I really like Williams, a lot. I love how he portrays relationships and these heavily intense and powerful characters. And The Glass Menagerie didn’t disappoint me in the least. I loved the play!

Presented as a “memory play”, the entire story is narrated by Tom, who tells the story of his mother and sister. Their family is one that appears to have been wealthy at some point of the past, but they have clearly lost their money and social status (again, the impoverished South in a William’s play).

Amanda, the mother of the family that is the focus of this play, is something like an ancestor of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar. Like Blanche, she’s lost her connection to reality at some level. And she’s also haunted by the memory of her past beauty and all the men who admired her then. Throughout the play she mentions several of her suitors, and most of them are dead. She has other crazy ideas, but the one that she obsesses the most about is having a “gentleman caller” (yes, I’m totally remembering Easy A here) for her daughter, Laura.

Laura is what made me love this play so much. She’s a shy girl with self-image problems. She had some disease (polio, probably) as a girl and she’s been left with a deformed leg since then. At some point she tried to go to a business school, where she could learn to be a secretary, but her social insecurities made her leave it. She doesn’t tell her mother right away, but goes out every day in the hours she’s supposed to go to classes.

When Amanda learns that, she becomes obsessed with the idea that her daughter’s only chance in life would be to get a husband, thus the “gentleman caller” obsession. At some point of the play, she reveals that in high-school, she had a crush on a boy who was friends with Tommy. Her reaction when her brother tells her that he has invited the same boy to dinner one day is to panic. Poor little Laura. Her mother, on the other hand, is ecstatic about the whole thing; she fusses over the good china, and the tablecloths and stuff.

Jim, the boy in question, is a perfectly nice boy. He remembers about Laura soon enough (they had a class together), and they quickly bond somehow. As he admires Laura’s collection of little glass animals, he breaks one of them: the unicorn. I believe that the figurine is meant to represent Laura, a fragile little thing. Not only because it’s fragile, but because it’s also a mythological animal. It represents the life that Laura dreams about at that point. Jim breaks it just before he reveals that he’s going steady with another girl.

I really felt sorry for poor Laura at that point. Having one’s heart broken is one of the worst feelings ever. And she was getting all these hopes about Jim, who is perfectly nice and tells her to be more confident and to believe that she’s beautiful.

Again, I really love how Williams works out his characters and the different relations between them. This play is a little wonder and I can only imagine how it must look in stage, and really want to see it.