The Glass Menagerie Background

The Glass Menagerie is a self-proclaimed “memory play,” but it does not recreate actual events — rather, it recreates the memory of emotion. Emotion, however, is never a singular node; it is a complex system of overlapping (for dramatic purposes) events, relationships, environments, sensory perceptions, and constraints of time. In writing The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams chose to lean on personal experience — his father’s absence as a traveling salesman and domestic violence when he was home; his mother’s eloquent and charming manner of speech; and his own 3-year stint in a shoe factory as a struggling poet. 

Perhaps none are more important to this play, this emotion, than that of Williams’ relationship to his older sister, Rose (The Paris Review), who spent the majority of her life in and out of hospitals and mental institutions. It was not until Rose was well into adulthood that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but by then, the family had fractured beyond repair. Despite their once closeness, Tennessee Williams severed contact with his sister in 1939 because “her talk was so obscene — she laughed and talked continual obscenities” (Independent). At the State Hospital in Farmington, Rose was “prescribed” Metrazol therapy, a form of injected shock therapy that forced epileptic seizures and induced the body to retreat into a coma. After six years of such treatment, Rose was given a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy in 1943. The Glass Menagerie premiered in 1944. Tennessee Williams would later use his royalties from A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) to pay for Rose’s care, frequently writing her letters and occasionally taking her on excursions outside the institution. 

What are we to make of personal history? Of feelings of guilt or loss? Even in the writing of this brief background, we are faced with an abundance of assumptions on my part, in the selecting of information on Tennessee Williams, in the words that present themselves as that information. Much has been made on scholarly criticism to assess the comparative value between Laura Wingfield and her real life counterpart, Rose Williams, but that conversation thread can often feel soulless, if only because it speaks in place of  Rose’s agency to asses her fictionalized representation herself. And perhaps that is why it is best to bear in mind that Williams’ intention was always to create imaginative memory, or remembered emotion. The characters in the play are intentionally fragments of himself, fragments of a complex system attempting “a more vivid penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.” 

The questions, therefore, we are left to consider with the internal, with the emotional imagination, are these questions of what Ursula Le Guin would call rhythm — conventions of language, tone, grammar — that establish character, without which, theatre does not exist.

Laura Does Not Cry…

The inception of Laura Does Not Cry was a class trip during my first year in SAIC’s graduate program to the International Museum of Surgical Science Museum. There was a wooden brace there from the early 1900s that, unexpectedly, triggered something within me, which didn’t take long to identify as my own personal relationship to disability, leg braces, and guesswork medical diagnosis. And I found myself writing a very brief poem as an email draft on my phone that included random references to various disabled characters in literature and film, and not thinking about it again for a year. I returned to it because I couldn’t put aside the idea that there was something there about disability I wanted to express, and I began to think of this short, hastily written message to myself as something that could be my way of remembering and acknowledging disability history.

From there, I asked myself, “When did my relationship to disability change?” And this is a question I believe can apply to any work that is in the beginning stages, inserting whatever concept, person, or idea into the formula, “When did my relationship to X change?” I picked several vivid moments from my life, and thought of them as planets, and it was my job as the writer to choose the memory that would serve as the “sun.” This is something else that I think could apply to any work that is fracturing time, memories, or even concepts together, to imagine them as a sort of mini-cosmos that are all dependent on a “sun” for their survival. Some films that excel in this narrative fracturing are Arrival, Pulp Fiction, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Women (2019), and Your Name. 

The Glass Menagerie and the emotional work within it is not the “sun” of my playscript — it is a planet. No matter how strong an external influence may be in your own writing, performance, or practice, it is impossible to borrow the emotion of another artist. The sun must come from yourself. A good starting place is a symbol — a leg brace, for instance — that keeps you grounded in something emotionally real. This symbol may end up being a planet, maybe even a distant moon, in the process; in fact, maybe it should. The typewriter and the glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie are important to Laura Wingfield, but they do not represent her entire identity. Likewise, the“leg brace” may have begun my project, but it is not the emotional center.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the concept that I have been talking around: trauma. In this talk of interior emotion, we must acknowledge that sometimes we are not ready to confront such emotions, maybe because we are still finding, as Virginia Woolf says, the right rhythms, the right tone to express it. That is good. We are not running from trauma; we are meeting it when we are at the advantage. I offer up one final thought on the matter of how playwriting and performance can help with that. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk in The Body Keeps The Score writes, “Our sense of agency, how much we feel in control, is defined by our relationship with our bodies and its rhythms. In order to find our voice, we have to be in our bodies … Theatre involves a collective confrontation with the realities of the human condition. Trauma is about trying to forget; theatre is about finding ways of telling the truth.”

The inception of Laura Does Not Cry was a class trip to the Surgical Science Museum during my first year in SAIC’s graduate program. There was a wooden brace there from the early 1900s that triggered my own relationship to disability, leg braces, and guesswork medical diagnoses. I found myself writing a brief poem as an email draft on my phone that included scattered references to disabled characters in literature and film, and not thinking about it again for a year. I returned to it because I slowly started to think of this short, hastily written message as something that could be my way of remembering and acknowledging my disability history.

From there, I asked myself, “When did my relationship to disability change?” I picked several moments from my life and thought of them as planets, and it was my job to choose the memory that would serve as the “sun,” something that would bring this mini-cosmos of fractured time, memories, and concepts together. 

It’s important to say that The Glass Menagerie is not the “sun” — it is a planet. No matter how strong an external influence may be in your own writing, performance, or practice, it is impossible to borrow the emotion of another artist. The typewriter and the glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie are important to Laura Wingfield, but they do not represent her entire identity. Likewise, the “leg brace” may have begun my project, but it is not the emotional center.

What that sun is, exactly, I’ll leave for the audience to interpret for themselves. 

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the concept that I have been talking around: trauma. In this talk of interior emotion, we must acknowledge that sometimes we are not ready to confront such emotions. It took me over a year, as Virginia Woolf might say, to find the “right rhythm” of this story, but as Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk in The Body Keeps The Score writes, “Trauma is about trying to forget; theatre is about finding ways of telling the truth.”

On Performing Laura Does Not Cry… (Virtually)

I originally wrote this script for a live theatre audience, but had to adapt it fro a virtual performance due to the COVID pandemic. 

The idea of having each performer represent four different concepts makes more sense when you can see these design shifts — lighting, costume, blocking, sets, etc. — but it’s much more confusing when the only thing you have to rely on is the sound of the performer’s voice. 

Artistically, I made the decision not to have the performers’ web-cameras on — the argument for it being that each camera would have delineated how each person is representative of multiple concepts — but I felt it would distract from the internal memoir of this piece and make it harder for the audience to track the story. I came up with a slideshow of visuals — illustrations, text-based images, photography, and video content — as the virtual comparative to lighting or set design, accentuating the emotion of the narrative while also helping the audience form connections as the scene shifts in memory and time.

The timing of matching the slideshow to the script became the biggest challenge, because I had to break down every beat of the script and think about what narrative and emotional information is being presented, and then design a simple yet effective image that would pair well onscreen. It forced me to be more demonstrative than I like to be in the cue-to-cue script because I had to map out exactly when to change image onscreen for the tech director, but it did allow me to take a directorial approach to the timing of the performance.

The photographs were actually something that I had always planned on incorporating into the performance, even in a stage version, because I had compiled some of my photos that fit really well with this script. In my mind, my thought was to project those photos on a screen or a curtain or a wall at specific moments, but it wouldn’t be this constantly running stream of video like it was for IMPACT. But it challenged me to come up with more visual content — I actually contacted my physician’s office to get copies of my x-rays, and I ended up shooting a video of putting on my old leg brace, which is something I never would have done if not for the virtual experience.

I ended up creating a hybrid between a radio play and a short film that got to the heart of some of my childhood fears. Though as far as the performance goes, the absolute reliance on seven different Internet connections (the four performers, my moderator, SAIC’s host on Zoom, and the livestream video) staying alive was the scariest bit.