DIRECTOR'S NOTE
There are two versions of The Glass Menagerie. The first production in Chicago in 1945 did not use Williams' original script. The producers insisted that the unknown playwright delete all the non-realistic staging devices from the script he had submitted to them. The realistic edited play became a highly successful, deeply moving, sentimental tearjerker.
Many critics and directors prefer this edited version of The Glass Menagerie, agreeing with the critic J.L. Styan that the non-realistic elements" ... got in the way of the direct impact of the play's action".
There are, however, people like me who prefer Williams' original version. One reviewer of a
Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, perceptively pointed out that too many of Tennessee
Williams' plays in production have been "pushed toward realism, their complex truths dealt with as so much emotional merchandise to be peddled".
In this play, Tom looks back painfully on his earlier life. What Williams presents is not a literal depiction of what happened to Tom and his family. Rather, the play depicts Tom's emotionally charged memory of what actually occurred. To create this memory play which Tom insists is
"not realistic", I have cast a mature-aged actor as Tom who looks back at his past with a degree of anguish and wry humour. I have used the original version that Williams insisted on publishing in his Collected Works. All the non-realistic stage devices specified in this version of the play have been used because I believe they help to create a meaning that goes beyond sentimentality.
Tennessee Williams did not believe in God. He once wrote that "life has meaning if you're bucking for heaven. But if heaven is a fantasy, we are in this jungle with whatever we can work out for ourselves. It seems to me that the cards are stacked against us. The only victory is how we take it".
In an 'absurd' world in which there is no inherent meaning, Williams' characters create their own meaning. The playwright believed that "we are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life", and so The Glass Menagerie depicts how each character finds their own way to make life meaningful.
Williams thought that people create meaning for themselves by having faith in some set of illusions in order that they can, like Amanda, "live vitally". Laura believes in her comforting glass menagerie world; Tom believes in a world of adventure and escape; Amanda lives in a happy past; and Jim survives by believing in a successful future. He has total faith in the American Dream. Their differing strategies for giving meaning to their lives are "how they take it".
Williams' characters try to tolerate each other's different belief systems, but when this tolerance breaks down, conflict results.
My whole aim in this production is to provide the audience with an experience that goes beyond the presentation of a sentimental story of a Southern family battling through the Depression. As
Blanche Dubois says in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire: "I don't want realism, I want magic!'
—Geoffrey Borny
