Masks that All Mothers May Bear
Cassidy Vinal
Word Count:
2018
The Glass
Menagerie is a play solely about memory and family, focusing on the
complicated life of a family struggling to make ends meet. This intricate
script was written by Tennessee Williams and is loosely based
upon his own abandonment of family, in his own life. This whole play draws on
themes that include guilt, anger, family, and pain. Tennessee Williams skillfully
uses his own life experiences and emotions to get authenticity and raw power.
Williams tells the story of Tom, a man who struggles internally with his
need for adventure and happiness and externally with his family and job at the
shoe factory. Williams focuses the story mainly on Tom, as he is the
narrator. Tom works at a shoe company, struggling with following his passion of
becoming a well-known novelist. While Tom desires go unfulfilled he
spends his days working tirelessly to support his family. Toms father left a
long time ago, leaving just a picture behind, this forced tom into working so
his family had a place to stay and food to eat. While we are not sure of when
Toms father leaves we do know that it was long before the start of the
play. Williams gives Tom a few moments to recognize his father but makes
sure those few lines can give the audience and impact “I descended these steps
of this fire escape for the last time and followed, from then on, in my
father's footsteps,” (Williams 68). While Tom always said he wouldn't be
like his father he leaves at the end of the story deciding that he must follow
the path his father had blazed for him long ago. While the struggle Tom faces
is going on Amanda his mother is left alone to take care of her two children,
only one of which can work. Laura is the final character in the family, a shy
girl who dropped out of school because of fear and has a limp in one leg that
has overtaken her completely. In class, we not only read and learned about the
whole story, but we dissected it enough that we then could team up and act out
specific scenes from Williams book. Below is a portion of the result.
In Williams written script he focuses a large portion of the plot on
the dysfunctionality of tom and his family. In the specific scene that I
chose to perform, I looked at two characters: Tom and Amanda. While their
relationship is bound to be complicated because it is one between mother and
son, it takes a sharp turn when they both begin getting into a heated argument.
Amanda calls Tom out, after being embarrassed with an engaged gentleman caller
showing up to the house and leaving suddenly. "The gentleman caller
made a very early departure. That was a nice joke you played on us too!"
(Williams 66). This relationship that Amanda and Tom have is not only unhealthy
for everyone in the household, but it is made up of a dangerous mix of love and
hate. While these are both very strong opposites, they do consistently come
together in interesting ways. For my performance, my group thought it
would be a good idea to perform a powerful scene like this one. While my group
only consisted of two people, including myself, I feel that the small group
made it easier to find our rhythm. This small group aided in finding a cohesive
dynamic between a new actor and a very experienced one. In that way, we helped
each other a lot in finding different ways to memorize lines and express
emotions.
I played Amanda in my scene, and while this role was very basic in terms of
words on the page, looking around through the book it became evident that
Amanda was very different than I had first perceived her. Amanda, being the
mother, has gone through more than her children. She has been abandoned by her
husband, had to deal with the hardships of poverty and the emotional distress
of having a child who is labeled as "crippled". Amanda does tend to
live vicariously through her children, especially Laura. Amanda constantly is
driving Laura to go out and get a good education and meet a gentleman caller so
that she can be taken care of. Amanda has lines that often come out with a
harsh, rude, or nagging tone even without any actions being applied, she
also has multiple lines that you can see her sadness and pain. This is
evident in lines such as “What did I do? -I just went out of my way and picked
your father!” (Williams 14). While there can be two different approaches
to this, one that pins Amanda as an angry mother who blames everything on her
husband who left. The other being, that Amanda is genuinely hurt about her
husband leaving her, and to compensate for this she pushes her dreams and
expectations onto her children. Amanda often uses her anger
and sadness as a mask in order to push her children away enough, so they
won't see her weakness, but Amanda also knows that she must keep
them close enough that she still has them. It is a strange and difficult
balance that leaves Amanda worn out and unable to keep the facade on for
the whole story. In the above line, Amanda has a confession, but
she chooses to wrap it in a way that changes the meaning, simply with the
change of her voice. Amanda could have let her children see her weak but
would rather come off stone cold than passionate. This is part of what
made portraying Amanda so challenging, she has these breakthrough moments where
you can see her imperfections, but she doesn't want anyone to read through the
illusion that she has built up. This can also play into the idea of the
pieces of glass menagerie that Laura has, these glass pieces hold a
lot of meaning to all members of the family. which is why I believe
that Williams uses the idea for the title; Amanda, for
example, is really a very fragile person, but she uses illusions to
seem stronger and powerful. Similarly, Tom tries to come off tough
but really, he, too, is just like the glass pieces because he is also fragile
and needs a tender touch to shine. The idea that Tom and Amanda are
both like the delicate pieces of glass that Laura cares so much about can
also play with the theory that people with very similar personalities don't get
along very well. Tom, wants to follow his dream of becoming a writer.
However, he knows that he is the lifeline that his family needs to stay afloat.
Amanda still has her dreams of a man coming by and sweeping her off her feet to
marry her and live her life out in happiness, but she was forced to give that
up when her husband left her with her children. Both have another life that
they believe is waiting for them, but they keep getting in each other's way.
Tom can't leave because he is supporting his mother and sister, while Amanda
can't leave because she must be there for her children and this is the road
that she knows she's on.
Williams does a really good job of putting hidden meanings and small
details that help actors become the characters, aside from the ideas
I have laid out previously, Williams uses his monologues wisely and piecing
them together in different orders not only gives the reader or actor
a quick backstory, but it tells them things about the character that they
wouldn't otherwise get. An example of this is, in the scene that I performed
with my partner we decided to take from three parts of Amanda's lines;
two of these were from her monologues. When I went looking for these monologues
it became evident that Amanda did have a lot of sadness in her. When tom left
and Amanda yells “Go then! Then go to the moon you selfish dreamer!”
(Williams 67). Amanda truly breaks at this point. In the book before she talks
about Tom being selfish with what he wants, because deep down she is scared for
her son She is scared that he's going to leave her too and she knows that she must
do everything in her power to keep him there even if it means making him pay
for everything, so he feels he must stay. She also talks about how she always
wishes for her children’s happiness on the moon “I’ll tell you what I wished
for on the moon. Success and happiness for my precious children. I wish for
that whenever there’s a moon, and when there isn’t a moon, I wish for it to.”
(Williams 34). Amanda talks about what the moon means to her briefly here, the
moon is a sign of hope and something that she can hold on to and put all her
dreams into so that her children can live better, because while Amanda can be
rude and come off mean, she just wants to care for her children. When Amanda
says the line about Tom going to the moon, she is telling him to go back to her
dreams because, I think, somewhere deep down she knew that he was leaving and
not coming back, Tom would turn into just another wish in the moon that she
prayed for every night. All of this shows Amanda’s true self and how much inner
torcher she goes through. Williams used this line as her final farewell to her
son, and it is a powerful statement; Amanda knows that Tom will not come back,
and she must remind herself that there is a place for him to go so that she
could still watch over him and pray for him no matter where he is. The fact
that Amanda is yelling after him rather than storming off shows how
she really knows that could be the last thing she ever says to him,
and in that moment, she doesn't truly know what to do. I showed this
in my performance because I cracked my voice to show the helplessness and that
sadness that Amanda felt in her heart and the broken woman that was deep down
in Amanda, even though she wasn’t willing to let anyone help take the weight off
that scene you really see her age and the effect of her holding everything in
for so long. This is Amanda’s last memory of Tom before the end of the book, and
her loosing hope that her son could be different than her husband.
Williams does a
great job overall of allowing his character to hide emotions and keep them so
that you really had to work for your own answers and reasonings for your performance.
Portraying his characters was an amazing challenge and a great experience
overall. Williams made sure that his characters really were quite deep and that
there were many hidden meanings in the book overall.
Work Cited:
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. Dramatists Play
Service INC., 1976.
