Laissle (315) 442-7755
11) Synopsis
Group Sales & Student Matinees
11.) Characters
Tracey White (315) 443-9844
12.) A Memory Play
15.) Major Plays 16.) A Girl in the Glass: The Imagery of The Glass Menagerie 17.) Questions for Discussion & Essays 18.) Activities & Video Resources 18.) Sources and Resurces
Box Office
(315) 443-3275
Syracuse Stage is a global village square where renowned artists and audiences of all ages gather to celebrate our cultural richness, witness the many truths of our common humanity, and explore the transformative power of live theatre. Celebrating our 41st season as the professional theatre in residence at Syracuse University, we create innovative, adventurous, and entertaining productions of new plays, classics and musicals, and offer interactive education and outreach programs to Central New York.
EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH AT SYRACUSE STAGE The Bank of America CHILDREN’S TOUR brings high-energy, interactive, and culturally diverse performances to elementary school audiences. ArtsEMERGING takes students on an in-depth exploration of one mainstage season production using a multi-cultural, multi-arts lens. The YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL challenges students to submit original ten-minute plays for a chance to see their work performed at Syracuse Stage. The STUDENT MATINEE SERIES provides student with the opportunity for a rich theatrical experience as part of our audience.
presents
by
Tennessee Williams DirecteD by
Timothy Bond scenic Designer
costume Designer
Lighting Designer
composer
William Bloodgood
Jessica Ford
Dawn Chiang
Michael Keck
proDuction D r a m at u r g
s ta g e m a n a g e r
casting
Kyle Bass
Stuart Plymesser*
Harriet Bass
Timothy Bond
Jeffrey Woodward
Producing Artistic Director
Managing Director
SyracuSe Stage dedicateS the 2013 – 2014 SeaSon to arthur Storch, 1925 – 2013: founding artistic director of Syracuse Stage and chair of Syracuse University Department of Drama 1974 – 1992. meDia sponsor
season sponsor
The Glass Menagerie is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. The video and/or audio recording of this performance by any means whatsoever are strictly prohibited. April 2 - April 27, 2014
4.)
introduction
Welcome!
As you take your students on the exciting journey into the world of live theatre we hope that you’ll take a moment to help prepare them to make the most of their experience. Unlike movies or television, live theatre offers the thrill of unpredictability. With the actors present on stage, the audience response becomes an integral part of the performance and the overall experience: the more involved and attentive the audience, the better the show. Please remind your students that they play an important part in the success of the performance!
A few reminders... BE PROMPT
Give your students plenty of time to arrive, find their seats, and get situated. Have them visit the restrooms before the show begins!
AUDIENCE
ETIQUETTE
RESPECT OTHERS
Please remind your students that their behavior and responses affect the quality of the performance and the enjoyment of the production for the entire audience. Live theatre means the actors and the audience are in the same room, and just as the audience can see and hear the performers, the performers can see and hear the audience. Please ask your students to avoid disturbing those around them. Please no talking or unnecessary or disruptive movement during the performance. Also, please remind students that cellphones should be switched completely off. No texting or tweeting, please. When students give their full attention to the action on the stage, they will be rewarded with the best performance possible.
GOOD NOISE, BAD NOISE
Instead of instructing students to remain totally silent, please discuss the difference between appropriate responses (laughter, applause, participation when requested) and inappropriate noise (talking, cell phones, etc).
STAY WITH US
Please do not leave or allow students to leave during the performance except in absolute emergencies. Again, reminding them to use the restrooms before the performance will help eliminate unnecessary disruption.
5.)
teaching theatre 6.)
Most (but not all) plays begin with a script — a story to be told and a blueprint of how to tell it. In his famous treatise, The Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle outlined six
ELEMENTS OF DRAMA that playwrights are mindful of to this day:
Plot What is the story line? What happened before the play started? What does each character want? What do they do to achieve their goals? What do they stand to gain/lose?
Theme What ideas are wrestled with in the play? What questions does the play pose? Does it present an opinion?
Character
Who are the people in the story? What are their relationships? Why do they do what they do? How does age/status/etc. affect them?
Language
What do the characters say? How do they say it? When do they say it?
Music How do music and sound help to tell the story? Spectacle What visual elements support the play? This could include: puppets, scenery, costumes, dance, movement, and more.
Other Elements: Conflict/Resolution, Action, Improvisation, Non-verbal communication, Staging, Humor, Realism and other styles, Metaphor, Language, Tone, Pattern & Repetition, Emotion, Point of view.
ACTIVITY At its core, drama is about characters
working toward goals and overcoming obstacles. Ask students to use their bodies and voices to create characters who are: very old, very young, very strong, very weak, very tired, very energetic, very cold, very warm. Have their characters interact with others. Give them an objective to fulfill despite environmental obstacles. Later, recap by asking how these obstacles affected their characters and the pursuit of their objectives.
Any piece of theatre comprises multiple art forms. As you explore this production with your students, examine the use of: WRITING
VISUAL ART/DESIGN MUSIC/SOUND DANCE/MOVEMENT
INQUIRY
How are each of these art forms used in this production? Why are they used? How do they help to tell the story?
teaching theatre
Most plays utilize designers to create the visual world of the play through scenery, costumes, lighting, and more. These artists use
ELEMENTS OF DESIGN
to communicate information about the world within the play and its characters.
LINE can have length, width, tex-
ture, direction and curve. There are 5 basic varieties: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, curved, and zig-zag.
SHAPE
is two-dimensional and encloses space. It can be geometric (e.g. squares and circles), man-made, or free-form.
FORM is three-dimensional. It encloses space and fills space. It can be geometric (e.g. cubes and cylinders), man-made, or free-form.
COLOR
has three basic properties: HUE is the name of the color (e.g. red, blue, green), INTENSITY is the strength of the color (bright or dull), VALUE is the range of lightness to darkness.
SPACE is
defined and determined by shapes and forms. Positive space is enclosed by shapes and forms, while negative space exists around them.
TEXTURE refers to the “feel” of
an object’s surface. It can be smooth, rough, soft, etc. Textures may be ACTUAL (able to be felt) or IMPLIED (suggested visually through the artist’s technique).
APPLIED LEARNING
Have students discuss these elements BEFORE attending the performance and ask them to pay special attention to how these elements are used in the production’s design. Whether your students are observing a piece of visual art (painting, sculpture, photograph) or a piece of performance art (play, dance), allow them first to notice the basic elements, then encourage them to look deeper into why these elements are used the way they are. 7.)
8.)
Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911
in Columbus, Mississippi to Cornelius and Edwina Williams. His father was a traveling salesman who worked for a shoe company and left Williams to live the first few years of his life with his mother and older sister, Rose, at his maternal grandparents home. Early in his life, his grandfather, a Episcopal rector, moved the family to Clarksdale, Mississippi. In 1918, Cornelius Williams received a promotion from the International Shoe Company, and the Williams family moved to St. Louis. A third child, Dakin, was born in 1919. Life in the family was not easy. Cornelius was a hard-drinking,gambling man, and he and Edwina argued constantly. Cornelius seemed to resent both Rose, who was often either withdrawn or volatile, and the delicate Tom, who found respite from the family arguments in banging out stories and poems on a portable typewriter his mother had given him.
9.)
The Playwright (Cont.) Williams attended the University of Missouri, but was forced to come home after two years by his father, who was appalled by his mediocre grades. He worked as a clerk in a shoe factory until he suffered a nervous breakdown and went to live with his grandparents, who were now living in Memphis, Tennessee, to recover. When he returned to St. Louis, he attended the local Washington University, but eventually received his degree from the University of Iowa. Around this time Rose, who by now had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, underwent a disastrous lobotomy that left her institutionalized for the rest of her life. In 1938, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he was intoxicated by the architecture, the cultural mix and the artistic life. Here he also began to explore his homosexuality. He changed his name to Tennessee in honor of his grandparents. Williams also acquired a New York agent, the legendary Audrey Wood, who guided his career to its greatest success. New Orleans would become the setting for A Streetcar Named Desire, his most popular play. He received a $1000 grant from Rockefeller Foundation to continue writing, and his play Battle of Angels was staged in Boston with the hopes of going to Broadway. But the production, beset by problems, barely lasted the Boston run. Wood got the desperate playwright a six months assignment at MGM studios. While in Los Angeles, Williams labored at his own work more than studio assignments and was released without ceremony. He plunged into revisions of a new play, which would become The Glass Menagerie. The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway March 31, 1945 to universal acclaim. Two years later A Streetcar Named Desire won Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. The evocative Summer and Smoke followed in 1948. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1956 was also awarded the Pulitzer. A prolific writer from his youth, Williams was now writing a play nearly each Broadway season. Although many of his plays were adopted into popular films, he participated in the production of only four and claimed to dislike most film versions of his work. The Night of the Iguana ,1961, was his last critically noted play. While he wrote many plays after this, none achieved the critical or popular acclaim of his earlier pieces. After the death of his longtime partner, Frank Merlo, Williams turned to turned to drugs and alcohol for solace. Tennessee Williams died on February 25, 1983. While the room was full of prescription drugs, the coroner reported that he had choked on a cap from an eye dropper bottle. Tennessee Williams was seventy-two years old. 10.)
About The Play While at MGM, Williams developed a scenario called The Gentleman Caller, drawn from his own experiences living with his family in St. Louis. He offered the script to the studio, which was not interested. After he was released from his contract at MGM, Williams began work in earnest on turning The Gentleman Caller into a play. Although he hated that early experience in Hollywood, this new play would bare the marks of the cinema. Williams’ writing took on a fluid dramatic structure, writing images and scenes unfolding in a series of tableaux that would stay with an audience. On December 26, 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge was raging in Europe, the play now called The Glass Menagerie opened at the Chicago Civic Theatre in anticipation of a Broadway run. The rehearsal period had not been easy. Legendary actress Laurette Taylor, who had been coaxed out of retirement to play Amanda, was drinking heavily and barely making an attempt to learn her lines. As opening day approached, the delicate little play seemed poised for disaster. On that opening night, it all gelled. Taylor not only knew her lines, but delivered an extraordinary performance. Throughout the Chicago run, audiences were sparse, but the critical reception was rapturous. The production moved to New York where again, The Glass Menagerie was the critic’s darling. Tennessee Williams was on his way to becoming America’s most famous playwright.
Laurette Taylor
Synopsis
The Glass Menagerie is narrated by Tom Wingfield, speaking from sometime in the 1940s, who tells us that the play is a memory. He takes us back to the 1930s when he was an artistic young man living in a small apartment in St. Louis with his mother, Amanda, and fragile sister Laura. Laura’s only joy is a collection of small figurines of animals, the glass menagerie of the title. Amanda, aware that Tom is anxious to escape into adventures, badgers him into inviting someone home for dinner, a “gentleman caller,” who could be a potential beau for Laura. When she hears the visitor’s name, Laura retreats to her room and has to be coaxed out. Jim, the young man, is someone she had a crush on in high school. The visit from the Gentleman Caller will change the Wingfields’ lives.
Characters Tom Wingfield: a dreamer who wants to be writer. He works in a shoe factory to support his mother and sister. They have been abandoned by their father. Amanda Wingfield: Tom’s mother, well-meaning but maddening. Once a Southern belle, she is now brought low by a bad marriage and near poverty. Laura Wingfield: Tom’s sister. She is physically and emotionally fragile. Laura, who is painfully shy, walks with a limp. The Gentleman Caller: a confident yet ordinary young man who Tom invites to dinner. He was a high school star, but now works with Tom at the shoe warehouse.
11.)
A Memory Play 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. Tom, The Glass Menagerie In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams coined the term “memory play.” Young Tennessee Williams, like his character Tom Wingfield, worked in a shoe factory while dreaming of being a writer. He also brought home a gentleman caller for his sister Rose-- a young man named Jim O’Connor, mirroring the suitor for Laura. By all accounts, well-meaning and maddening Amanda Wingfield bore an extraordinary resemblance to William’s own mother, Edwina. However, there are several significant differences between events and characters in The Glass Menagerie and the playwright’s life. Like the Wingfields, the Williams family, marginalized by economics, lived in a cramped apartment in St.Louis. In addition to his mentally fragile sister, Rose, who serves as a template for Laura, there was also a younger brother, Dakin living at home. Unlike the Wingfields’ father, who “fell in love with long distances,” and left his impoverished family, the Williams’s father, although a distant personality, was physically present in the St. Louis apartment. Dakin recalled about the St. Louis days that “My father was home all the time, and that was one of the main problems of our family.” So, does memory lie? As Tennessee Williams says in the preface to the play, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominately in the heart.”
Edwina Williams with young Rose and Tom (Tennessee) Williams
The Glass Menagerie is not the first, nor will it be the last theatrical piece to hinge on the selective qualities of human memory. Often using a narrator whose recollections are the stuff of the drama, memory plays come in all shades and moods. Notable examples include Brian Friel’s wistful Philadelphia, Here I Come and the haunting Dancing at Lughnasa. Neil Simon’s comically autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs also fits the description as do both the screen and stage incarnations of Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story.
12.)
St. Louis in the Thirties During the time The Glass Menagerie is set, St. Louis, Missouri had a population of about 600,000 and was the fourth largest city in the U.S. Tom Wingfield, like Williams himself, worked for one of the many shoe companies that headquartered in St. Louis, which was the center of the shoe industry in the United States. Few families did not have relations working in the industry’s factories or warehouses. There was a distinct German influence in the city. The Catholic Church was also a powerful force. When Amanda learns that the Gentleman Caller’s name is O’Connor, St. Louis in the 1930’s she responds, “That means fish.” At the time, Catholics did not eat meat on Fridays. Despite the influence of immigrants, the city imposed total segregation of blacks and whites, and many families had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. The Great Depression affected the city greatly. By 1933, the city had lost half of its production faciltites, and there was 30% unemployment. African American’s suffered an 80% unemployment rate. The New Deal poured money into the area through WPA projects, including the Jewel Box, the municipal greenhouse that Laura wanders through when she should be at Rubicam’s Business College. The end of prohibition did bring some relief. St. Louis brewery Anheuser Busch, the maker of Budweiser, celebrated the end by sending a team of Clydesdales bearing beer to the White The Jewel Box as it stands today House. On the sports scene, baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, led by star pitcher, Dizzy Dean became known as “the Gashouse Gang” for the outsized personalities of its players. 13.)
Tennessee Williams on The Glass Menagerie The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes. The Glass Menagerie, stage directions The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic. The following are excerpts from letters to Donald Windham as collected in Tennessee Williams Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-65. April 22, 1943 I am out of cigarettes and very nervous so I cannot write much of a letter. I have been writing with tigerish intensity on The Gentleman Caller every day and today I felt like I was going to just blow up, so I quit. What am I doing to that quiet little play. I don’t know. December 18, 1944 (During rehearsals in Chicago) We’re having a bloody time of it here—as expected. Yesterday, Sunday evening, I thought the situation was hopeless—as [star Laurette] Taylor was ad libbing practically every speech and the show sounded like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour. We all got drunk and this a.m. Taylor was even worse. I finally lost my temper and when she made one of those little insertions I screamed over the footlights, “My God, what corn!” She screamed back I was a fool and playwrights made her sick—then she came back after lunch and suddenly began giving a real acting performance—so good that Julia and I, the sentimental element in the company, wept. So I don’t know what to think or expect.
Excerpt from an Interview with Robert Berkvist, New York Times, December 21, 1975: There is, he insists, "very little" autobiography in his plays, "except that they reflect somehow the particular psychological turmoil I was going through when I wrote them. The early ones are relatively tranquil, like 'Menagerie.'" But aren't there certain similarities between Laura, the physically and emotionally crippled daughter in "Menagerie," and Williams's mentally ill sister, Rose? "In a sense, although my sister was a much more vital person than Laura. Terribly vital. She could have become quite well by now if they hadn't performed that goddam operation on her; she would have come back up to the surface." The operation was a lobotomy. Williams broods over the past for a moment, and then smiles at a memory. "My mother panicked, you know, because she said my sister had begun using four-letter words. 'Do anything! Don't let her talk like that,' mother cried." Williams shrieks the words in hysterical falsetto. "But Rose wasn't doing that. Oh, she said things that four- letter words say, but she put them in elegant language.” 14.)
Willams’ Signature
Major Plays Tennessee Williams was a prolific writer. His works include many short plays, two volumes of poetry, two novels and a memoir. He often revised his work and was continually reworking plays that had already been produced with success.
Battle of Angels (1940) The Glass Menagerie (1944) A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) Summer and Smoke (1948) The Rose Tattoo (1951) Camino Real (1953) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) Orpheus Descending (1957 a re-working of Battle of Angels) Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) Period of Adjustment (1960) Night of the Iguana (1961) The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1962, rewriting of Summer and Smoke) The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) The Mutilated (1965) The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968, aka Kingdom of Earth) In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) Small Craft Warning (1972) The Two Character Play (1973) Out Cry (1973, rewriting of The Two-Character Play) The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975) This Is (An Entertainment) (1976) Vieux Carrè (1977) A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur (1979) Clothes For a Summer Hotel (1980) The Notebooks of Trigorin (1980) Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) A House Not Meant to Stand (1982) In Masks Outrageous and Austere(1983)
15.)
A Girl in Glass: The Imagery of The Glass Menagerie
In the published script of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams describes the set which includes a series of projections appearing on an upstage screen to illuminate major thematic strands. Photographic images, words, or phrases would flash on that screen to interrupt the realism of a moment and place us back in the theatre of images. Some merely illustrated the dialogue: a bouquet of blue roses, Amanda as a girl greeting callers, a swarm of typewriters, etc. Others were exclamations, comments, or parallel poetic references. Although these onscreen images proved impractical and distracting—they weren’t even used in the first production—they mirror Williams’s use of verbal and pictorial imagery and provide a key to the verbal and visual imagery that is so striking in his later work. The title of his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which precedes The Glass Menagerie and tells the same story, provides a preview of Williams’ method. Laura, like her tiny figurines, is made of glass and can shatter. In the stage directions for the play, when dressed for the Gentleman Caller’s visit, she is “like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.” She is also the delicate unicorn, who, when Jim breaks off the horn, is for a transcendent moment, “Just like all the other horses.” Laura’s identification with impossible creatures is clearly seen in her escapes from the terrors of business college. She goes to the zoo to commune with living incarnations of her glass pets, or to the Jewel Box, the glass-faced municipal greenhouse, to see exotic flowers like herself; she is the impossible and delicate bouquet of blue roses that Jim associates with her. Williams also trades in irony. Things often turn upside down for the Wingfields. Tom’s first lines announce “…I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” In other words, he is an artist. But Amanda turns the artist’s role upside down after the departure of the Gentleman Caller, when she barks at Tom, “You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!” Tom also escapes into the intoxication of the movies, but finally finds them an occasion to stop moving. “I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move!” he proclaims to Jim. The setting for The Glass Menagerie appears realistic, but as Williams says in the opening stage directions, “It is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poet license….The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.” The apartment is stripped of all but the utilitarian. Tradition is turned upside down. The heaven of the Paradise Dance Hall is in the alley below; the hell—or at least limbo—of the Wingfield apartment hangs above it. The fire escape offers a chance to run away, but it also displays the iron bars of a prison.
16.)
Questions for discussion Amanda says “…as soon as Laura has got someone to take care of her, married, a home of her own, independent—why then you’ll be free to go wherever you please, on land, on sea, whichever way the wind blows you! But until that time you’ve got to look out for your sister.” Is this a sentiment that still makes sense today? Does Tom have a responsibility to Laura? Laura has attempted business school, and Amanda is desperate to have her married. Were those the only choices available at the time? Have women’s roles changed since the time in which the play was written? Tom, Amanda, and Laura all spend a lot of time onstage. Who is the protagonist of The Glass Menagerie? Whose story is it? Laura collects small glass animals, her “glass menagerie.” What do people’s collections say about them? How do they reflect their interests, hopes, and dreams? Do you have a collection? Each of the three Wingfields lives with fantasy. What are those fantasies, and how do they affect their lives and their prospects for the future? Many works of modern literature use an unreliable narrator, that is, a narrator whose retelling the story may not be true. Sometimes that narrator is lying, but most of the time he or she is only seeing part of the picture and relays this faulty vision to us. How reliable is Tom as narrator? How does The Glass Menagerie comment on the American Dream? What is the function of the Gentleman Caller? Does he change the lives of the Wingfields? How is humor used in The Glass Menagerie? Amanda, Tom, and Laura are shown in extreme circumstances and sometimes in an unflattering light. What are some admirable qualities of each? What are some flaws they display?
Essays Does memory always tell the truth? Consider how we might either embellish or bury memories. Is the re-telling of a memory as Tom does in The Glass Menagerie therapeutic? Can it be destructive? Tom says, “There is fifth character in this play.” Discuss how the father is a character in The Glass Menagerie. How does he affect the family dynamics? Each of their expectations? Consider the original stage directions and projections in your answer. Consider the theme of abandonment as it is presented in The Glass Menagerie.
17.)
Activities
• Bring in examples of a collection of your own and explain how it reflects who you are. • The Glass Menagerie uses a series of monologues, long speeches by a character, as one of its major devices. Sometimes Tom speaks directly to the audience. Write and perform a monologue in which a character reveals something about himself or herself by describing the circumstances of his or her life. • Consider how the play would change if told from the point of view of Amanda or Laura. Write an opening monologue that would introduce their lives from one of their perspectives. • Using the play script of The Glass Menagerie, assemble a version of the projections described. Perhaps own scene can be acted using this. Discuss how the projections, which are rarely used in productions, change the play.
Video Resources
The Glass Menagerie has been filmed three times. The first version, produced in 1950, stars stage legend Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda in her only film appearance. Although Williams was involved in the adaptation, the final result bears little resemblance to the play. A television version starring Katherine Hepburn and Sam Waterston from 1973 fares somewhat better, although Hepburn’s personality does tend to overpower the text. A third version, starring JoAnn Woodward and John Malkovitch was directed by Paul Newman in 1987. • The highly altered first film version of The Glass Menagerie ends on a positive note that negates the entire play. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku_zdAxZUMs • Katherine Hepburn and Sam Waterston http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SumagAF4nU8 • The opening of the 1987 version with John Malkovitch as Tom and JoAnn Woodward as Amanda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksBkKtqxlqc • An interview with Williams scholar Robert Bray http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHjHmYNhuBw • A look at the last sad days of Tennessee Williams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CFdrPD7Bsg
Sources and Resources
King, Thomas L. “Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie,” Modern Critical Views Tennessee Williams, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers, The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1985. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions, 1999. Windham, Donald, ed. Tennessee Williams Letters to Donald Windham. New York: Penguin Books, 1976, 1977 http://www.biography.com/people/tennessee-williams-9532952?page=2 http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer.htm http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/tennessee-williams http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07122007-190055/unrestricted/Barnard_dis.pdf http://blogs.utexas.edu/culturalcompass/2011/05/19/q-and-a-playwright-tony-kushner-speaks-about-influenceof-tennessee-williams/ http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/menagerie/facts.html http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators/lessons/grade-9-12/Memory_Play.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Williams http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-interview75.html http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/tennessees-finest-teaching-the-glass-menagerie/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_St._Louis http://www.stl250.org/crash-course-depression-war.aspx 18.)