The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams

Paperback, 104 pages

English language

Published June 17, 1999 by New Directions.

ISBN:: 978-0-8112-1404-9
Goodreads:: 92517

(27 reviews)

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister. In writing the play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller. The play premiered in Chicago in 1944. After a shaky start, it was championed by Chicago critics Ashton Stevens and Claudia Cassidy, whose enthusiasm helped build audiences so the producers could move the play to Broadway where it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1945. The Glass Menagerie was Williams' first successful play; he went on to become one of America's most highly regarded playwrights.

5 editions

mikerickson reviewed The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

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3 stars

This felt like a case of, "it's not you, it's me." I don't typically read plays and I'm not big on stage dramas in general, so maybe I was never the target audience for it, but it was a different experience than I'm used to.

There's a serviceable story in here that personally felt dated to me, and unfortunately I feel it's brevity worked against it; while this cast of four characters is impressively fleshed out for the short amount of time we spend with them, I don't know that I'm going to retain much of this plot when asked to recap it a year from now. Maybe I just had to be there when it first came out.