Who hasn’t wished they could escape, for a moment, a day, a year, or the rest of your life? 

We have all at one time or another dreamed of leaving behind our normal everyday existence, leave the sometimes-boring life we know to see the world, find adventure, travel to the moon, or maybe just find that something better. Or maybe at one time, whether out of pain or fear, found a way to hide from the real world using our imagination...creating a sanctuary...a safe place to hide away from the sharp edges.  Possibly we found ourselves looking back on the years that have passed by, those good old days when possibilities seemed endless, and those memories seem so nice, like a favorite old sweatshirt, so safe that if we are not careful, we linger on it, escaping from the present.  These escape routes are the center of the world created for us by the main characters of Tennessee Williams' award winning play The Glass Menagerie. 

The characters live in a time where the world offers little more then the promise of survival. Tom explains it as "that quaint period when the huge middle class of America was matriculating from a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy." Additionally, they were in the middle of violent labor demonstrations while in other countries there was revolution and war. This play is set in a time not unlike our own, where society was changing by the hand of the economy as the country dealt with the Great Depression.  

The Glass Menagerie is set in a shabby St. Louis tenement apartment occupied by Amanda Wingfield and her two adult children: shy, fragile Laura, and Tom, a restless, poetic soul trapped in a stifling factory job. Tom narrates this self-described "memory play", revisiting a time when his family longs to escape their meager existence by creating idealized fantasy worlds. Amanda tries to rise above the family's depressed circumstances with the trappings of gentility. An emissary from the outside world is shown only in the last scene, represented by "a gentleman caller" who brings into focus the contrast between the world of the Wingfields and reality of life. Mr. Williams also adds in a fifth character - a silent but ever-present character - watching over the lives of those he left behind. Tom offers this portrait of the father as a symbol of the "long delayed but always expected something that we live for". This symbol offered is of one of the few universal experiences, something that everyone has shared in, something that keeps us going no matter the obstacles - hope.

Mr. Williams offers us this scary real world in a safe way; he offers it as a memory, a remembrance. We can safely follow the author into this world knowing an experienced guide is holding the lantern. The playwright offers the audience this partly autobiographical look at the world of a man who was raised without a dependable father, a strong mother who was a southern belle in her youth, and his sister who seems to suffer throughout her life because of illness.