The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams (1944)
“The play that invented the memory play — and the most honest thing Williams ever wrote about guilt, love, and the people we leave behind.”
Short Summary
Tom Wingfield, a poet trapped in a St. Louis shoe warehouse, narrates from memory the events leading to his abandonment of his family: his faded Southern belle mother Amanda, who lives in delusions of her Mississippi girlhood, and his painfully shy sister Laura, who retreats into her collection of glass animals. Amanda pressures Tom to bring home a gentleman caller for Laura. The caller — Jim O'Connor, Tom's warehouse coworker — turns out to be the boy Laura secretly loved in high school. The evening ends in shattered glass and shattered hope. Tom leaves. He cannot escape the memory of Laura's face.
Detailed Summary
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play narrated by Tom Wingfield from an unspecified point in the future. The setting is a cramped St. Louis apartment in 1937, during the Great Depression. Tom is a poet who works at Continental Shoemakers to support his mother Amanda and his sister Laura, because thei...