the glass menagerie introduction essay

The Glass Menagerie Essay

Written by Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie is a masterpiece and it passes as a memory play for it exposits Tom Wingfield’s thoughts. A wishful poet, brother to Laura, and son to Amanda and ever absent Mr. Wingfield; Tom works hard in a shoe store to provide for his mother and sister. Amanda on the other side is a complicated mother who regales her children in this moment and scolds them in the next.

Amanda plays important role in Laura’s reticence and pathological shyness. While she cannot be blamed for making her shy in the first place, she is to blame for making Laura’s continued shyness.

Instead of supporting Laura emotionally, she goes out to look for quick fixes and material gains. First, she enrols her in a business school for her to earn some good fortune. After realizing Laura’s weakness has kept her out of school, she does not care to investigate the problem and settle it amicably; on the contrary, she resorts into finding her a fiancé.

These are uninformed decisions and she is to blame for Laura’s continued shyness. If only Amanda were supportive, Laura would probably gain self-confidence and have high self-esteem. Amanda’s reminiscences on her youth in the South are not reliable. They are too overstated to be true. How can someone get seventeen callers in one afternoon? This is unrealistic; therefore, judged from this platform, Amanda’s reminiscences are treacherous.

Throughout this play, there are different forms of music, movies, and legends. These elements create emotional impact in the play. The audience can connect with the main characters. For instance, the music and lightning used make the audience connect with Laura’s shortcomings, Amanda’s indifference, and Tom’s struggles.

This play suggests a repressed desire boiling under the surface. Tom holds this burning passion; he wants to get out there and explore the world. This burning desire explains why Tom visits a witchdoctor and finds a way of getting out of a coffin without the hustle of pulling any nail.

He coffin here represents Wingfield’s home. The object of Tom’s longing is to explore the world out there and this is why he plans to accompany Merchant Seamen to get out and explore the world. He says, “I am tired…movies tranquilize people, making them content to watch other people’s adventures without having any of their own…plan to join the Merchant Seamen” (Tennessee 62). This trip would finally quench Tom’s desire to explore the world.

Absence of Mr. Wingfield affects his children and wife greatly. Tom has to work for the family whilst Laura knows only a nagging mother. Perhaps she would gain self-confidence and self-esteem if she had her father around her. Amanda is ever worried because of her fatherless family.

She is too concerned about her family’s financial security that she would not let Tom leave without getting Laura a suitor who would provide for her. To counter her fears, Amanda enrols Laura in a business school hoping that she would be stable; provide for her self and probably for the family. This stems from the fact that she fears without a father; her family would be insecure. If only Mr. Wingfield were around, she would be financially secure.

Jim O’Connor is a “nice, ordinary, young man” (Tennessee 5). These adjectives come out clearly in the context of the play. Due to his ‘ordinary’ nature, he manages to win Laura’s confidence, dances with her, and finally kisses her. His ‘niceness’ drives away Laura’s fears and low self-esteem and she opens up to him. As the play closes, Tom tells Laura, “Blow out your candles, Laura–and so good-bye” (Tennessee 97). Audience may respond to this statement by concurring to it.

Laura has to blow out her candles and reach for the lighting that lights the world nowadays. Tom is the protagonist in this story. Tom is the most crucial to the play’s dramatic action because everything revolves around him. Without him, the Wingfields would not be, Jim would be unknown, and the central theme of illusions would not be realized.

Works Cited

Tennessee, Williams. “The Glass Menagerie.” Oxford; Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1968.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, July 7). The Glass Menagerie. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/

"The Glass Menagerie." IvyPanda , 7 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Glass Menagerie'. 7 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Glass Menagerie." July 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Glass Menagerie." July 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Glass Menagerie." July 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/.

• Childhood Disorders: Shyness Explained
• The Glass Menagerie: How Laura's Relationship With Jim Changed the Tone of the Play
• Tennessee Williams: Characters in “The Glass Menagerie”
• "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams: Play Analysis
• Gender Roles in "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams
• Tennessee Williams: “Glass Menagerie” and Autor's Life
• The Glass Menagerie: A Play by Tennessee Williams
• The Glass Menagerie: Figurines' Significance
• Character Sketch of Laura in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• Analysis of the Characters in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
• Faith or Free Will Used in the Movie – Minority Report and the Drama – Antigone
• Mrs. Hale: Different but Equal - Legitimate Gender Differences
• A Critical Analysis of Hamlet's Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Leadership Reign in "Oedipus Tyrannus" by Sophocles
• The Three Themes of the "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: Introduction

The play is set against the background of depression where the characters struggle with the past, the future and with each other.

One of the most strikingly dominant hallmarks of The Glass Menagerie is that it is a memory play. By making the play a memory play, Williams gained a ground to add an innovation to the modem theatre by rejecting the illusionist conventions. Throughout this play the present life of the character is penetrated by the memory of the past life. To break the illusion of the present reality the fantasy elements and memories of the past are frequently introduced in the play. Through the device of the screen, legend, and memory Williams succeeded in subverting the deep seated theatrical conventions that forces a seated theatrical convention that force a drama to capture an illusion of reality.

The equally striking feature of The Glass Menagerie is that it is an autobiographical play. Williams said that The Glass Menagerie is a tribute to his sister. William cast Laura into the mold of his sister Rose. Amanda is cast into the mold of his mother. Laura's father who has fallen in love with the long distance is none other than Williams' own father who never used to stay in the house.

Another feature of this play is that it lacks realistic dimension. The play is not realistic. Almost all the characters in the play are habituated to live in the world of illusions. They are prone to relapse into the promised land of dream. They are afflicted with the tendency to manufacture illusions. Due to their entrapment in illusions, they were far removed from the light of reality. Since they are blind to reality, the playwright did not bother to give a realistic touch and twist to the dimension of play.

Tennessee Williams is disinterested in the mode of the 19th century realism. The 19th century technique of realism failed to stimulate him. Therefore, he happened to embark on the ship of the psychological realism. By the expression The Psychological Realism we mean the realism which is appropriated from observing the psychological reactions of the characters to the events that befall them.

Williams specifies a setting that is almost dreamlike, using Brechtian devices such as the visual images and screen legends flashed at appropriate moments. He uses music to establish a mood. Williams uses symbols to cater the implicit meaning of the play.

The Glass Menagerie Study Center

Nature of illusion in The Glass Menagerie

Dramatic Technique in The Glass Menagerie

Tom as a Representative of the 20th Century Man

Laura as a Romantic Superwoman in The Glass Menagerie

Southern Womanhood in Modern World in The Glass Menagerie

Tom as a Man of Imagination in The Glass Menagerie

Summary of The Glass Menagerie

Symbolism in The Glass Menagerie

Sublimating Animal Drives into Aesthetics

Style of Williams in The Glass Menagerie

Biography of Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie

Introduction to the glass menagerie.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play , written by a popular American writer, Tennessee Williams . The play was first staged in 1944 and became an instant hit, bringing fortune and popularity, both for the playwright on account of the autobiographical elements he has inserted in it. The story of the play revolves around a mother, her shy and introverted daughter, Laura , and her artist son, Tom. Originally written as The Gentleman Caller, the play won New York Drama Critic Award for the author in 1945 and became a masterpiece.

Summary of The Glass Menagerie

The play starts with Tom Wingfield, Amanda Wingfield’s son recalling his life. Amanda is a single mother, whose husband had forsaken the family years back in the past before the play begins. The cast shows Laura and Amanda, both daughter and mother, conversing with their only male member in St. Louis in the year 1937.

The play shows Amanda Wingfield living in a middle-class apartment in St. Louis, taking care of her small family. She recalls her glory days when the boys used to chase her due to her beautiful looks and outgoing personality. This future worry and not-so-bright prospectus of her son, who is working in a warehouse, has become another constant worry for her. Despite seemingly being a budding poet, Tom Wingfield does not find enough time due to his constant worry of everyday preoccupations and penchant for movies that he watches all night . Now her main anxiety is her daughter, Laura, who is crippled and naturally shy, does not seem to win any gentleman’s attention. Looking at her daughter’s youth, Amanda becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a gentleman for her. At dinner Amanda tells her daughter, Laura, to stay polite and pretty for her gentlemen callers even though she never had any callers and never expected one.

Amanda then proceeds to tell Laura to practice her shorthand and typing. A few days later when Amanda comes home from Laura’s school after getting to know that Laura had dropped out several months earlier, she is shocked. Amanda wonders what they will do with their lives since Laura never tried to help her and spends all her time playing with her glass menagerie and her old phonograph records. Amanda decides that to have a gentleman caller for Laura, and Laura reveals that she has liked only one boy in her whole life, a high school boy called Jim.

When Tom goes out to the movies that night, Amanda scolds him and asks him to do something useful other than watching movies. The next morning after Tom apologizes to her, Amanda asks him to find a nice gentleman caller for Laura. A few days later, Tom tells her that he has invited his colleague, Jim O’Connor over dinner. When Amanda comes to know about the arrival of Jim, she becomes jubilant, seeing the prospects of meeting with the future of her daughter. When Jim comes, she starts recalling her own budding youthful period and her own looks. However, Laura senses that she must have been attracted to Jim during her school years. First, she excuses herself to join dinner with them due to her supposed illness but later when she comes into the living room, she sees Jim alone waiting for the electricity.

As they start a conversation, Jim encourages her to think about their past and starts dancing quietly when he accidentally knocks down her menagerie, having her glass animals in it, breaking the unicorn. However, he immediately takes the situation in control by kissing her and paying compliments for keeping such a beautiful menagerie. Following this, he explodes the bombshell about his likely marriage soon. Laura, on the other hand, presents the broken unicorn to him as a gift after which he departs. Amanda, upon learning this, lashes out at Tom, who expresses his ignorance about such a thing. The play ends on a sad note of Tom leaving the house, asking his sister to extinguish the candles.

Major Themes in The Glass Menagerie

• Escape from Responsibilities: The play demonstrates the theme of escape from the heavy responsibilities of life as Tom desires to avoid family responsibilities like a magician, who shows the ability to escape the box without removing nails from it. The burden of a shy sister and a pestering mother remains heavy on his mind. He wants to remove this burden from his mind and escape to the world of magical fantasy . However, the memory of the family stays with him, reminding him of having family relations with Laura and his mother. On the other hand, both of them could not escape the financial constraints and social pressure due to the well-knit domestic setup. In the end, Tom realizes that this escape from responsibilities does not come without its cost which is loneliness and mental depression.
• Family : The major theme of family and its responsibility is shown through the Wingfield family, Amanda, the mother , Laura, the daughter, and Tom, who’s Amanda’s son. As the only male member, Tom has to assume the charge of the main breadwinner, though, he shirks taking up the responsibility of the whole family. On the other hand, Amanda constantly feels the stress of finding a suitable match for her daughter, Laura, whose social shyness and isolation are costing the family heavily. In this backdrop, the shadow of the disappearance of Mr. Wingfield is peeping through their mental stress. Tom, therefore, follows suit, but the realization of his being the patriarchal head does not recede.
• Abandonment: The theme of abandonment looms large in the background due to the disappearance of the head, Mr. Wingfield. Amanda has an acute realization of her husband’s abandoned presence and on her daughter who suffers from social abandonment. Her son, Tom, too, tries to take this abandonment on him by deciding to leave the family. He tries to hook Jim, but this, too, proves a futile effort on his part. Therefore, his own predicament shows his fear of being abandoned by his dreams and desires in life.
• Illusions and Reality: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of illusion and reality through the characters of Amanda and Tom. Her Southern legacy has caused the illusion to Amanda in that she visualizes patriarchy taking up the household responsibility but her son’s upbringing in the abandoned household is the stark reality staring in her face. It is because he has a constant reminder of the disappearance of his father, the reality which runs contrary to his presence as the responsible head of the family. Similarly, Amanda feels that the illusion of her being an outgoing girl in her past may be reflected through her daughter Laura, who is, in reality, a socially shy girl, having little prospects of finding a gentleman.
• Memory: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of memory and its undertones among all the family members of the Wingfield family. Amanda, the mother of the family, is constantly stuck in her memories of her blissful and pretty youth period, while the memory of her escaping husband makes these memories muddied. Similarly, Tom also recalls his sister by the end, the memory of which haunts him, while Jim is lost in his memories of boyhood, a thrilling period of his life.
• Shattering of Dreams: Despite a broken family, every Wingfield individual dreams about having a good life. Amanda, the mother, dreams of having her daughter married to a gentleman and her son, Tom, taking up the family responsibility. On the other hand, Tom dreams of having an independent life free from family preoccupations and burdens.
• Marriage: The play also shows the theme of marriage as an institution whose existence and preservation keep the family united and stable. Amanda wants her daughter to have a good gentleman to marry, but she fails, shattering her dreams. It is because Amanda’s husband married her but left her, leaving the family in the lurch.
• Alcoholism: The play implicitly shows the theme of alcoholism in that if a person drinks, he is irresponsible as Amanda experiences addiction as she recalls her fleeing husband. Keeping this in mind, she also questions Jim whether he drinks or not, having the point of family responsibility in her consciousness.
• Love: The theme of love in the play is quite implicit through the motherly love of Amanda for her daughter to marry a gentleman and for her son to take up the family responsibility.

Major Characters The Glass Menagerie

• Tom Wingfield: Tom Wingfield is the representative of patriarchy in the play and shows the memories presented objectively. His direct address to the audience shows his capability of objective evaluation of his situation. At the same time, his duality confuses the audience in understanding his role within the family. His artistic capabilities stand in contrast to his actual achievement for the family in the real world. Although his concerns about his sister, Laura, and mother, Amanda, shows that he takes care of his family, his frequent demonstration of indifference leads to the impressions of the audience about his cruel behavior. His breaking down of the glass menagerie, in the end, shows this cruel behavior, leading to contradictory arguments about him, having no role model in the family to follow.
• Amanda Wingfield: A remnant of the faded Southern beauty , Amanda represents the role of the fading matriarchy after having suffered an economic and social decline. Following her husband’s escape from the family responsibilities, she has to take up matters into her own hands despite having little experience of raising a family, the reason that the family is undergoing stress and turbulence. As the extrovert character , she tries to lead her son, Tom, to take up the role of the family head. Yet, she herself stays away from Laura instead of guiding her to mix in the society. Some of the flaws in her character lead to the comic and tragic issues arising in the family. Her failures are apparent from her monologue delivered in response to her children’s behavior.
• Laura Wingfield: A very innocent and mentally challenged character, Laura demonstrates compassion when she comes to know the situation of her brother. This behavior stands in stark contrast to the selfish attitude of Amanda, her mother, as well as, her brother, Tom. Her position in the family makes her the center of the play in that her mother and brother, both, are engaged in finding a suitable match for her. Although she is a young girl, her mother’s thoughts of her own glamorous past belittle her prospects when Tom brings Jim. Laura, though, seems an introvert and a shy character, shows her will at several moments which defies her real personality built by her mother and brother.
• Jim O’Connor: The character of Jim within the play is interesting and intriguing. He is a gentleman and Amanda encourages him to woo Laura. An ordinary but nice young man, Jim is a hero in Tom’s sight since his school days when he used to lead sports and theatrical productions. Having no haunting memories and present stigmas, Jim is a true middle-class young man who does not take fantasies at the face value. Sensing his fall in this abyss, he extricates himself and returns to his world on the pretext of his being already hooked.
• Mr. Wingfield: The significance of the character of Mr. Wingfield lies in his portrait hanging on the wall in the family apartment despite his shameful flight from the family responsibilities. A symbol of the deceitful patriarchy, he becomes prominent in the play on account of his absence. Amanda’s memories of his charm also belittle his patriarchal role due to her wrong choice among the responsible and noble gentlemen of her time.

Writing Style of The Glass Menagerie

As poetic, symbolic, and spontaneous, The Glass Menagerie establishes Tennessee Williams at his best. The characters speak in a lyrical style with spontaneity in their dialogues. The conversation is down-to-earth direct and simple, showing the characters in their true colors. As far as the sentence style and diction are concerned, they are informal and simple. Yet Williams relies heavily on metaphors , similes, and symbols to convey the meanings of the frustration the family members are in after the flight of their family head, Mr. Wingfield.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in The Glass Menagerie

• Action: The main action of the play comprises the life of the Wingfield family, the desires of Tom and Laura, and the wish of Amanda to marry her daughter to a gentleman. The rising action occurs when Laura allows her mother to decide that she should marry. The falling action occurs when Jim states that he has a fiancée waiting for him and leaves the house.
• Anaphora : The play shows the use of anaphora as given in the below examples, i. In Spain there was a revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago , Cleveland, Saint Louis . . . This is the social background of the play. (Scene-I) ii. Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread . (Scene-I) Both of these examples show the repetitious use of some phrases such as “In Spain there was…” and “have to push.”
• Allusion : The play shows amazing use of different allusions as given in the examples below, i. You simply couldn’t go out if you hadn’t read it. All everybody talked was Scarlett O’Hara. Well, this is a book that critics already compare to Gone with the Wind. It’s the Gone with the Wind of the post-World-War generation! (Scene-III) ii. I’m going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired assassin, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! (Act-III) iii. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! (Scene-III) The first example shows alluding to an author and her books, the second to a gang, and the third to Spanish locations. There are some other lurking allusions such as Pygmalion , a Greek mythical figure, Midas touch of King Midas, Biblical allusions of the Annunciation, and allusion of the Clark Gable.
• Antagonist : Amanda seems to be the antagonist of the play as she seems to have still the charm of her husband and the glamor of her personality having encircled her mind that she does not think about other family members.
• Antimetabole : Antimetabole is the reuse of words in the first and second halves of a sentence. The play shows the use of antimetabole as given in the below example, i. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (Act-I) The play shows the use of antimetabole as the reversely used phrase “Their eyes” show.
• Conflict : The play shows both external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is going on between Tom and Amanda, while the internal conflict is going on in Tom’s mind as he narrates the events of the play.
• Characters: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows both static as well as dynamic characters. The young man, Tom, is a dynamic character as he shows a considerable transformation in his behavior and conduct by the end of the play. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation such as Laura and Amanda.
• Climax : The climax in the play occurs when Laura comes to know that Jim is the same, her classmate, and faces freezing feelings that she has to get support to sit on the sofa.
• Foreshadowing : The play shows many examples of foreshadows as given in below, i. Tom’s departure from the scene foreshadows his escape from familial responsibilities ii. Music foreshadows the dance of Jim and Laura iii. Breaking of unicorn foreshadows breaking of Laura’s heart
• Hyperbole : The play shows various examples of hyperboles as given below, i. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment… (Scene-III) ii. I’m starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside — well, I’m boiling! (Scene-VI) Both these examples exaggerate things such as the first one says that the gentleman has become a ghost and in the second Tom says that he is boiling inside which is not possible.
• Imagery : The Glass Menagerie shows excellent use of imagery as given in the below examples, i. He had tremendous Irish good nature and vitality with the scrubbed and polished look of white chinaware. He seemed to move in a continual spotlight. He was a star in basketball, captain of the debating club, president of the senior class and the glee club and he sang the male lead in the annual light operas. (Scene-VI) ii. I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. (Scene-VII) These two examples show images of nature, color, and feelings.
• Metaphor : The Glass Menagerie shows good use of various metaphors as given the examples below, i. The play is memory. (Scene-I) ii. My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children!. (Scene-IV) These examples show that several things have been compared directly in the play such as the play itself has been compared to things recalled from memory or the mother compared to a witch.
• Mood : The play, The Glass Menagerie , shows various moods; it starts with a reflective mood but turns out highly ironic and melancholy at times.
• Narrator : The play, The Glass Menagerie , has been narrated by the first person, Tom, who happens to be one of its characters, too. In this sense, it seems a meta- fiction , a narrative within the play but still, it has a dialogue form.
• Personification : The play shows examples of personifications as given below, i. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting. (Scene-VI) ii. Wind blows the white curtains inward in a slow, graceful motion and with a faint, sorrowful sighing. (Scene-VI) These examples show as if the glass and the wind have life and emotions of their own.
• Protagonist : Laura Wingfield is the protagonist of the play as it is her fate that Amanda and Tom are going to decide or not decide.
• Setting : The setting of the play, The Glass Menagerie , is the middle-class apartment of the Wingfield family located in St. Louis in 1937.
• Simile : The play shows good use of various similes as given in the examples below, i. Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum! (Scene-I) ii. But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. (Scene-V) iii. Amanda has worked like a Turk in preparation for the gentleman caller. (Scene-VI) iv. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light. (Scene-VII) The use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things in the examples. The first example shows this between the mother and Jesus, the second shows between sex with a chandelier, the third between Amanda and a Turk, and the fourth between Laura and glass menagerie.

Related posts:

• The Man in the Glass
• The Sea of Glass
• The Glass Castle Quotes
• The Glass Castle Themes
• The Glass Castle Characters
• Tennessee Williams
• A Streetcar Named Desire

Post navigation

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence, as he says, is not a depiction of actuality; its employment of symbolism is unusual; and in the very effective ending, a scrim descends in front of mother and daughter, so that by stage convention one can see but not hear them, with the result that both, but especially the mother, become much more moving and even archetypal. The play is also almost unique historically, in that it first opened in Chicago, came close to flopping before Chicago newspaper theater critics verbally whipped people into going, and then played successfully for months in Chicago before finally moving to equal success in New York.

The setting is the Wingfield apartment in a shabby tenement building, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the year 1937. The set has an interior living room area and an exterior fire escape.

Tom Wingfield is in the fire-escape area outside the Wingfield apartment. He explains the concept of a memory play. He enters the interior setting, where his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield, who wears a brace on her leg, are seated at a table, waiting to eat dinner. All aspects of the meal are mimed, and as Tom seats himself, Amanda begins to instruct him on how to eat politely. Tom abruptly leaves the table to have a cigarette. Laura rises to fetch an ashtray, but Amanda tells her to stay seated, for she wishes Laura to remain fresh and pretty for her prospective gentleman callers. Amanda recalls her Sunday afternoons in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, where she received and entertained countless callers. Amanda asks Laura how many callers she expects to have, and Laura explains that she is not expecting any callers.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Laura sits alone, polishing her glass figurines. Hearing her mother approach, Laura quickly hides her collection and resumes her place behind a typewriter. Amanda reveals that she has discovered that Laura has dropped out of secretarial school. Laura explains that she became ill during the first week of school and was too ashamed to return. Amanda pleads with Laura, asking her what she is going to do with her life. Amanda fears that Laura will be dependent on the charity of others for the rest of her life. Amanda warns Laura that there is no future in staying home playing with her glass collection and her father’s phonograph records. She implores Laura to set her sights on marrying. Laura confesses that she had liked a boy named Jim O’Connor in high school, but she is certain that he must be married by now. Laura acknowledges her disability as her primary obstacle in forming relationships. Amanda dismisses this claim and advises Laura to cultivate aspects of her personality to compensate for her disadvantage.

The same location as scene 2. Tom addresses the audience. He explains that Amanda has become obsessed with finding a gentleman caller for Laura and has begun selling magazine subscriptions to generate extra income. Amanda has a telephone conversation with a neighbor, trying to convince her to renew her subscription to The Homemaker’s Companion . Tom and Amanda quarrel about his habits, his writing, and his books. Amanda accuses Tom of being selfish and of engaging in immoral activities. Tom swears at his mother and bemoans his fate of working in a warehouse to support his mother and sister. In the heat of the argument, Tom accidentally crashes into Laura’s glass collection, shattering it to pieces on the floor. Amanda refuses to speak to him until he apologizes. Laura and Tom collect the shattered glass from the floor.

The same location as scene 3. Tom returns home from a movie and talks with Laura. She asks him to apologize to Amanda. Amanda sends Laura out on an errand so that she may speak with Tom alone. She and Tom make peace. Amanda warns Tom of the danger in pursuing an adventurous life. Amanda raises the subject of Laura and the need for Tom to bring a nice young man home to meet Laura. Amanda promises Tom that she will let him do as he pleases and leave after he has provided for Laura’s future. Amanda begs him to secure a nice man for Laura first. Tom grudgingly agrees to try to find someone. Amanda happily returns to soliciting magazine subscriptions.

On the fire escape, the exterior of the Wingfield apartment, Amanda suggests that Tom be more mindful of his appearance. She makes a wish on the new Moon. Tom tells her that he is inviting a gentleman caller for Laura to the apartment the following evening. Amanda inquires about the character of the gentleman caller. Tom describes Jim’s qualities and characteristics, and Amanda determines that he is suitable to call. Tom warns Amanda not to be too excited, because Jim is unaware that he is being invited for Laura’s benefit. Tom expresses concern that Amanda has unrealistic expectations of Laura. Amanda refuses to accept the reality of Laura’s condition. Tom goes to a movie and Amanda calls Laura out onto the fire escape. Amanda urges Laura to make a wish on the new Moon.

On the fire escape and in the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Tom speaks directly to the audience and explains the nature of his friendship with Jim. Tom makes Jim feel important because Tom can recall Jim’s high school glory days. In the living room, Amanda and Laura prepare for the arrival of the gentleman caller. Amanda dresses Laura and discovers one of her own former gowns. At the mention of the name Jim O’Connor, Laura refuses to participate in the evening’s events. Amanda chastises Laura and orders her to answer the door when the doorbell rings. Laura freezes with anxiety as Amanda forces her to welcome Tom and Jim. Laura hides in the kitchen while Amanda converses with Jim O’Connor. Tom goes to the kitchen to check on supper. Amanda summons everyone to the table. Laura maintains that she is sick and lies on the couch for the duration of the dinner.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, the lights in the apartment suddenly go out. Amanda quickly lights candles, asking Jim to check the fuses. Finding that the fuses are fine, Amanda asks Tom whether he has paid the electric bill; he has not. After dinner, Amanda asks Jim to keep Laura company. She gives him a candelabrum and a glass of wine to give to Laura. Amanda forces Tom to join her in the kitchen to wash the dishes. Settling down on the floor beside Laura, Jim asks her why she is so shy, and Laura asks whether Jim remembers her. She explains that they had singing class together in high school and reminds him that she was always late because of her disability. Jim confesses that he never noticed her limp and admonishes Laura about being self-conscious. Laura takes out her high school yearbook and Jim autographs it for her.

Laura shows her glass collection to him and Jim marvels over her delicate figurines. Hearing music from the nearby dance hall, Jim asks Laura to dance. She hesitates, but Jim persuades her to join him. They stumble into the coffee table, breaking Laura’s favorite figurine, a unicorn that she has had for 13 years. Jim apologizes, and Laura consoles him. Struck by Laura’s charm and delicacy, Jim kisses her. He chastises himself for his hasty action and informs Laura that he is engaged. Laura gives him the glass unicorn. Amanda gleefully returns to the living room with a pitcher of cherry lemonade. Jim apologizes and announces that he has to leave to collect his fiancée at the train station.

Amanda is horrified by the news and calls Tom out of the kitchen. She accuses him of playing a cruel joke on the family, but Tom explains that he had no knowledge of Jim’s engagement. Amanda again chastises Tom for selfishness and for lack of concern for his abandoned mother or his disabled sister. Tom finally leaves the Wingfield apartment for good. The lights fade on the interior setting, leaving Laura and Amanda in candlelight. Tom appears on the fire escape and offers the audience details of his departure and journey away from his family. He explains that no matter how much distance is between them, he can never forget his sister. He instructs Laura to blow out her candles, and she does.

A scene from The Glass Menagerie /New York Public Library

The Glass Menagerie began its life as a screenplay, The Gentleman Caller . This script was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” The script of “The Gentleman Caller” was submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the summer of 1943. Williams had hoped that this script would impress studio executives and ultimately relieve him from other contractual obligations at MGM such as writing what he scathingly termed a “celluloid brassiere” for the actress Lana Turner. MGM was less than amenable to Williams’s idea. They declared that the popular film Gone With the Wind (1939) had served up enough Southern women for a decade (Spoto, 97). In an oddly ironic twist, this response and its implicit preference for fiction over reality resonated with the play’s central theme.

Stylistically, The Glass Menagerie reflects its prehistory. The screenplay-turned-stage-script shows a number of elements more familiar, and perhaps more suited, to the cinema than to the theater. In theatrical terms, Williams’s approach is Brechtian: It uses devices meant to create what the German playwright and dramaturge Bertolt Brecht, a contemporary of Williams’s, called the “alienation effect.” In The Glass Menagerie , these devices constitute a sometimes disjointed sequence of tableaux (or scenes) rather than the more conventionalthree-act structure; a narrator/commentator (Tom) who also is a character in the play and steps in and out of the action; Williams’s scripted suggestions of legends to be projected onto gauze between the dining and front rooms, “to give accent to certain values in each scene”; the very strictly defined music, which assigns specific pieces or themes to certain scenes, especially in relation to Laura; and the lighting, “focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center.”

For Brecht, the alienation effect served to remind the audience that what they saw on stage constituted the real world. Williams takes this concept a crucial step further, in that he turns alienation— the conscious or unconscious loss of a person’s feeling of connection with his or her surroundings—into the mainstay of the play: It becomes a way of life for the characters. Brecht tries to prevent his audience from escaping into illusion. Williams forestalls his characters’ conquest of “a world of reality that [they] were somehow set apart from.” None of the characters is truly able to cope with the demands of everyday life; therefore, all seek refuge in their own dream world, to such an extent that illusion itself becomes subjective reality.

In this the characters are not alone. Williams declared this denial of reality symptomatic of an era during which individuals would seek out “dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows,” in order briefly to forget about their lives and their troubles. But the diversion cannot last, and the conflict between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe, remains irreconcilable. This is the central theme of The Glass Menagerie . From it emerge two related themes: the impossibility of escape and the trap of memory—or of the past in general.

The play is memory in more than one sense. As is much of Williams’s work, The Glass Menagerie is poignantly autobiographical. However, this is by far his most autobiographical work. In July 1918, Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, exchanged his job as a traveling salesman for a managerial post with the International Shoe Company in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cornelius, his wife (Edwina Dakin Williams), and their two children, Rose Isabel Williams and Tom, left Clarksdale, Mississippi, to take up residence in what then was the fourth-largest city in the United States and a major industrial center.

From their initial quarters at a boardinghouse they moved into and out of a succession of apartments, including one at 4633 Winchester Place in downtown Saint Louis. The apartment had “two small windows, in the front and rear rooms, and a fire escape [that] blocked the smoky light from a back alley” (Spoto, 16). The wording may be less poetic than Williams’s stage directions for The Glass Menagerie , but it accurately describes the Wingfield home, and the Williams’s tenement at 4633 Winchester Place in Saint Louis later became known as the “Glass Menagerie Apartments.”

For Rose and Tom, both delicate and accustomed to the rural gentility of Mississippi and the relative stability their maternal grandparents had helped to provide, the relocation and its effects on their home life proved traumatic. Tom was seven years old at the time of the move, old enough to recognize that “there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that [the Williams family] belonged more to the latter” (Tynan, 456)—with all the ostracism this entailed. Although the play’s references to the Spanish civil war and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937 set The Glass Menagerie nearly two decades later, during the depression, the social and economic context and its bleak inescapability are virtually the same.

The family’s reduced circumstances were due to Cornelius Williams’s compulsive drinking and gambling, and the domestic situation was worsened by a string of illnesses and operations Edwina Williams had after the birth of the Williams’s youngest son, Dakin Williams. Caught between a volatile father and an infirm mother, Rose and Tom each found their own ways of escaping into safer fantasy worlds. Tom fled into literature, at first reading voraciously (much to his father’s distaste), but when his mother gave him a typewriter, he started to write poetry. The consequences for Rose, however, were far bleaker. By the early 1920s mental illness began to manifest itself through psychosomatic stomach problems and an inability to sustain any social contact, which turned her enrollment at Rubicam’s Business College into a debacle. Her condition worsened over the next 15 years, until, in 1937, her parents agreed to a prefrontal lobotomy, which left Rose in a state of childlike, almost autistic detachment. Tom, studying at the State University of Iowa by then, was informed only after the disastrous procedure. From that point on, the spirit of his sister “haunted his life” (Spoto, 60).

It also haunts The Glass Menagerie . Though physically rather than mentally disabled, Laura Wingfield is painfully shy and socially inept, and she wears her physical difference as a stifling protective cloak. Nicknamed “Blue Roses” in a clear reference to Williams’s sister, she has stomach pain caused by nervous self-consciousness when exposed to strangers, and she visits the penguins at the zoo instead of attending classes at Rubicam’s Business College. The focus of her life, to the exclusion of everything else, is her collection of glass animals, which serves as a symbol of her (and Rose’s) fragility. When Jim O’Connor accidentally breaks her glass unicorn, the loss of the horn offers a subtle but nonetheless striking reminder of Rose’s lobotomy. As Laura states, her unicorn “had an operation” to make it “less freakish.”

Rose is not the only member of the Williams family to appear in The Glass Menagerie . With the exception of Dakin, all of the Williamses are cast. Williams himself infuses his namesake Tom, the trapped poet-narrator, who hides in a closet to write and dreams of joining the merchant marine. Tom is a warehouse worker for Continental Shoemakers, and his job fills him with the same desperate frustration that caused Williams to suffer a nervous breakdown after his father withdrew him from college and forced him to work at the International Shoe Company between 1932 and 1935. Cornelius Williams, an alcoholic and a former telephone company employee, is clearly identifiable as the absent head of the Wingfield household, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

A more oblique and more sinister reference, which plays on Cornelius’s middle name, illustrates Tom’s/Williams’s attempts to break away from the presence of the father. Recounting his nightly exploits to Laura, Tom launches into the tale of Malvolio the Stage Magician and a coffin trick, “the wonderfullest trick of all. . . . We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail.” For Williams, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a flesh-and-blood opponent; for the character, Tom Wingfield, he is a photograph over the mantel and the mirror his mother relentlessly holds up to him. This disembodied specter is all the more oppressive because it cannot be fought or escaped. Condemned to stay at home because his father ran away, Tom looks for vicarious adventure, always fancies himself on the brink of moving, but has no idea when or where. When he finally does make a break, it is at the expense of taking the past with him. True escape is as impossible for him as it was for Williams: Laura/Rose constantly haunts him.

Completing the family analogies, Tom and Laura’s mother, Amanda, is a replica of Edwina Dakin Williams. Both have pretensions to be Southern belles, both claim to have been pursued by countless gentleman callers only to marry “this boy,” both are capable of prattling incessantly, and neither can cook or bake anything apart from angel food cake. They also share a dangerously tenuous grasp on reality that materializes in their aspirations for Laura and Rose, respectively. Both mothers are convinced that their daughter’s problem—be it lameness or schizophrenia—will dissolve if only she finds the right man. In the autumn of 1933, Edwina invited a family friend, “the very handsome Jim O’Connor” (Spoto, 43), as a prospective suitor for Rose. The experiment concluded in only one brief visit, which apparently upset Rose greatly. In the same vein, Amanda badgers Tom into inviting his shoe company colleague, and former high school basketball hero Jim O’Connor, as a gentleman caller for Laura. This attempt leads to an equally devastating result. Jim, brimming with self-satisfied optimism and bent on self-improvement, has nothing in common with Laura. He has genuine affection for her and does manage to draw her out, but the relationship cannot go further, because he is engaged to someone else. This revelation occurs just as Laura is beginning to believe that her high school crush on Jim could be fulfilled. In other words, the Gentleman Caller breaks her illusions and her spirit as easily and as casually as he has broken her glass unicorn.

The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s recollection of the events culminating in the visit of the Gentleman Caller. Everything in the play happens in and from memory. Insight and perspective are counterpoised by that peculiar trick of memory that diminishes some things and enlarges others, according to their importance. Such distortion always serves to sharpen and explain. Likewise, Tom’s account, always slightly unreal, always slightly over the top, veers between caricature and canonization.

Reminiscent of the brittle translucency of glass, Laura is imbued with a “pristine clarity” similar to that found in “early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas.” In stark contrast to Laura’s otherworldliness, Amanda and her idealized Southern girlhood—grotesquely laden with jonquils and suitors—clash with the everyday contingencies of cold-calling, mastication, a disabled daughter, and an absconded husband in a way that is both painfully comical and brutally revealing. Even Jim cannot escape from the exaggeration of memory. Having failed “to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty” (53), he is shown to wallow in the sweet smell of former basketball glory, yearbook pictures, and the admiration of a shy, lonely girl. “Try and you will succeed” is the futile battle cry Jim and Amanda share in the face of stagnation.

Because he is an outsider and inhabits the real world, Jim is raised to a symbol of hope, “the longdelayed but always expected something that we live for.” For Amanda expectation does not stop here. Roger B. Stein makes a convincing case that Jim has been cast as a Christ-like savior figure or, at the very least, as Moses about to lead the Wingfield family to the promised land of harmony and happiness (Stein, 141–153). There is no such land, of course, and only Amanda has promised it. The pivotal scene between Jim, the flawed suitor, and Laura exposes this fallacy. “Unicorns, aren’t they extinct in the modern world?” he asks when Laura shows him her favorite glass animal. The unicorn is a mythical animal and an alien even in the unreal world of Laura’s glass menagerie. In fact, it is so strange that Jim cannot recognize it as what it is without being prompted, just as he is unaware of the real reason why he has been invited to dinner. At this point the unicorn stands for the Wingfields’ combined dreams of escape: Amanda’s hope of the miracle cure of marriage for Laura, Tom’s longing for adventure and motion, and Laura’s tentative, naive, and unformed dream of love. The shattering of the glass unicorn heralds the collapse of those dreams as much as it heralds the personal shattering of Laura. Unicorns are extinct in the modern world, Jim is engaged, and escape from reality is impossible. Tom’s last monologue underscores this fact. His own break from home has only succeeded in setting him adrift and the sole guilty resting point he has left are his memories. Ironically, it is precisely those memories that prevent his true escape, because they forever tie him to the past.

With The Glass Menagerie , Williams set out to create a new kind of “Plastic Theatre,” a highly expressionistic language of the stage that would replace what he saw as the stale conventions of realism. He succeeded, thereby revolutionizing American theater. Within two weeks of opening on Broadway in 1945, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Claudia Cassidy, present at the Chicago premiere, had predicted The Glass Menagerie ’s success: “It was not only the quality of the work as something so delicate, so fragile. It was also indestructible and you knew right then” (Terkel, 144). Cassidy was correct about the play’s indestructibility, although for a long time, critics either failed to see or attempted to marginalize the play’s achievement. For some, the lyricism of language and expressiveness of theatrical devices obstructed the action. This response was due to the fact that the critics were married to an American theater tradition that demanded realism, which is precisely what Williams denounced in the production notes for the play. Instead of scientific photographic likeness, Williams attempted and conveyed spiritual and emotional truth.

The acid test of audience reception bears this out. Not tied to ideologies and convictions, audiences understood and responded immediately and favorably to The Glass Menagerie . A generation after its Chicago premiere, critical attitudes and opinions had shifted markedly. Many acknowledge The Glass Menagerie as possibly Williams’s greatest achievement because of the breadth of its cataclysmic vision, a vision “not only of individuals who fail to communicate with one another, nor a society temporarily adrift in a depression, but of man abandoned in the universe” (Stein, 153). This is the explanation for the play’s enduring appeal. As are all great works of art, it is not limited by time and space but manages to transcend both by touching on matters shared and universal. Spoto surmised that nothing Williams wrote after The Glass Menagerie possesses the “wholeness of sentiment,” its “breadth of spirit,” or its “quiet voice about the great reach of small lives” (Spoto, 116).

O’Connor, Jim

Jim is a former hero of the high school Tom and Laura Wingfield attended. He is also a colleague of Tom’s at the International Shoe Company. Tom invites Jim for dinner at the Wingfields’ apartment. Jim does not realize that Tom’s mother, Amanda Wingfield, has the ulterior motive of presenting him as a gentleman caller and prospective suitor for Laura. The plan fails, as Jimis already engaged. The character of Jim is based on an actual Jim O’Connor, who was one of Williams’s fellow students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. On one occasion he was invited to the Williams home with the goal that he would become better acquainted with Williams’s sister, Rose Williams.

Wingfield, Amanda

She is the mother of Tom and Laura Wingfield. Living in a dingy, Saint Louis apartment and struggling to make ends meet by selling magazine subscriptions, Amanda finds solace in the romantic memories of her girlhood. Her concern about her children’s future prompts her to bully them to live her ideal life, that of Southern gentility. Her inappropriate sense of propriety makes Tom and Laura miserable. As does Esmeralda Critchfield in Spring Storm , Amanda places importance on the need to have Laura marry a socially suitable young man. This goal causes an unhappy tension in the household and bitter friction, especially between Amanda and Tom. At her insistence, Tom invites Jim O’Connor, a fellow shoe factory worker, to visit the Wingfield home as a prospective gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda Wingfield is based on Williams’s mother, Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams. Mrs. Williams acknowledged the similarity and recalled that in her youth she was always “the belle of the ball,” who proudly “made [her] debut in Vicksburg twice” (Brown, 119). Mrs. Williams also said that she greatly enjoyed the character of Amanda, especially when she was played by Laurette Taylor, a “real genius,” who adequately captured the “pathos” of the character (Brown, 115–116).

Wingfield, Laura

Laura is the daughter of Amanda Wingfield and older sister of Tom Wingfield. A childhood illness has left her with a shortened leg, for which she has to wear a brace. Laura’s self-consciousness about her disability renders her unable to attend business college, and she seeks refuge in her collection of glass animals, the eponymous glass menagerie. Her encounter with Jim O’Connor, with whom she has been secretly infatuated since high school, proves traumatic when she finds out that he is engaged. Laura Wingfield is based on Williams’s sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

Wingfield, Tom

Tom is the narrator and simultaneously a character in the play. He has ambitions to be a poet, but he is forced to work at a shoe factory warehouse to support his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield. His home life in their Saint Louis apartment is miserable. His mother repeatedly accuses him of being selfish and regularly looks through his possessions. Dreaming of adventure and escape from his depressing job and home life, Tom spends most of his evenings at movies. He becomes a reluctant accomplice in his mother’s plan to secure a gentleman caller for Laura. He invites his workmate and former high school associate Jim O’Connor to the Wingfield apartment for dinner. The evening is a disaster, and his mother blames the negative turn of events on Tom. As a result, he leaves home, abandoning Amanda and Laura to their own resources. Tom is forever haunted by memories of his sister, and the play is his account of events surrounding his departure. Tom Wingfield is Williams’s most autobiographical character. Tom’s leave-taking mirrors Williams’s own departure from his family’s Saint Louis, MISSOURI, apartment and from his emotionally unstable sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

FURTHER READING Brown, Dennis. Shoptalk: Conversations about Theatre and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer—and Tennessee Williams’s Mother. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992). Cassidy, Claudia. “Fragile Drama Holds Theatre in Tight Spell,” Chicago Daily Theater Tribune, December 27, 1944, p. 11. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Stein, Roger B. “ The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe without Violence,” Western Humanities Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1964): 141–153. Terkel, Studs. The Spectator: Talk about Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them. New York: New Press, 1999. Tynan, Kenneth. “Valentine to Tennessee Williams,” in Drama and the Modern World: Plays and Essays, edited by Samuel Weiss. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1964, pp. 455–461.

Share this:

Categories: Drama Criticism , Literature

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Articles of Tennessee Williams' Play The Glass Menagerie , Critical Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Criticism of The Glass Menagerie , Essays of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Literary Criticism , Notes of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Scene wise analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Summary of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Tennessee Williams , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Criticism , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Essays , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Notes , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Project , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Themes , Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Thesis , The Glass Menagerie , Theatre Studies

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• study guides
• lesson plans
• homework help

Introduction & Overview of The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie Summary & Study Guide Description

The Glass Menagerie was originally produced in Chicago in 1944 and then staged m New York on Broadway in 1945. The text was also published in 1945. This play was the first of Williams's to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, an honor he was given four times. Although The Glass Menagerie also received much popular acclaim, some critics believe that the thematic devices that Williams relies on, such as the legends on the screen, are too heavy-handed.

The Glass Menagerie is autobiographical in its sources. In some ways, this is a coming of age story, with both Tom Wingfield and Laura Wingfield negotiating their roles as young adults. Like many coming of age stories, the major conflicts in this play are both internal and external; Tom cannot choose both the future he desires for himself and the future his mother, Amanda Wingfield, desires for him and for Laura. Emerging through this major conflict between Tom and Amanda are the themes of alienation and loneliness, duty and responsibility, and appearances and reality.

Through its poetic structure and reliance on stage technology, The Glass Menagerie has had a significant impact on later twentieth century drama. Tom serves as both narrator and character, dissolving the present into the past; Williams signals this by exploiting lighting and sound, especially music technologies that were less available to earlier playwrights. In this sense, the themes of the play are inseparable from its production values.

Read more from the Study Guide

FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:

The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee williams, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and all the events are drawn from the memories of the play’s narrator, Tom Wingfield , who is also a character in the play. The curtain rises to reveal the dimly lit Wingfield apartment, located in a lower-class tenement building in St. Louis. The apartment is entered by a fire escape . Tom stands on the fire escape and addresses the audience to set the scene. The play takes place in St. Louis in the nineteen-thirties. Tom works in a warehouse to support his mother, Amanda , and his sister, Laura . A gentleman caller, Tom says, will appear in the final scenes of the play. Tom and Laura’s father abandoned the family many years ago, and except for a single postcard reading “Hello––Goodbye!” has not been heard from since.

Tom enters the apartment, and the action of the play begins. Throughout the play, thematic music underscores many of the key moments. The Wingfields are seated at dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his table manners and his smoking. She regales Tom and Laura with memories of her youth as a Southern belle in Blue Mountain, courted by scores of gentleman callers. The stories are threadbare from constant repetition, but Tom and Laura let Amanda tell them again, Tom asking her questions as though reading from a script. Amanda is disappointed when Laura, for what appears to be the umpteenth time, says that she will never receive any gentleman callers.

Amanda has enrolled Laura in business college, but weeks later, Amanda discovers that Laura dropped out after the first few classes because of her debilitating social anxiety. Laura spends her days wandering alone around the park and the zoo. Laura also spends much of her time caring for her glass menagerie , a collection of glass figurines. Amanda is frustrated but quickly changes course, deciding that Laura’s best hope is to find a suitable man to marry. Laura tells Amanda about Jim , a boy that she had a crush on in high school. Amanda begins to raise extra money for the family by selling subscriptions for a women’s glamour magazine.

Tom, who feels stifled in both his job and his family life, writes poetry while at the warehouse. He escapes the apartment night after night through movies , drinking, and literature. Tom and Amanda argue bitterly, he claiming that she does not respect his privacy, she claiming that he must sacrifice for the good of the family. During one particularly heated argument, precipitated by Tom’s manuscripts pouring out of the typewriter , Tom accidentally shatters some of Laura’s precious glass animals.

Tom stumbles back early one morning and tells Laura about a magic trick involving a man who escapes from a nailed-up coffin. Tom sees the trick as symbolic of his life. Due to Laura’s pleading and gentle influence, Tom and Amanda eventually reconcile. They unite in their concern for Laura. Amanda implores Tom not to abandon the family as her husband did. She asks him to find a potential suitor for Laura at the warehouse. After a few months, Tom brings home his colleague Jim O’Connor, whom he knew in high school and who calls Tom “Shakespeare.” Amanda is overjoyed and throws herself into a whirlwind of preparation, fixing up the lighting in the apartment and making a new dress for Laura. When Laura first sees Jim and realizes that he is her high-school love, she is terrified; she answers the door but quickly dashes away. Amanda emerges in a gaudy, frilly, girlish dress from her youth and affects a thick Southern accent, as though she is the one receiving the gentleman caller. Laura is so overcome by the whole scene that she refuses to join the table, instead lying on the sofa in the living room.

After dinner, the lights in the apartment go out because Tom has not paid the electricity bill––instead, as Tom and Jim know but Laura and Amanda don’t, Tom has paid his dues to join the merchant marines. Amanda lights candles, and Jim joins Laura by candlelight in the living room. Laura slowly warms up and relaxes in Jim’s gently encouraging company. Laura reminds Jim that they knew each other in high school and that he had nicknamed her “Blue Roses,” a mispronunciation of her childhood attack of pleurosis. Jim tells Laura that she must overcome her inferiority complex through confidence. Laura shows Jim her glass collection and lets him hold the glass unicorn , her favorite. They begin to dance to the strains of a waltz coming from across the street. As they dance, however, Jim knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn.

Jim kisses Laura but immediately draws back, apologizing and explaining that he has a fiancée. Laura is devastated but tries not to show it. She gives him the broken glass unicorn as a souvenir. Amanda re-enters the living room and learns about Jim’s fiancée. After he leaves, she accuses Tom of playing a trick on them. Tom storms out of the house to the movies, and Amanda tells him to go to the moon. Tom explains that he got fired from his job not long after Jim’s visit and that he left his mother and sister. However, no matter how far he goes, he cannot leave his emotional ties behind. The play is his final act of catharsis to purge himself of the memories of his family.

The Glass Menagerie

By tennessee williams, the glass menagerie summary and analysis of scene 1.

Williams opens with extensive stage directions that set the scene of the play. He describes the Wingfield apartment, a small unit in a crowded urban area of St. Louis. Visible outside are a fire escape and narrow alleys flanking the building; through the transparent fourth wall, the audience can see the Wingfield living room and dining room. A large photograph of the family's absent father is on the wall. Also visible is a large collection of transparent glass animals, Laura's "glass menagerie," for which the play is named. There is a phonograph, along with some old records, and a stenography chart with a typewriter. During the opening, the transparent fourth wall ascends out of sight.

Tom emerges, dressed as a merchant sailor. In his first speech, he contrasts himself to a magician, giving "truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion," and establishes himself as a poet and the narrator of the play. He tells the audience that the play takes place in the thirties, when there was war in Spain and a different kind of turmoil in America. He warns that the play is a work of memory, and therefore is not realistic. There will be music, unrealistic lighting, certain events amplified and emphasized. He describes the characters: Amanda, his mother; Laura, his sister; a gentleman caller who will appear later in the play; and Tom's and Laura's absent father, who never appears, but is nonetheless an important figure in the play. Their father occasionally sends the family postcards from all over the world; the last one contained a two-word message of "Hello! Goodbye!" He abandoned the family many years ago.

As the action begins with Amanda calling Tom to the dinner table, the tension in the family immediately becomes apparent. Amanda is a sympathetic character, but she is also demanding of her children and often quite silly - instructing Tom, although he is a grown man whose wages support their family, how to chew his food. Laura tries to clear the table, but Amanda tells her to sit and be the lady while she does the work. As Tom goes out to smoke a cigarette, Amanda tells a story she has often told before, about one day in her youth when she received seventeen gentleman callers in a single afternoon. She names them, tells what they went on to do with their lives, and reminds her children miserably that she, who had her pick, chose their father. She then asks Laura when Laura's own gentleman callers are going to start arriving, and Laura responds nervously that she has none. The question clearly makes Tom uncomfortable. Amanda responds with incredulity to Laura's insistence that she is not as popular as her mother was back in the small town of Blue Mountain. The scene closes with Laura remarking wistfully to Tom that their mother is afraid that Laura will be an old maid.

From the beginning, the figure of the narrator shows that Williams' play will not follow the conventions of realistic theatre. The narrator breaks the conceptual "fourth wall" of naturalistic drama by addressing the audience directly. Tom also tells us that he is going to give the audience truth disguised as illusion, making the audience conscious of the chimerical quality of theatre. By playing with the theme of memory and its distortions, Williams is free to use music, monologues, and projected images to haunting effect. Tom, as narrator, tells the audience that the gentleman caller is a real person - more real, in many ways, than any other character - but he also tells the audience that the gentleman is a symbol for the "expected something that we live for," the thing for which we are always waiting and hoping. This naming of a character as both real entity and symbol is characteristic of Williams' work; both of these aspects of the gentleman caller are important to the overall impact of the play.

The allusion to Guernica and the turmoil in Spain, juxtaposed to the uneasy peace in America, establishes a tense atmosphere as the play's background. The Americans of the thirties lived in relative peace, if economic hardship, but for the 1944-5 audience of the play's first production, the thirties would have been seen as the calm before the storm of World War II. The allusion to Guernica (bombed by Germany, ally of the fascist forces in Spain; the carnage was famously depicted in a painting by Pablo Picasso) serves as a reminder that before long war will be coming to everyone, the United States included.

There is symmetry between the uneasy peace of the time period and the uneasy peace in the Wingfield house. Just as America stirs restlessly with the uneasy peace before the Second World War, Tom seethes with the need to escape his home and set out into the world, as his father did before him. The fire escape, a visually prominent part of the set, is an important symbol for the imprisonment that Tom feels and the possibility of a way out. In his stage directions, Williams characteristically imbues the fire escape with symbolic weight, saying that the buildings are burning with the "implacable fires of human desperation." Tom addresses the audience from the fire escape, and his positioning there, standing alone between the outside world and the space of the apartment, points to the painful choice he makes later in the play. In order to escape, he must escape alone and leave his mother and sister behind.

Originally, the script called for the use of a projector, which, during each scene, showed images to emphasize certain motifs and symbols. This projector was not used in the original Broadway production, but some productions since have used the idea and the instructions for the device remain in the script. For example, while Amanda is speaking, the script says that a projected image of Amanda as a young girl appears. These photographic images and projected text emphasize the symbolic elements of the play as well as the theme of memory; in the case of Amanda's image, we are given memory within memory, a memory framed by the larger memory of the play itself. The audience is therefore twice removed from the world of the image, contributing to the dream-like and ghostly atmosphere of the play. While the projected image gives added force to Amanda's words, showing the audience a visual representation alongside the images created by Amanda's speech, these visual images become symbolic of memory's paradoxical nature. On one hand, the visual image is real, right before our eyes, and full of evocative power; on the other hand, it is only a photograph from a distant past and is therefore frozen and lifeless.

Amanda is always returning mentally to this past, which is immaterial and far-removed from her current reality. Her reaction to Laura shows that she is strangely in denial about the nature of her own daughter. Laura is crippled, able to walk only slowly and with great effort, and emotionally she is terribly fragile. The contrast between the vivacious and talkative Amanda and her timid, soft-spoken daughter could not be starker. Tom has a tender relationship with Laura; when Tom expresses frustration at the start of Amanda's story about her gentlemen callers, it is Laura who persuades Tom to humor their mother.

The relationship between Tom and Amanda is tense. In this scene, he seems to be struggling to tolerate her, and while Amanda is loving, she is also demanding beyond reason. Her insistence that Laura stay put while Amanda plays "the darky" reveals her extremely provincial Southern upbringing. In her youth she was wealthy enough to have servants, but now, with her husband gone, she is struggling to make ends meet. Indeed, she wants to relive her past through Laura, transplanting the quaint life she had in Blue Mountain to the urban setting of St. Louis. Clearly, Amanda seems oblivious to Tom's unhappiness and Laura's painful shyness.

The Glass Menagerie Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Glass Menagerie is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is Jim's nickname for Tom?

Jim nicknamed Tom, Shakespeare.

In Scene 6, how does Amanda embarrass Tom?

Tom is embarrassed by his mother because she acts like a teenager in Jim's presence. She talks incessantly (about herself) and presents herself as if she were a young, southern belle in search of a husband.

What would you judge the Wingfield's social status as being?

In context, the family's social status/ financial status has declined. Amanda is described as once having been a Southern belle. She has been abandoned by her husband and is now supported by her son.

Study Guide for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie study guide contains a biography of Tennessee Williams, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Glass Menagerie
• The Glass Menagerie Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Glass Menagerie.

• Chekhov's Influence on the Work of Tennessee Williams
• Entrapment in The Glass Menagerie
• Odets and Williams's Women of the Depression
• Life's Fire Escape
• Symbolism of The Glass Menagerie

Lesson Plan for The Glass Menagerie

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Glass Menagerie
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Glass Menagerie Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Glass Menagerie

• Introduction
• Original Broadway cast
• Autobiographical elements

Highlights From the 2024 Tony Nominations: ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and ‘Stereophonic’ Earn Most Nods

Daniel Radcliffe, Leslie Odom Jr., Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Jeremy Strong and Alicia Keys all opened up about being recognized for their work on and for the stage.

• Share full article

Michael Paulson

Here’s what to know about the nominations.

A semi-autobiographical Alicia Keys musical and a play about a group of musicians struggling to record an album each got 13 Tony nominations on Tuesday, tying for the most nods in a packed Broadway season when shows need all the help they can get.

The musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” features some of Keys’s biggest hits as well as new songs by her. The play, “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s exploration of creativity and conflict inside a recording studio, is now the most-nominated play in Tony Awards history, besting a record set in 2021 by “Slave Play,” which had 12 nominations.

A star-studded production of “Merrily We Roll Along” that turned a storied Stephen Sondheim flop into one of the season’s biggest hits is favored to win the musical revival category. But it faces several other big revivals, including a lavish production of “Cabaret” starring Eddie Redmayne that got the most nominations of any show in the category, as well as a rollicking revival of “The Who’s Tommy” and a now-closed production of “Gutenberg! The Musical!” that found success with two appealing co-stars.

The two most nominated shows, “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Stereophonic,” opened 24 hours apart less than two weeks ago.

“Stereophonic,” which features songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, had an initial run last fall at the Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons. It succeeded despite a three-hour running time and no high-wattage celebrities — powered by strong reviews and word-of-mouth.

“I’m just gobsmacked,” said Adjmi, a longtime downtown playwright whose work has never before made it to Broadway. “I started this play 11 years ago and didn’t know if it would ever even be produced — it was impractical and wildly demanding on every level and I just made it from a place of passion and obsession. To be rewarded at a platform like this is so mind-bogglingly incredible I don’t have words.”

“Hell’s Kitchen,” which had an Off Broadway run starting last fall at the nonprofit Public Theater, is about a 17-year-old girl growing up in Manhattan and struggling to navigate first love, a hunger for independence and a tense relationship with a well-intentioned but overprotective single mother.

“I’m definitely in a deep state of freaking out, in a really great, awesome, grateful way,” said Keys, whose challenges as an adolescent in the 1990s shaped the plot of “Hell’s Kitchen.” “I have felt so connected to the mission of this story. I always felt that there was a purpose, there’s a reason, there’s something important about the story.”

The nominations come at a challenging time for Broadway. Theaters are packed with shows — 36 Tony-eligible shows opened this season, including an unusually large slate of 15 new musicals. But the costs of production have skyrocketed while the number of ticket buyers has fallen since the pandemic.

Here are some other highlights of the nominations:

Daniel Radcliffe finally broke whatever spell had impeded him from getting nominated for a Tony Award. The actor, beloved for his portrayal of Harry Potter in all eight films, has been overlooked by nominators during four previous Broadway outings, but on Tuesday he was recognized for his work in “Merrily We Roll Along.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” now heads into a race for the best musical prize that is unusually competitive , because none of the contenders has broken out as a consensus favorite at the box office or among critics. Just behind “Hell’s Kitchen” in the nominations derby is “The Outsiders,” a musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s classic young adult novel, which received 12 nods. The other nominees are “Illinoise,” a narrative dance telling a story of self-discovery, with songs from Sufjan Stevens; “Suffs,” a look at the women’s suffrage movement in the United States; and “Water for Elephants,” based on the novel about a circus romance.

“Stereophonic” appears to be the favorite in the best play race, but is up against four strong competitors: “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” “Mary Jane,” “Mother Play” and “Prayer for the French Republic.”

Notably, three of the nominated plays (“Jaja’s,” “Mary Jane” and “Prayer”) were produced on Broadway by a single nonprofit organization, the Manhattan Theater Club , and two of the nominated musicals (“Hell’s Kitchen” and “Suffs”) began at the Public Theater.

Among the screen stars who picked up Tony nods, in addition to Radcliffe and Redmayne, are Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons, Rachel McAdams, Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Liev Schreiber, Leslie Odom Jr. and Amy Ryan.

The nominations were chosen by a group of 44 people with theatrical expertise (many of them are artists or arts administrators) but no financial stake in the eligible shows. There were originally 60 in the group, but since they are required to see all 36 eligible shows, their number dwindled as some missed shows or developed conflicts of interest.

The Tony Awards, which are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, will be presented on June 16. The ceremony is to take place at Lincoln Center, hosted by Ariana DeBose, and broadcast on CBS.

Here’s what we know about the Tony Awards ceremony.

Now that we know who the Tony nominees are, the awards season begins in earnest.

So what happens next?

Over the next six-plus weeks, the nominees will be celebrating and campaigning.

On Thursday, they will assemble at a Midtown hotel to meet the press — a traditional post-nominations ritual at which they pose for photos, sit for interviews and get their official I’m-a-Tony-nominee pins.

Then come a string of other ceremonies (among them, the Drama League , Drama Critics’ Circle , Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards ), nonprofit galas (where nominees can mingle with, or perform in front of, Tony voters), and an annual luncheon at the Rainbow Room.

The Tony Awards ceremony this year is scheduled to take place on June 16 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater (home to the New York City Ballet). The televised portion of the ceremony is to air on CBS from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern, and to stream on Paramount+; there will be a preshow at which some awards are handed out that will stream on Pluto TV.

Ariana DeBose will host, for a third year in a row. She’s an Oscar winner for “West Side Story,” and has performed in six Broadway musicals; she was a 2018 Tony nominee for “Summer.”

Advertisement

What’s up next on Broadway? Plenty.

Broadway is pretty packed right now — there are 35 shows currently running, so there’s not a lot of room for more until some of those close (as a few of them, inevitably, will do following Tony nomination or award disappointments).

But there are a handful of new shows, and a concert stand, expected to open on Broadway between now and Labor Day.

First up: A revival of “Home,” a three-character play by Samm-Art Williams, is scheduled to begin previews May 17 and to open June 5 at the recently renamed Todd Haimes Theater. This production is to feature Tory Kittles, Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers; it is being directed by Kenny Leon and produced by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company.

“Home,” initially staged by the Negro Ensemble Company, first arrived on Broadway in 1980; it is a coming-of-age story about a young man from North Carolina.

Next: Ben Platt, who won a Tony Award for originating the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen,” will be playing an 18-performance concert residency to reopen the Palace Theater, which has been closed for six years for a construction project. Platt’s show is scheduled to run from May 28 to June 15.

“Oh, Mary!,” a madcap comedy from the alt-cabaret performer Cole Escola, is scheduled to begin performances June 26 and to open July 11 at the Lyceum Theater. The show, a historical fantasia about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, has been playing to sold-out houses at Off Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theater since January.

A very different style comedy, “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” had announced plans for a summer run, but decided to indefinitely postpone its run , citing Broadway's crowded landscape.

Still, there are likely to be at least one or two other new shows on Broadway this summer. There has been talk of a possible transfer of a City Center production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” starring Sutton Foster. And a play called “The Roommate,” starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, is expected to start performances this summer in anticipation of a post-Labor Day opening.

Alicia Keys on ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ nods: I’m in ‘a deep state of freaking out.’

Alicia Keys has been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for 13 years, so she found it serendipitous — in addition to thrilling — that on Tuesday morning her musical picked up 13 Tony nominations.

In an interview shortly after the nominations were announced, Keys was clearly heartened by the news. The show, featuring her songs and a book by Kristoffer Diaz, is personal for Keys . The show is about a 17-year-old girl whose life circumstances have enormous echoes of Keys’s own upbringing — the single mother, the hunger for independence, the passion for piano, even the same subsidized housing development.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Congratulations! What do you make of this?

Whoa! I’m definitely in a deep state of freaking out in a really great, awesome, grateful way. I don’t know what’s happening to me — I’m a songwriter and I can’t put my words together, but I feel unbelievable. I’m so excited for everybody to be recognized.

Did you ever have any doubts, or were you always confident about this one?

I’ve always felt really good about it, and I know that we’ve put the work and the time into it, and so I do feel a sense of strength and joy around it, but you just never know how people receive things. You never know how it all goes. And ultimately you can’t create with that in mind — you have to create with your mission in mind.

Do you really burn palo santo around the theater?

Absolutely! Every crevice, every backstage place, every dressing room, on the stage itself, in the theater, in the seats. Just creating that good energy.

Is it hard to watch people perform scenes that echo painful chapters in your own life?

It is painful and it is thrilling and it is emotional and it is honest. When Kecia Lewis sings “Perfect Way to Die” at the end of the first act, I don’t care how many times I see that, it touches me powerfully and poignantly every time. It is painful, but it’s also triumphant, you know?

What is it like for you to see your songs in a totally different context?

That is the part that I find to be the most curious and the most fascinating is how songs can continue to evolve even to its composer. There is something so special about that. When people leave the theater, they say, “I never heard those songs like that before.” And neither have I! There’s something really tremendous about just how it’s taken on a life of its own.

I know you want this show to run as long as possible. What are the tasks ahead for you?

Yes, that is the goal. I do have many dreams and many manifestations to be on the level of longevity of some of the greatest pieces of theater that have ever existed. That would be such a deep honor. And so we’re just going to keep working and keep loving, keep believing. And you know, the rest is up to whatever divine choice is meant for this.

So many shows only just opened. How did the nominations happen so quickly?

Of the 36 Tony-eligible shows on Broadway this season, 12 only just opened — during a frenetic nine-day period that wrapped up on April 25.

So how is it possible that the season’s Tony nominations are already being announced?

Broadway’s openings are always clustered around the Tony eligibility deadline — which this year was April 25 — because producers believe that Tony nominators and voters will remember most clearly, and hopefully fondly, the shows they saw most recently. (A similar phenomenon occurs in Hollywood, where many films open close to the deadline to qualify for the Oscars.)

The Tony nominators are required to see every show before they vote, and this year they voted on April 29. That meant they had to see a lot of shows in a short period of time — many of them set aside much of the second half of April for theatergoing. But with careful planning it can be done — in fact, it happens every year — because the nominators, like theater critics, are invited to see shows in preview performances starting a few days before the official opening, and can come to any performance after that, free of charge. Generally they have at least eight opportunities to see a show before they vote.

And who are the nominators? They are artists and arts administrators who are knowledgeable about theater but do not have a financial relationship to any Tony-eligible show. This year’s committee started with 60 members, but, as happens each year, several had to recuse themselves because they missed a show or developed a conflict of interest, so in the end 44 members of the committee wound up voting on this year’s nominations.

Laura Collins-Hughes

Jessica Lange, nominated for ‘Mother Play,’ wanted to create a new role.

Jessica Lange’s previous Broadway outings have all been in classics: Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie,” and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” for which she won a Tony Award in 2016.

This time, though, Lange is creating a role: Phyllis Herman, the title character in Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated “Mother Play,” whose entire cast — which also includes Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons — received Tony nods.

On Tuesday morning, Lange, 75, spoke by phone about her nomination. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Congratulations. How are you feeling?

What made me the very happiest of all news this morning was that the three of us were all nominated. Each part is integral to the whole, and to separate out would have been inconceivable.

Why did you say yes to playing Phyllis?

It came down to wanting to do a new play, which I’ve never done before. I’ve done the great kind of classics from the American canon. I didn’t quite know the process of working on a new play. I wanted to understand having a living playwright in the room with you, working and changing things and adapting. It’s a brand-new play. No one has ever seen it before. The character has not been played by a dozen other actresses in history.

When I look at your Broadway roles — Blanche DuBois, Amanda Wingfield, Mary Tyrone and now Phyllis — I see them belonging to a kind of lineage.

You could definitely draw a line from one to another. They have this profound disappointment and profound loneliness. Those are the things that, in the roles that I’ve been drawn to onstage, have really appealed to me. Like Mary Tyrone, which is the favorite role I’ve ever played, and would continue playing for the rest of my life if I could. [Laughs.] You can kind of trace that lineage through all four characters of some great, profound disappointment, and also some profound misjudgment. You know, that moment where you do something that you then regret for the rest of your life, and that follows you and haunts you.

You are playing a character based on a real person who was your playwright ’ s mother. Did that affect your approach?

Actually it didn’t, because I was not interested in doing some kind of historical representation, and I don’t think that was what Paula had in mind.

You have a stunner of a solo scene that ’ s long and quiet and almost wordless: Phyllis at home, engaged in the mundane tasks of a lonely life.

And counting the time until she can have her first drink. She has obviously set some kind of schedule that she won’t have her first drink before 7 o’clock or whatever it is. So it’s filling up that time. But even with the first drink, it’s not a balm. That is one of the most interesting scenes, I find. You read about this, that loneliness is epidemic in this country. I think it’s much more universal than we’re aware of. So to investigate that I found really fascinating: a woman coming home from work, she’s estranged from her children, her family is gone. What do you do to fill the hours before you can go to sleep and start yet another day?

You have a Tony for “Long Day ’ s Journey.” You have two Oscars. You have three Emmys. Do awards matter?

I’m not going to pretend that it’s meaningless, because it’s not. The people in your community, your peers or whatever, look at your work and say, “Yes, that was good work.” I mean, I’ve had enough that they haven’t acknowledged. [Laughs.] So when it’s acknowledged, I’m thrilled.

Julia Jacobs

Leslie Odom Jr. on his Tony nomination for ‘Purlie Victorious.’

To land the role of Aaron Burr in a new musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda called “Hamilton,” Leslie Odom Jr. had to go on a campaign of persuasion , imploring the show’s director over and over to cast him as the protagonist’s foil.

After the whirlwind of success that was “Hamilton,” Odom was the one making the choices for what was next.

For his return to Broadway, he decided on a revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play “Purlie Victorious,” an uproarious comedy about a Black preacher from Georgia. The original iteration of the play, about all that America has stolen from its Black citizens, had counted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. among its audience members . It had not been staged on Broadway since the Civil Rights Movement.

On Tuesday, Odom, 42 — who won a Tony in 2016 for his performance as Burr — received his second Tony nomination for his role as Purlie. He shared his delight over the phone from Philadelphia, where he learned the news in a hotel lobby as he struggled to find the livestream of the announcement on his phone. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

I’m sure after “Hamilton” you had plenty of choices for what to do next. Why “Purlie”?

Simply, I was looking for something harder than the challenge Lin had given us. Lin had given us the biggest challenge onstage that any of us had ever had before and after you climb a mountain like that there was a desire to keep climbing.

We’ve been dreaming about “Purlie” on Broadway and trying to get it on Broadway for years, so the fact that we made it, the fact that it did so well and connected with people in the way that it did, and then to have a morning like this, it’s just a feeling that I can’t quite describe. Certainly it’s harder to describe before I’ve had my coffee.

How was the challenge of “Purlie” different than the challenge of playing Burr, which included singing and dancing on top of the acting?

The amount of text — I had never taken on a challenge like that. The physical and emotional demands of it. There was also taking on the challenge of joining the producing team. Wearing both those hats — starring in the play and producing it — was something I had never done before. And this was a play that hadn’t been done in 62 years. There are some shows that we, for whatever reason, get real used to seeing every five or six years. “Purlie Victorious” has not been one of those shows, and so it was, in some ways, a new play for lots of people. It had a fair amount of challenges to it, and certainly more than I had when Lin-Manuel gave me the role of a lifetime and asked me to stand onstage eight shows a week and sing that music.

Are you looking for any particular challenges at this stage in your career? What’s something you haven’t done that you want to try?

There is. I don’t know if there’s anything I want to tell The [New York] Times about. You know, it was one of these kind of interviews after I won a Tony in 2016 — somebody said, “Is there any show that you want to revive?” and I said “Purlie.” So I’ve got to be careful what I wish for, is what I have learned.

Alexis Soloski

Jeremy Strong on his nomination and a role in ‘Enemy’ that felt ‘undeniable.’

Jeremy Strong’s best actor nomination for his starring role in the widely praised “An Enemy of the People” could not have come as a surprise. But it did. “It’s always a surprise, actually,” he said. “And the Tonys have always represented the highest accolade to me, the Holy Grail. So it’s incredibly gratifying.”

Strong, a star of the HBO phenomenon “Succession,” spent his early career in the theater. After a break of more than a decade, he returned in Amy Herzog’s adaptation of the Ibsen drama, directed by Sam Gold. Strong plays Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a man who discovers that his town’s beloved spa is dangerously polluted and a vector of infection. When Stockmann speaks his truth, the townspeople turn on him.

Having spent so many years away from the stage, Strong did not know if he would have the strength to carry the play. But he couldn’t deny the role and the environmental themes it explored. “It felt necessary,” he said. “The play felt like a summons.” And he feels that his time in film and television has influenced his stage acting.

“Maybe what I’ve been doing over the last 10 years has helped prepare me to try to be free up there,” he said.

Reached on the morning of the Tony nominations, Strong described playing the role as like “walking the plank,” “summiting Everest” and “walking a beautiful tightrope over an abyss.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Why did you choose this play for your return to theater?

It’s a play that speaks urgently to now. It’s a play about a man attempting to wake people up to an imminent ecological catastrophe and warn them of the steep and perilous cost of their inaction. And Amy Herzog and Sam Gold are people who I love deeply and have absolute faith in. So it just felt undeniable.

Dr. Stockmann is someone who speaks truth to power and then suffers the consequences. How close do you feel to the character?

The truth that Stockmann is fighting for is a much larger and more important truth than whatever my personal truth as an actor is. But I have to summon all the courage I have just to walk out there every day. Most of what’s in this character, it’s something that I’ve had to find through the play. There’s any number of things that fill me up and fire my imagination and my heart and passion, the climate crisis being first and foremost, and all of these incredibly brave, courageous scientists and activists who are putting themselves on the line to wake up our civilization.

During one of the press nights, the production was interrupted by climate change protesters . How did it feel to have the real intrude on the play?

It was difficult. But those people echoed and amplified the message of the play. While there was a slight wobble for me, ultimately it was quite easy to embrace what they were saying and to exhort them to continue. I was like, [expletive] it, they’re right. And I would be a hypocrite to try and silence people advocating for scientific truth. In retrospect, it was a gift, because it underlined what the play is about.

Daniel Radcliffe on breaking the spell with his first Tony nomination.

Daniel Radcliffe caught the first batch of Tony nominations during the announcement at 8:30 a.m. He texted congratulations to his “ Merrily We Roll Along ” co-star Jonathan Groff, who was nominated for best actor in a musical.

But then dad duty called before his own category, featured actor in a musical, was announced at 9:00.

“I was in the middle of doing breakfast and trying to put my son down for his morning nap, so I got a text from a member of the cast letting me know I was nominated,” said the actor, 34, who stars as the lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas in the acclaimed revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”

Radcliffe’s Tony nomination — for his fifth Broadway role since his 2008 debut in “Equus” — is the first of his career. And it’s extra special, he said in a phone conversation from his New York apartment on Tuesday, because not only Groff, but his other “Merrily” co-star, Lindsay Mendez, was also nominated, for featured actress.

“People in your line of work probably get bored of actors talking about how much they love each other, how much they enjoy working with each other,” said Radcliffe, who is best known for playing Harry Potter onscreen. “And we do say it a lot, but this group is really awesome — Lindsay, Jonathan, the whole cast. I feel so lucky.”

You recently were the ring bearer at Lindsay’s wedding , for which Jonathan served as the officiant. How did that come about?

It’s what I do in the show — when Jonathan and Katie Rose Clarke are getting married, I’m the ring bearer. So we were in Lindsay’s dressing room on the Saturday or Sunday before she got married, and she just offhandedly was like, “Would you be the ring bearer?” We found that funny. So I did! But also I suddenly went from going to a wedding with zero responsibilities to going and having to not screw something up; to not drop the rings and suddenly have them flying around Central Park! But it was fine.

All three of you have been with the show since its Off Broadway run in 2022. How has your performance grown and changed?

When we first met, we were getting on really well, but we were still getting to know each other, so we were having to act the friendship more. And now so much of it is just there. That’s not a feeling you get all the time as an actor. It’s rare, and I feel very lucky that I just have to look into Jonathan’s eyes or Lindsay’s eyes and get everything I need to get through whatever moment we’re doing.

What initially attracted you to the “Merrily” role?

When I saw this production in London, I had the reaction of going, “Oh, I’m really right for this part.” I could hear my voice in the character pretty early on. I love musical theater, but it’s not something I’ve done my whole life the way Jonathan and Lindsay have, so the vocal aspects and the musical aspects are the stuff I’ve really enjoyed, especially when the music is as incredible as Sondheim’s. “ Franklin Shepard ” in particular was pretty challenging to learn initially. But now that it’s in me, it’s incredibly fun.

There’s no challenge in musical theater like a Sondheim patter song.

The first few times I was doing it, it was genuinely terrifying. The one time Off Broadway where it kind of went wrong was one of the most terrifying things that’s ever happened to me onstage.

What happened?

I got ahead of the band by like half a beat, so I was out of sync with them for — it felt like 30 seconds, but it was probably less. Thankfully there are enough musical things happening in that song that I recognized one of them and was able to reorient myself.

Who is the person you’ve been most nervous to have come see the show?

Meryl Streep was in the audience one night, and I was very thrilled to find that out after the show was finished.

“Merrily” closes July 7. What’s next for you?

I’m going to take some time off and just be a dad for a while, which I’m very, very excited about.

Jesse Green ,  Alexis Soloski and Scott Heller

Tony nominations snubs and surprises: Steve Carell and ‘The Wiz’ miss out

The day of the Tony Award nominations is like college acceptance day a bit earlier in the spring, but on the scarcity model: Of the dozens of artists eligible in each category, only five or so are “admitted.” That means some great work gets left by the wayside — but also, because the number of nominators is small enough to be idiosyncratic, that plenty of outcomes defy all prediction. Here are our thoughts on this season’s inadvertent (and possibly advertent) snubs, delightful (or mystifying) surprises and other notable anomalies.

A melancholy morning for ‘Vanya.’

Television stars are considered good box office but not always good Tony bait. This year’s crop, including Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper, complicates that wisdom. Paulson is a likely winner but the men are already canceling each other out. Though Carell, in his Broadway debut, and Harper both play characters competing for the love of a married woman in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Uncle Vanya,” only Harper, excellent in a role that is usually considered supporting, was nominated as best leading actor in a play. (The production, which featured many lovely performances, was otherwise shut out.) Note that Chekhov let neither man win.

Deep cuts for ‘Stereophonic.’

How the nominators handled the ensemble in David Adjmi’s recording-studio-set play was going to be one of the morning’s most interesting questions. The answer: Generously, as five members of the young cast were singled out for their supporting performances, including Tom Pecinka and Sarah Pidgeon as the fraying central couple, and Juliana Canfield and Will Brill as their bandmates. Without an instrument in hand, Eli Gelb got in, too, as the ’70s rock group’s frazzled sound engineer. Spreading all that love helped take the show to Number One with a Bullet — the most nominated play in Broadway history.

Too many riches to go around.

On the other hand, the superb ensemble casts of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and “Illinoise” were skunked. That’s no accident: As more works these days distribute the storytelling burden equally among many members of a cast, odd nomination outcomes — feast or famine — can result.

That’s why we often argue here for a new category that honors ensembles. And Actors’ Equity, the national union representing actors and stage managers, goes further, with its annual award for Broadway choruses. Of the 23 musicals that opened this season, 21 are eligible; the winner will be notified on June 15 — pointedly, one day before the Tonys.

Women lead in directing.

In the history of the awards, only 10 women, beginning in 1998, have won prizes for directing. This year that number seems likely to rise, with seven of the 10 possible directing slots filled by women. Anne Kauffman, Lila Neugebauer and Whitney White have been nominated for best direction of a play, and Maria Friedman, Leigh Silverman, Jessica Stone and Danya Taymor (the niece of Julie Taymor, the first woman to win for direction of a musical) are in contention for best direction of a musical.

To love, honor and ignore.

The Tony nominating committee said “I do” to two pairs of actors playing married characters: Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara as lovers undone by alcoholism in “Days of Wine and Roses,” and Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood as an older couple grappling with dementia in “The Notebook.” But the shows did not receive the same love. Neither was nominated for best musical, though “Days of Wine and Roses” did pick up a nomination for score and “The Notebook” for book. Guess you can’t always have your wedding cake, and eat it too.

A warm Willkommen to ‘Cabaret.’

Rebecca Frecknall’s crepuscular revival of Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” was celebrated when it opened on the West End in 2021, eventually winning seven Olivier awards. But its Broadway transfer received a more muted response. (“Too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs ,” The New York Times wrote.) So who cares? Not the Tony nominators, who recognized the show with a nomination for best revival of a musical and gave nods to the actors — Eddie Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell — in all four categories.

No yellow brick road for ‘The Wiz.’

The much-anticipated revival has been one of spring’s early hits, but Tony nominators followed the lead of critics, not audiences, who didn’t have much nice to say about the show’s look, script and performances. “The Wiz,” which earned seven Tony awards when it arrived on Broadway in 1975, didn’t get a single nod this time around.

Shaina Taub gets out the vote (mostly).

Like “Hamilton,” the musical “Suffs” looks at American history through a contemporary lens. Like “Hamilton,” the show started at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway. And like “Hamilton,” it was written and composed by its multitalented star, here 35-year-old Shaina Taub . When nominations were announced, though, Taub didn’t pull off a Lin-Manuel Trifecta. She received nods for her music and book, two of six nominations for “Suffs,” but not for starring as the suffragist Alice Paul. Nikki M. James, already a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon,” got the show’s one acting nomination, as Ida B. Wells .

Pop/rock storms another stage…

Squint and you may think you’re at the Grammy Awards on Tonys night, as the best score nominees include Arcade Fire’s Will Butler (“Stereophonic”); David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (“Here Lies Love”); and Jamestown Revival (“The Outsiders”). Plus, of course, Sufjan Stevens, whose 2005 concept album is transcendently reorchestrated for dance in the best musical nominee “Illinoise,” and Alicia Keys, whose existing tunes power the most nominated musical of all, “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Except when it doesn’t.

Among those who might instead be watching from home: the not-nominated Barry Manilow (“Harmony”); Ingrid Michaelson (“The Notebook”); and Huey Lewis, whose songbook energizes “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” but didn’t rouse Tony nominators.

Waving the flag for ‘Illinoise’ and more.

Monday’s roster reflected a Broadway season that was notably American, even aside from “Illinoise,” a show actually named for a state. “Hell’s Kitchen,” nodding at the New York City neighborhood where Keys grew up, told a story we like to think of as local: Big dreams come true. “Suffs” took us behind the scenes of American history, as women fought for the vote. “Purlie Victorious” and “Appropriate” took contrasting approaches — one comic, one gothic — to the peculiar American institution of racism. But even aside from their content, the 17 productions nominated for the biggest prizes are overwhelmingly the work of American authors. (One of the touted London imports, Peter Morgan’s “Patriots,” didn’t even make the list for best play.) Is Broadway, which has too often resembled a British colony, finally achieving independence?

Sarah Paulson on her first Tony nomination, for ‘Appropriate.’

After Sarah Paulson moved to New York City when she was a young girl, her mother took a job as a waitress at Sardi’s, a storied Broadway restaurant. It opened up a world that she would not have otherwise been exposed to, helping to nurture her ambitions of performing onstage.

Paulson’s first acting job, at 19, was as a Broadway understudy, beginning a career that returned to the stage several more times but found its rhythm on television, with steady roles on Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” and a career-defining turn as the prosecutor Marcia Clark in the limited series “ The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story ,” for which she won an Emmy.

Despite complex roles as famous public figures and, once, a pair of conjoined twins , Paulson said her most challenging role has been in the Broadway drama “Appropriate,” for which she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play on Tuesday.

In “ Appropriate ,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins , Paulson plays an older sister clinging to her memories of her father as she and her siblings clear out his home after his death, confronting the family’s dark secrets and their grievances against one another in the process. In the script, Paulson gets to play with cutting insults, weighty monologues and plenty of yelling.

After learning of the news while still in bed, hours before taking the stage again, Paulson spoke about the endurance that it takes to be a stage actor and about her career coming full circle. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Tell me how you’re feeling right now about your first Tony nomination.

I feel very moved and certainly overwhelmed to be in a category with such extraordinary women, some of whom are my friends. More than anything there’s that little girl in me who moved to New York at 5 years old and whose mother got a job as a waitress at this theater hangout, to wake up and have a Tony nomination for the first time in my life, at 49, feels just wildly moving to me and something that I have dreamed about since I was a girl.

I think a lot of times we spent a lot of energy pretending like these things don’t matter, because at the end of the day, they don’t — in the grand scheme of things the work is all that matters — but the little girl in me cannot be quieted this morning with a kind of explosive joy and excitement for a childhood dream being realized.

What makes your role in “Appropriate” — as Toni Lafayette, this very headstrong, sometimes caustic woman — the toughest you have faced so far?

Part of it is the athleticism required to do a play eight times a week — vocally, spiritually, emotionally. It is literally different every night. Energetically, you can only prepare a certain amount and then something else happens onstage between you and the audience and you can’t prepare yourself for that. There are aspects of every performance that are unknown to you.

I remember one of the notes I got — I actually have it pinned up on my wall in my dressing room now — is that Toni belongs to you now. Ride the roller coaster with her; when she’s her most cruel, do it. When she’s her most loving, do it. When she’s her most vulnerable, allow that to happen. Toni is a roller coaster. She’s a roller coaster of a person, and therefore I have to be on that rickety roller coaster with her every night.