“The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie was an instant success. Before that, he was a playwright of very little success and in fact, most of his early works were poorly received. Since its debut in Chicago in 1944, Williams’s play has been performed numerous times on the stage and adapted for the screen. The Glass Menagerie made him something of a star – which Williams noted “snatched [him] out of virtual oblivion and thrust [him] into sudden prominence.” As far as he was concerned, he was afflicted by the “catastrophe of Success.”

Williams was forthcoming about the “inspiration” behind the play. It is his most autobiographical creation. He was unable to absolve himself of the guilt of neglecting his sister’s well-being – she was seriously mentally unwell, and as was the norm of the day, was made to undergo prefrontal lobotomy. If it were up to him, as Williams would later say, he would have tried harder to prevent the operation. By creating Laura, Tom’s mentally unwell cripple sister, Williams had written his “saddest...

Read more