The Glass Menagerie
Written by Tennessee Williams
Watched in class on December 11-15
Movie by N/A
The Glass Menagerie, is a story that exemplifies the lives of a mother, a daughter, and a son. It play in the the perspective Tom, the son; who opens the play with a monologue about life. In the beginning Tom and Amanda fight at the dinner table, Tom goes to smoke in the living room, and Amanda starts telling the story about her 17 gentlemen callers, Tom doesn't believe it’s true so he questions her about it. Laura begins to get upset, as the story goes on because she has never had a gentleman caller and doesn't believe she will. Amanda gets into another fight with Tom after a day of work and starts yelling at him for his drinking and smoking habits, along with his frequency to the “movies”. In the fight Tom breaks some of Laura’s glass menagerie, surprisingly, he doesn't continue to fight but drops down, almost tn pain, to the glass pieces on the floor, and picks them up. Tom soon leaves and comes home drunk, to which Laura helps him into bed, Tom gives Laura a scarf he got from a magician, a magic scarf. Tom later apologizes to Amanda, who immediately starts to fuss and nag him right away, mainly about Laura. Amanda had discovered that Laura had not been going to typewriter classes and been walking in the park instead. Tom and Amanda make a wish on the moon, the first time that we see them not fighting. Tom had invited a man to dinner the next night. Amanda gets too excited and buys things for her and Laura, so they can look better than usual. Tom brings the man, Jim, Laura discovers it is her high school crush and get too nervous and faints. After dinner Jim and Laura start talking, remembering their time in school. The two of them talk about their favorite things, Jim wanting to get into television, and Laura with her glass animals. They begin to dance and during this they kiss, and then break Laura’s favorite glass animal, the unicorn.Laura discovers that Jim is engaged and they can not be together. She gives him part of the unicorn and Jim leaves. Tom gets yelled by amanda for bringing an engaged man there instead of one that could marry Laura. Tom leaves and becomes something far more, but he left just like his father did. Tom talks about how he can't get rid of Laura’s memory no matter what he does and he begs her to leave his mind.
Over the course of this story we see some major themes such as anger, guilt, regret and secrecy. These themes are interesting because they are very relatable to most families and walks of life. Anger is a large one because of the fights that Tom and Amanda have constantly. But, there is regret and guilt to balance the anger, because they always came back to each other and Tom never really left until the end. Finally, secrecy, it a major theme because Laura had lied about going to classes and Tom was lying about going to the movies. These themes are small parts that play but when they come together they form a complex story that is being told from the memory of Tom. Taking a deeper look into anger we can see that even though Amanda is always fighting Tom, I think that she is really mad at herself for letting things go with her husband because he left her, but she went too far which made Tom leave too. In some ways Amanda is really just another victim, I don't think anyone in this story is a ‘villain’ because all of them have reasons that are not just skin deep as to why they act certain ways. Amanda had lost her husband and she regrets not doing anything more to make him stay, that's why she is so worried about Laura, because she knows what it's like to be all alone and doesn't want they for Laura. This translates to anger because she says “You’re just like your father” and she is building walls to keep Tom not only from leaving, but believing he would never leave them. Laura keeps the classes that she misses a secret because she is angry partially at herself, because she wants to do things, like go up to Jim and get her waiver signed, or go to class but she can't help what is going on with her emotions. This makes her regret choices that she had been making. Tom is angry at Amanda for yelling at him all the time, but he doesn't know why she does it because he is caught in his own bubble of torment, because he wants to be a poet but is forced into the shoe factory. He is guilty for leaving because of the decisions that made to leave.
In the movie the colors were all very muted and there wasn’t anything super bright that called out for attention, which I thought was rather interesting.They has the whole house planned out in a strange format that made it difficult to see where things were happening sometimes, also the majority of the play was either inside or outside at night, which did not allow for variations in lighting for emotional cues. This was also interesting because it forced the actor to portray things more through voice, and body movements. Something that I loved was the color of the hair; Lura and Amanda had lighter hair while Tom had dark brown almost black hair. This was interesting because Tom was the only male and he was the person who seemed to have the most negative emotions (anger, regret, guilt, sadness, etc.) while Amanda and Laura weren’t like that. Tom also wore darker clothes, which could showcase his detachment from the family, since Laura and Amanda wore some lighter clothes with some color. They didn’t do the best job of highlighting which characters were the most important because there were so few characters in the whole play that everyone really was very important. The closest thing they did was keeping the characters who had lines on the screen rather than everyone at one time. So the scenes that Laura and Tom had lines those would be the only two on the screen rather than having Amanda there too. They also showcased this by not having anyone in the alley, or showing the classes or the factoury.
The actor who I thought was the best would have been Amanda, this is because when she held herself and how she accused Tom of things, it made me understand more about her pain and what could have been going through her mind when before I thought only about the other characters and how Amanda was nagging the and being ‘annoying’ to them.
Overall, I liked this play in some aspects because of its complex and realabel nature but I would not recommend it or watch it again, because it was plain in therms of the film. This was because there was very little color and light to change setting. This play taking place in the same color scheme and place was boring after while for me so I overall didn't enjoy it.
