TGM Paper - Rough Draft 2

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 in order 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 in order 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. Int eh 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. "" (Williams ). 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 Which are very strong contradictions but still, a possible relationship especially with a mother. My group consisted of myself and one other person, together we had agreed to play a scene that involved Tom and Amanda, because of their intense chemistry. I was given the role of Amanda, reading and acting out her character was interesting

purely because of the complexity that seems so simple. Amanda, is the mother in this story; she is a character the likes to live vicariously through her children. While, the context of Amanda's lines are meant to be harsh and in a nagging fashion, her lines hold a lot of sadness and grief. This can be seen in lines such as “What did I do?-I just went out of my way and picked your father!” (Williams 14). Amanda is genuinely hurt about her husband leaving her, in order to compensate for this she pushes her dreams into her children. AManda uses her anger and sadness to push her children away enough that they won't see her paint, but close enough that she still has them. It is a strange and difficult balance. In the above line AManda has a confession but she chooses to wrap it in a way that changes the meaning sim ply with the change of her voice. 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. This can also play into the idea of glass menagerie, these glass pieces hold a lot of meaning to all members of the family. Williams uses this idea to base the title on, AManda is really only a fragile person, but she uses her abilities to seem stronger and beautiful; 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 in order to shine. The idea that Tom and Amanda are oth like the delicate pieces of glass can also play with the theory that people with very similar personalities don't get along very well.

Williams does a really good job of putting hidden meanings or small details that can help actors become the characters, aside form the ideas I have laid out previously, Williams uses his monologue wisely and piecing them together in different orders not only gives the reader otr 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 really evident that Amanda did have a lot of sadness in her. When tom left and Amanda yell “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 has to do everything in her power to keep him there even if it means making him pay for everything so he feels he has to stay. To me, it is the line that we see her wall finally fall. Williams used this line as her final farewell to her son, and it is a powerful statement; part of you would think that she expects Tom to come back like he had done every other time, but the other part knows that she was saying that regardless of if he was coming back. 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 care. In the moment that Amanda says that to Tom she is saying it more to prove that she was right and h is just like his father.



With all of that in mind, it is important that you take an even deeper look into Williams book. After dissecting everything from the book I could, I started working on understanding motives, because it is easy to say what a motive is but much harder to recreate a motive and really embody it. IN order to do this we used the book for a long time and didn't go off script until we knew how we were going to act out the scene. We used a few different techniques that included just yelling the lines and disregarding all sensable emotion. This, I think, was actually really helpful because it allowed my group mate and myself to get connected with each other and mess around with voices for the character, facial expressions and was helpful in memorizing the lines. However, the main thing that I did for getting Amanda's character down was thinking about her and her life. Knowing what was going on in her world and thinking about how she wants to be proved wrong, or ask for help. It was interesting to think about how that connected with me as an actor and having that feeling of wanting to ask for help or wanting someone to see through a curtain you put up but they don't see it and dissapoint you intentionally or unintentionally.