Tennessee Williams “The Glass Menagerie”

1. Tennessee Williams“The Glass Menagerie”

2. Tennessee Williams1914-1983 • Troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. • He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. • He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” • He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights in American history.

3. Williams continued… • Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1914, Tennessee was the son of a shoe company executive and a Southern belle. • Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy and carefree. • This sense of belonging and comfort were lost, however, when his family moved to the urban environment of St. Louis, Missouri. • It was there he began to look inward, and to write • He had a brief stint working at his father’s shoe company, and a move to New Orleans, which began a lifelong love of the city and set the locale for A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.

4. Plays • Williams’ first critical acclaim came in 1944 when THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. • It won a Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and, as a film, the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. • At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams worked with Elia Kazan, the director for stage and screen productions of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and the stage productions of CAMINO REAL, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Kazan also directed Williams’ film BABY DOLL. • Many of his works, were simultaneously praised and denounced for addressing raw subject matter in a straightforward realistic way.

5. Tom Lanier Williams • The 1960s were perhaps the most difficult years for Williams, as he experienced some of his harshest treatment from the press. • His plays, which had long received criticism for openly addressing taboo topics, were finding more and more detractors. • Around this time, Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer. Williams began to depend more and more on alcohol and drugs and though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories and another play, he was in a downward spiral. • In 1969 he was hospitalized by his brother.

6. Truth rears its ugly head in fiction • After his release from the hospital in the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. • In 1975 he published MEMOIRS, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality. • Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills. It was in this desperation, which Williams had so closely known and so honestly written about, that we can find a great man and an important body of work. • His genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories.

7. Above info found at:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/tennessee-williams/about-tennessee-williams/737/ • Williams’ Family: • His mother was an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living. • His father, a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, was at turns distant and abusive. • His older sister, Rose, was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions. • He remained aloof from his younger brother, Dakin, whom his father repeatedly favored over both of the older children. • “Glass Menagerie” Family • Amanda • The absent father (shoe factory) • Laura • Tom – who narrates, writes, and dreams about doing what he wants to do…

8. Memory Play • Tennessee Williams claimed that all of his major plays fit into the "memory play" format he described in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie. • The memory play is a three-part structure: ( • 1) a character experiences something profound; • (2) that experience causes what Williams terms an "arrest of time," a situation in which time literally loops upon itself; and • (3) the character must re-live that profound experience (caught in a sort of mobius loop of time) until she or he makes sense of it. • The overarching theme for his plays, he claimed, is the negative impact that conventional society has upon the "sensitive nonconformist individual.“

9. How do we remember things? • Post-World War II many American playwrights began to tap into the power of memory as a narrative device. Influenced by the forces that were shaping American society, especially the psychoanalytical concepts of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these playwrights used the concept of memory to fuel non-linear plots and intense character development.