When Autobiography Isn't
by Lenora Inez Brown, Production Dramaturg

Tennesee Williams, the Man and the Artist
by Jack Taburri, Reasearch Assistant

Returning to Williams' Original
by Marin Kirby Executive Assistant

When Autobiography Isn't
by Lenora Inez Brown, Production Dramaturg

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. Most young writers have heard this when their ideas run afield, and subsequently those who search for new literary talent read too many thinly veiled autobiographies. On occasion, however, a play, poem or novel leaps beyond the predictable coming of age fare and subsequently lands on the stage or nightstand. Numerous critics consider Williams’ breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie a prime example of excellent salad days writing. Certainly each member of the Wingfield clan resembles members of Williams’ own family, but the writing reveals Williams to be more than a biographer, because he moves well beyond the limits of his family’s flaws. More importantly, he shows himself to be a social critic who dissects the never-ending, everconstant fading of time to highlight our fleeting preparedness to live comfortably within it.

The Glass Menagerie began as a short story in 1941 entitled Portrait of a Girl in Glass. Williams’ 60 short stories are, like his plays, smoldering narratives detailing the act of looking at and longing for things and people that remain just out of reach. That blistering truth fixes the characters, especially his tragic heroes and heroines, into standing still or tumbling downward as they frantically grasp for the promise of what they felt they were entitled to. Amanda and Tom suffer mightily once each realizes that the present will never match the past’s promise. Another heroine, Blanche Dubois, endures more, slipping into madness once the vestiges of the Old South slough off.

Portrait of a Girl is the story of a girl who, like Williams’ sister Rose, was labeled “different” and described as lonely, if not forlorn. In Portrait of a Girl in Glass, the girl waits for something akin to the kindness of strangers, but with the tentativeness of Alma from Summer and Smoke. But in 1941 Williams hadn’t yet mastered how to depict a woman (or man) shunned for living with difference and so he placed the short story in the proverbial drawer. Soon after, Williams revisited Portrait and adapted it into two short pieces, one comic and one tragic. Perhaps he was motivated to delve deeper into the young girl’s story by these dramatic incarnations or simply bored with the Hollywood gig his agent Audrey Wood found forhim, since these rewrites occurred during Williams’ brief time as a staff writer for MGM charged with writing vehicles for stars and starlets, in this case a young Lana Turner.

Between memos berating him for failing to create a suitable film for Turner, Williams took to writing The Gentleman Caller, a cinematic version of his original short story. Throughout the new scripts, Williams tinkered with where the young girl waited for her callers and how actively she pursued them or they her. Her inability to hold onto the mysterious man, however, remained constant.

Was this because Williams saw his spinster sister and a bit of himself in Laura? Or was it because this girl and the world she introduced Williams to helped clarify a senseless time? As Williams neared his stage version, which premiered here in Chicago December 26, 1944 at the Civic Theatre (now enveloped by the Lyric Opera), Hitler had risen to power, Chamberlain ignored rising German nationalism and unsuspecting towns like Guernica were bombed in unprovoked attacks.

Williams firmly set the play during a global shift with Tom’s opening monologue and frames the saga with The Great Depression. But more importantly, the action unfolds through characters formed by the preceding 70 years: the Civil War (Amanda’s parents); the tail end of Reconstruction (Amanda’s early childhood); and WWI (Tom and Laura’s births and early childhoods).

In truth, the characters in The Glass Menagerie (and its original audience) were caught in a temporal shift, which may account for why the play took so long to catch on and critics returned numerous times to see and review the enigmatic play. The Antebellum world that shaped this play is literally as near to them as The Great Depression is to us–70 years. We too, despite our many technological advances, still grapple with a 70-year- old legacy. Some remember living through the Thirties while others debate the merits of agencies introduced by FDR like Social Security. And like the Wingfields, few of us are prepared for the demands of our new society and the changing etiquette governing many things including online dating.

Considering this, how different are we from Amanda, whose expectations regarding courting are as outdated? Or, Blanche, Maggie and Big Daddy who contend with how to hold onto the vestiges of the old south amidst new ideas of expected behavior. Blanche fares poorly, choosing to step outside her traditional boundaries and engage in physical relations with her young male students and the coarse (as well as ethnic and religious outsider) Stanley Kowalski. Maggie and Big Daddy implode as they struggle to reconcile Brick’s sexual preference with their traditional definitions of masculinity and honoring the family name.

Eventually, The Gentleman Caller morphed into a play entitled The Glass Menagerie. Image projections and supertitles suggest Hollywood influence. But these then-avant garde elements connect Williams to experimental writers and work he discussed or saw while living in New York: O’Neill (memory and narration) Elmer Rice (episodic structure) and Brecht (projections and titles that reveal the essential action of the upcoming scene). Williams also followed their examples for taking the realistic expectations of time and realistic structure and redefining dramatic expectation because he sought to wrap the audience in the experience of the memory rather than simply sharing memories.

Williams noticed how Americans bristled as change confronted them. Religious and ethnic migrations altered neighborhood borders and other social boundaries. Within the fading economic designations of working- and upperclass, he explored the struggles of people learning to occupy the same space. Through that lens, his plays are more than tales of Civil War descendents and immigrants engaging in illicit and sometimes violent romances (as in The Rose Tattoo, Sweet Bird of Youth or Orpheus Descending). They are poetic American dramas that begin with a Southern landscape to illuminate the soul of a nation in the midst of change.

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