The glass Menagerie By T Williams Essays

The glass Menagerie By T Williams Essays The glass Menagerie By T Williams Essay The glass Menagerie By T Williams Essay Essay Topic: Literature The Glass Menagerie The glass menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams in the mid 1940s and is what many consider to be his best ever work. Like many of his plays, The Glass Menagerie is set in the south of Northern America and consists of five characters. The play is said to mirror Tennessees life very closely as he was brought up with an overbearing mother, a disabled sister and devoid of a father figure in his life. The play shows the Tom characters struggle for independence and freedom from his current existence. The entire play is centred on two of the five characters, even though one of these characters, the gentleman caller, only arrives in the final scenes, and the father, who is illusive throughout the entire play but is mentioned and referred to throughout. For the performance piece, I played the character of Amanda, Toms imperious mother. The scene that we performed was directly after a scene where Tom and Amanda had had a furious argument with Amanda and Tom both saying how they truly felt about how the other one treats and acts towards them. Our scene starts with lots of stage directions that truly build up the tension between Tom and Amanda that grows and grows with the silence and the physical distance between them, and is only broken by Tom breaking this strain of characters by saying the first sorry. There is very strong sub- text to the scene that is shown more in the stage directions then in the text. The sub- text being that Amanda was truly hurt by the things that Tom had said to her and is genuinely terrified that she will once again be left another loved one, but this does not mean that she is scarred because she will miss her son solely as a mother, but because the more manipulative, self centred side of her will miss him as the provider and the bread-winner. This sub- text is apparent when she turns the conversation from Toms love of the movies to how he should completely forget about his own aspirations and dreams and concentrate more on his job, most young men find adventure in their careers. which is paying for the house which he coincidently he shares with his mother and sister. The main plot in the scene is not set and changes from Tom apologising to his mother, to her trying to talk to him about Laura, to them both ultimately arguing about what they where arguing about in the previous scene. I played the character of Amanda to demonstrate the plot and the sub-text by using the dialogue and the stage directions that are given and exaggerated them slightly as the play is that of memory and is not a realistic play. I used facial expressions to display the way I felt about the way the conversation was going and to show the way that my character was feeling, such as the look of embarrassment when she asks Tom, promise me son that you will never be a drunkard. I think that while asking Tom this Amanda has an uncomfortable look because that is how she feels, she thinks that Tom may dismiss her worries as a load of over the top dramatisation that his is so used to seeing from his mother, or because she is revealing one of her biggest fears to her son, that stems from her husband leaving her, and will also expose an extremely venerable side of her that her son has probably never seen to her before. The start of the scene is one of the most important parts, as it is the part that has the most stage directions in it. The stage directions that were given told me that I should play Amanda as a hard character, I showed this by turning away from Tom as soon as he entered the room, and saying like this throughout, until he apologised. When he did apologise I remained facing away from him because even though Amanda was crying, Tom had given her the higher status by making amends first, and I feel that Amanda is a character that would want to hold on to the higher status for as long as she could, and by turning away from Tom she is keeping him in suspense as to how she is going to react to his request for forgiveness. The staging of the scene is very simple as the entire play is a memory and is therefore very selective. The set for this scene is a small dining table and two chairs. All of the props are mimed as directed at the very beginning of the play. The audience were end on as we felt that they could then see all of the facial expressions and gestures better in this type of staging. The only entrance made is from Tom as we thought that is would be better if Amanda was already in the scene, that way the audience would be able to see the contrast between how she behaves and her body language is before Tom is in the scene, and how she is and how they are towards each other after he has entered. There is a moment at the very beginning of the play where there is no dialogue but lots of stage directions. This creates a very tense atmosphere as neither of our characters was doing a lot of movement, but because they have just had a dispute and you can see that Tom is going to make an attempt to talk or apologise to Amanda it builds and builds the tension so much that with every failed attempt Tom makes, the atmosphere is at breaking point, until Tom actually speaks and it is somewhat of an anti-climax as all of a sudden all of the dramatic tension is lost and Amanda cries. This section as an opening to the scene also shows pace as well, as the pace in the beginning is very slow and almost not moving at all, as where in the middle of the scene where Tom and Amanda have started arguing again the pace is very quick with lines overlapping. This also created a tense atmosphere between our two characters but in a different way to the start of the scene. The moment in the middle of the play where Amanda changes from the nicer Amanda back to the familiar aggressive Amanda, I made a long pause to show that a change had occurred, and also to allow time for the audience to take in what had happened in the scene and what would happen. I tried to make the change in her personality clear also by using lots of facial expressions.