The Glass Menagerie

American playwright Tennessee Williams has said: "My greatest affliction, which is perhaps the major theme of my writings, [is] the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights." It is this loneliness and longing which resonate so movingly in the poetic, family drama, The Glass Menagerie, Williams' first success and his most clearly autobiographical play.

Williams' real name is Tom, and so he chose to make the narrator of The Glass Menagerie a haunted young man called Tom Wingfield. The play consists of Tom's memories of his domineering mother and crippled sister, both of whom are lost in their own fantasy worlds. An innocent gentleman caller, unaware of the tangled Wingfield family's conflicts, is the catalyst for Tom's final, heartbroken desertion of his loved ones.

The Glass Menagerie, like other classics, deserves it reputation. Rich in symbolic imagery, the play affects the spectator directly, simply by the force of its characterizations. The University of Waterloo production tries to do justice to the unforgettable characters Williams has created.

The University of Waterloo Drama Department's presentation of The Glass Menagerie was directed by senior student, Jennifer Epps, and featured Joel Harris, Nancy Forde, Linda Albanese, and Joey Morin.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if yur wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

By: e.e. cummings