He works in a shoe warehouse for a mere $65 a month, and he clearly feels obligation to support his father-less family but Tom is at heart a poet who also often appears near suffocating inside the walls of his family’s apartment.Įlijah Fisher portrays a Tom who seems partly real and partly a hazy image of someone not really present.

Perched on the metal fire escape often to escape the apartment where he lives with mother and sister, Tom informs us that what we are about to see comes from his memories and as such, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Tom is both our narrator and a participant in his own memories. As the play is about to begin, a voice sounds over the Marines’ Memorial Theatre to reiterate this last point: “This is our story, also being your story.” The result is a production that profoundly speaks to the interplay of disillusions and disappointments, feelings of entrapment due to obligation, and memories that continue to haunt throughout a lifetime that can occur for members of Any and Every Family – not just those that are white. The current staging of The Glass Menagerie by the African-American Shakespeare Company is a powerfully different take on Tennessee William’s memories, with a cast whose skins are varying shades of brown and whose heritages are a mixture of African-American, Filipino, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous. But in all productions that I have personally seen from London to New York to San Francisco, the common element is that the casts have been all-white. Louis, middle-class setting have time and again been recreated on the stages on and off Broadway, in theatrical centers worldwide, and in thousands of towns where many of high-school-aged actors have cut their acting eye-teeth on the four, now iconic roles created by Williams. In the decades since, many revivals of the 1930’s, St. In 1944, Tennessee Williams skyrocketed from near obscurity to wide-spread fame with the premiere of The Glass Menagerie, a play touted as a memory play both in the script and in its evident connections to the playwright and his family of an excessively attention-seeking mother, a mentally and physically fragile sister, and a long-absent father. The African-American Shakespeare Company Mars Holscher

The glass menagerie play script