by Tennessee Williams
Amanda Wingfield believes in the talent of her two children, Tom and Laura. And she believes in her own wealthy and romantic southern-states background. But are these beliefs based on fact? Or are they merely fantasy and wishful thinking?
In reality, Tom is a frustrated warehouse-worker, trapped at home by his family’s poverty and getting drunk every night because he cannot find the peace to compose the poems he wants to write. Laura is a painfully shy cripple, unable to get a job or even talk to people – a girl as fragile and delicate as glass.
The Glass Menagerie is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century American theatre – a play about fantasy and reality, about the unreliability and the pain of old memories, and about the lies and deceptions to which we resort in order to preserve our dreams.
Photos of 'The Glass Menagerie'
Extract from the script 'The Glass Menagerie'
| Laura: | I don't do anything – much. Oh, please don't think that I sit around doing nothing! My glass collection takes up a good deal of time. Glass is something you have to take good care of. |
| Jim: | What did you say – about glass? Isn't there something you take more interest in than anything else? |
| Laura: | Well I do – as I said – have my – glass collection – |
| Jim: | I' m not right sure I know what you're talking about. What kind of glass is it? |
| Laura: | Little articles of it, they're ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. |