Final Draft
The broken menagerie, the broken dream, the broken family
Chak ho (David) Chau
March 9, 2018
Word count: 1770
‘The Glass Menagerie’ is written by Tennessee Williams that is based on his own memory with some changes. It reflects the harsh society during the Great Depression, and how people give up their dreams due to the poor conditions. The story focuses on the character Tom Winfield who dreams to become a writer but instead works in a warehouse because of his family’s poor financial condition. His mother Amanda wants to find a husband for her physically disabled daughter Laura desperately, who is too shy to interact with others, her only hobby is to collect glass menagerie. The part that my group (Stella, David and I) chose to act was the combination of Act1 scene2 and scene3. The conversations between Amanda and her children, and how she keeps annoying Tom and Tom is eventually outraged and accidentally breaks Laura’s glass menagerie. The thesis of this performance was to explore the broken relationship between Amanda and her children, which includes Amanda’s disappointment when she hears the fact that Laura has been lying to her about going to school, and also the major shift in Tom’s emotion from clam to annoyed and at the end, then turns into pugnacious to his mother. Both scenes reflect that under the pressure from the harsh reality, every character has their own problem and they all struggle with chasing their dreams. In this essay, I will mainly focus on the literary analysis (The use of language and explore the deep thoughts of each character) of the part my group chose to play, and also how our performance correlates to the literary interpretation.
Throughout the play, all three characters are disappointed at their current situation. Amanda is desperate to let her daughter to get married and keeps reminiscing her joyful past. Laura is too shy to communicate with people, so instead, she goes to a walk every night in order to escape from the reality. Tom, a writer who has a big dream, is trapped to work in the warehouse to pay the bills, he is also tired of his garrulous mother. For instance, Tom’s disappointment of life can be shown in Act 1 scene 3 when he argues with Amanda. He says ‘Look, mother, do you think I’m crazy about the warehouse? You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemaker? You think I want to spend fifty-five years of my life down there?’(Williams page23). From this solemn tone, it indicates that Tom is not willing to work in the place that vanishes his dream slowly. In Tom’s opinion, his dream is lack of support from his mother because Amanda clearly does not care about his writer dream, this is shown when Tom says to Amanda ‘I know it seems unimportant to you, what I’m doing, what I’m trying to do, having a difference between them! You don't think that!’(Williams page23). It is depressing to see the fact that Tom does not get any encourages from his family.
Tennessee Williams also shows the strained relationship between Amanda and Tom by using aggressive language. For instance, in Tom’s last line when Amanda asks where Tom is going, Tom replies ‘Oh I could tell you things to make you sleepless, you ugly babbling old witch!’(Williams page24). The lexical choice Tom uses to describe his mother such as ‘Ugly’ and ‘Witch’ does not only emphasize Tom’s anger to Amanda but also his disappointment to the unfair reality and his dying dream. A son can use such rude language to talk to his mother tells us how broken their relationship is. The use of repetition by the author shows the rise in emotions of Tom, as the conversation goes, both Tom and Amanda’s language become more aggressive, as Tom becomes angrier, we can see the more uses of repetition, such as “House! House!”(Williams page22), “Do you think…do you think…”(Williams page23) and “That's very very true”(Williams page23). Also, these instances indicate Tom’s increasing madness. All the complaining can be understood as Tom’s hardship because he needs to support this whole family. The movies he goes to are symbolized as a shelter for him, a shelter that is not only for him to escape from his mother’s nonsense, but also for a place for him to plan his future, which then later he joined the Union of Merchant Seamen.
Bringing the scene onto the stage, on February 13th, Stella Chen, David Dai and I performed our short piece in the black box. I chose to play the character of Tom Winfield. It was challenging to take such a significant character who has a dramatic change in emotions throughout the scene (from calm to angry). However, I treated this experience as a chance to explore my potential of creating drama. Since I was not in the first scene of the performance, I will only focus on the second scene and how we used different strategies and acting techniques to explore the dramatic potential of this part of the text.
My character began the scene by showing Tom’s lack of patience to his mother. Amanda came and tapped my back to tell me to sit straight while I was writing. I turned my head and said ‘Now what are you up to?’(Williams page21) impatiently. Later in the scene, I had a line ‘Mother, will you please go away and let me finish my writing?’(Williams page21) I said the word ‘please’ really long and tried to enunciate more, in order to show Tom’s dedication to writing and he really wants to finish his writing. Then the emotions started to build up when there was a breaking point where I said ‘House, house! Who pays the rent on this house…’(Williams page22), then after series of arguing, it reached the climax where I totally expressed Tom’s thoughts of his mother and his family by using the dialogue ‘…you ugly babbling old witch!’(Williams page23). From the first few lines where the conversation did not get too intense yet, I controlled my voice at a suitable volume that is not too loud but showed a bit of impatience. In addition, in the first line before I said ‘Now what are you up to?’(Williams page21) I looked back to Amanda slowly with a facial expression of tiredness and stress in order to show my unwillingness to listen. As the conversation gets intense enough to the breaking point where I was triggered by Amanda saying ‘Her house’, I stood up from the chair quickly and immediately raised my volume. Also, in order to show my anger, I fisted my left hand and pointed at Amanda with my right hand, and started breathing heavily. During the performance, we constantly had subtle switches in levels, we discovered an order that when one character is talking, he/she will be on a higher level than the other character. For instance, when I was saying the line ‘Look, mother, I haven’t got a thing, not a single thing left in this house that I can call it my own.’(Williams page22) I stood up from the chair and walk toward to Amanda, Amanda on the other hand, as a lower level character, drew back and try to keep a distance between us, which means I was more powerful when I was talking.
The theme of hopelessness was shown at the end when I left the room, I grabbed my coat from the hanger and swang it widely. I accidentally hit the glass menagerie to the ground which was originally on the table and broke it. All three characters looked at the menagerie with a facial expression of surprise and antsy. From character’s perspective, this symbolizes the end of Laura’s unreal dream and this drags her back to the brutal reality. However, from reader’s perspective, this starts a new chapter of Laura’s life, because she starts to realize this childish menagerie dream will not make her life better, instead, she needs to face to the challenge.
After hours and hours of discussion about what kind of setting on the stage we will have, we eventually decided to keep it as simple as possible so that the audience will only focus on the acting and will not be distracted by the fancy lighting or costumes. There were only two shots of light, one on Tom and the other one was on Amanda and Laura. The blackout during the performance indicated the switch between two scenes. For staging, it was simply two chairs, two tables, one hanger and one typing machine. The theme of estrangement was showed by keeping the distance between two tables. The table Amanda used is far from the table I was using. This is because we wanted to show that Tom wants to keep Amanda away from his life. This is effective because it shows the bad relationship Amanda has with Tom.
It is important to reflect what I could do better and what went wrong during the performance. Although I showed enough facial expression and good use of voice, it would be more natural if I added more movement while I was talking. For example, when I said the line “Well, I'm not going to listen, I’m going out.”(Williams page23) I could walk around on stage and act like I’m grabbing my wallet and coat, also speed up my feet to show how desperate I was to leave the house, the house of hopelessness. In addition, maybe at the end when I broke the glass menagerie, there could be a sad background music in order to show the accident and how Laura’s fantasy world has vanished.
Playing the role of Tom was relatively challenging for me since I don't have any personal experience of facing the poor condition and the harsh side of the society, so I could not use Stanislavsky’s method (relate the story of your character to your own experience). But after a long time of practicing and the help from my teacher and group mates, I eventually conquered the difficulties. The process of analyzing the relationship between Amanda and her children really helped me to learn how to create drama by using changes in voice and body language. The design of the stage taught me how to use props to symbolize different themes. Overall, it was such a great experience to perform this great play and be allowed to express my creativity.
Works cited
Williams Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie 440 Park Avenue South New York 1976 print
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