INFO for AUDITIONS May 2 & 4, 2016
The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Jennifer Vellenga will audition actors on Monday, May 2, 2016 in Chapman Theatre in Nichols Hall from 5-8pm
AUDITION PREPARATIONS for May 2
Prepare (memorize) and perform a one-two minute monologue.
CALLBACKS
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 in Chapman Theatre from 5-8 pm
Scenes and monologues (sides) will be provided.
ABOUT THE PLAY
The Glass Menagerie, set in the 1930’s, is the memory play of Tom Wingfield, a stand-in for Tennessee Williams. Tom struggles with the memory of his family, particularly the relationship between his mother, Amanda and his sister, Laura.
Amanda Wingfield is a faded, tragic remnant of Southern gentility who lives in poverty in a St. Louis apartment with her children. Amanda struggles to give meaning and direction to their lives. Tom is driven to distraction by his mother’s nagging and seeks escape through liquor and the world of the movies; Laura lives in her own Illusions. The family and their inner worlds are shaken when Tom invites a young man (Jim) to join the family for dinner.
CHARACTER BREAKDOWN
TOM WINGFIELD (M)
Look!—I’ve got no thing, no single thing…in my life here that I can call my OWN! -Tom Wingfield
Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse! -Tom Wingfield
Amanda’s son and Laura’s brother, Tom plays a dual role in the play as both the narrator and protagonist. The play is from the perspective of Tom’s memories. He addresses the audience directly to frame and present analysis of the events, but he also participates in the play’s actions as a character within his own recollections. Tom feels fettered by the constraints of his job and his family and yearns for escape in all aspects of his life. Dissatisfied with his monotonous warehouse job, he writes poetry on the side and plots a future in the merchant marines. Tom frequently goes to the fire escape and smokes cigarettes, symbolically escaping the house yet remaining trapped onstage and in the tenement. He goes to the movies night after night, attempting to escape into action-adventure narrative; he also attempts to escape through alcohol, as indicated by the bottles poking out of his pockets. The oscillation between Tom’s desire for freedom and inability to escape forms the emotional tension underlying the entire play. Although Tom leaves his family in the end, abandoning Amanda and Laura to pursue an independent future, the fact that he has created this play shows that he can never truly leave his memories, and therefore his family, behind.
AMANDA WINGFIELD (F)
One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!—gentlemen callers…No girl can do worse than put herself at the mercy of a handsome appearance! – Amanda Wingfield
What are we going to do, what is going to become of us, what is the future? – Amanda Wingfield
Tom and Laura’s mother. Amanda was a Southern belle in her youth, and she clings to this romantic vision of her past rather than accepting her current circumstances of poverty and abandonment. Amanda does not live in the past; rather, she lives in her own version of the present that she sees through the veil of memories and illusions. Unlike Tom and Laura, who retreat into their own private fantasies to escape from reality, Amanda lives her daily life through the rose-tinted glasses of her memories and dreams. Amanda is pragmatic in many ways––for example, she makes ends meet by selling magazine subscriptions. However, Amanda’s vision of the way she thinks her world should work and the reality of the situation often do not intersect. She constantly nags Tom, and she refuses to accept Laura’s peculiarities, projecting her own ideals of femininity onto Laura rather than accepting or even recognizing her daughter for who she is. Amanda is both a very comic and deeply tragic figure. Her exaggerated, larger-than-life statements and actions are often so out of touch with reality that they seem quite funny. However, her self-delusion and inability to see the world around her is also sad and painful to watch. For example, when the Gentleman Caller comes to visit, Amanda puts on a frilly dress she had worn as a young ingénue, slips into a thick Southern accent, and minces daintily around the apartment, as though she were sixteen again. Her actions are absurd, but she cannot see how desperately and pathetically she is acting, which makes the scenario tragic.
LAURA WINGFIELD (F)
What shall I wish for, Mother? -Laura Wingfield
…they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie!…Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! –Laura Wingfield
Tom’s sister and Amanda’s daughter. Laura is deeply fragile, both emotionally and physically: she is painfully shy, and a childhood illness has left one leg slightly shorter than the other, making her walk with a limp. The glass menagerie of the title refers to Laura’s prized collection that she carefully polishes and rearranges. Laura herself is as delicate, beautiful, and otherworldly as her miniature animals, and she retreats from the anxiety of social interactions and the pressures of daily life by slipping into a fantasy world populated with beautiful, immortal objects: she goes walking in the park, visits the zoo and the greenhouses, plays the Victrola, and immerses herself in her glass collection. Her nickname, “Blue Roses,” derives from Jim’s mishearing of “pleurosis,” the disease that left her crippled. Both Tom and Jim see Laura as like a blue rose, exotic and frail in her rarity. Yet despite her fragility, Laura does not willfully delude herself about the nature of her reality. She accepts her leg injury and her shyness without trying to pretend that she is another version of herself. When she confesses her schoolgirl crush for Jim O’Connor before he enters the play as the Gentleman Caller, she does not spin a wild fantasy life of wedded bliss between herself and Jim, but rather presents the memory as though it were a glass animal itself, a beautiful but immobile creature. Indeed, although Laura is symbolically linked with the fragile glass and the exotic Blue Roses, she may have the most strength and willpower of anyone in the play. Laura serves as peacemaker between Tom and Amanda, soothing both parties and helping to mend some of the wounds. When Tom escapes at the end of the play, he realizes that as far as he goes, he can never abandon Laura:
“Oh, Laura, Laura,” Tom exclaims, “I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”
JIM O’CONNOR (M)
[Jim] seemed to move in a continual spotlight. … He was shooting with such velocity through his adolescence that you would logically expect him to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty. -Tom Wingfield
Unicorns—aren’t they extinct in the modern world? -Jim O’Connor
The Gentleman Caller whose arrival in scene six spurs the play’s climax. Tennessee Williams’s stage directions describe Jim as “a nice, ordinary, young man.” Jim works with Tom at the warehouse. He and Tom were acquaintances in high school, where Jim was the hero: sports star, lead in the theater productions, class president, etc. Jim is Tom’s foil, the steady, working man who is neither haunted by the past nor yearns for a seemingly impossible future. Unlike the play’s other characters, Jim does not visibly long for escape from his present situation. Instead, he is content in his working-class, ordinary lifestyle. Jim is pleasant and affable, amused by Tom’s poetic inclinations and sympathetic to his ambitions rather than threatened or confused. When Tom invites Jim over for dinner, he knows that Laura knew Jim in high school, but he does not know that she had such a profound crush on him. After he comes to dinner, Jim exits the Wingfields’ world to return to his fiancée and his real life.
FIRST REHEARSAL
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
We may try for a first read between May 9-13, depending on actor availability.
IMPORTANT DATES
Thursday, September 22 crew watch
Saturday, September 24 tech begins
Thursday, September 29 7:30PM opening night
Friday, September 30-Sunday, Oct. 2 7:30PM performances
Sunday, October 2 2:30PM performance
NEW: Two Sunday performances have been ADDED to the first week!
Thursday, October 6 – Saturday, October 8 at 7:30 PM
Sunday, Ocotber 9 2:30PM closing matinee/strike
Venue: The Purple Masque Theatre, West Stadium
PLOT SUMMARY
By Ben Florman and Justin Kestler, LitCharts Editors 2016. LitChart on The Glass Menagerie. Retrieved March 11, 2016 from http://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-glass-menagerie.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and all the events are drawn from the memories of the play’s narrator, Tom Wingfield, who is also a character in the play. The curtain rises to reveal the dimly lit Wingfield apartment, located in a lower-class tenement building in St. Louis. The apartment is entered by a fire escape. Tom stands on the fire escape and addresses the audience to set the scene. The play takes place in St. Louis in the nineteen-thirties. Tom works in a warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and his sister, Laura. A gentleman caller, Tom says, will appear in the final scenes of the play. Tom and Laura’s father abandoned the family many years ago, and except for a single postcard reading “Hello––Goodbye!” has not been heard from since.
Tom enters the apartment, and the action of the play begins. Throughout the play, thematic music underscores many of the key moments. The Wingfields are seated at dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his table manners and his smoking. She regales Tom and Laura with memories of her youth as a Southern belle in Blue Mountain, courted by scores of gentleman callers. The stories are threadbare from constant repetition, but Tom and Laura let Amanda tell them again, Tom asking her questions as though reading from a script. Amanda is disappointed when Laura, for what appears to be the umpteenth time, says that she will never receive any gentleman callers.
Amanda has enrolled Laura in business college, but weeks later, Amanda discovers that Laura dropped out after the first few classes because of her debilitating social anxiety. Laura spends her days wandering alone around the park and the zoo. Laura also spends much of her time caring for her glass menagerie, a collection of glass figurines. Amanda is frustrated but quickly changes course, deciding that Laura’s best hope is to find a suitable man to marry. Laura tells Amanda about Jim, a boy that she had a crush on in high school. Amanda begins to raise extra money for the family by selling subscriptions for a women’s glamour magazine.
Tom, who feels stifled in both his job and his family life, writes poetry while at the warehouse. He escapes the apartment night after night through movies, drinking, and literature. Tom and Amanda argue bitterly, he claiming that she does not respect his privacy, she claiming that he must sacrifice for the good of the family. During one particularly heated argument, precipitated by Tom’s manuscripts pouring out of the typewriter, Tom accidentally shatters some of Laura’s precious glass animals.
Tom stumbles back early one morning and tells Laura about a magic trick involving a man who escapes from a nailed-up coffin. Tom sees the trick as symbolic of his life. Due to Laura’s pleading and gentle influence, Tom and Amanda eventually reconcile. They unite in their concern for Laura. Amanda implores Tom not to abandon the family as her husband did. She asks him to find a potential suitor for Laura at the warehouse. After a few months, Tom brings home his colleague Jim O’Connor, whom he knew in high school and who calls Tom “Shakespeare.” Amanda is overjoyed and throws herself into a whirlwind of preparation, fixing up the lighting in the apartment and making a new dress for Laura. When Laura first sees Jim and realizes that he is her high-school love, she is terrified; she answers the door but quickly dashes away. Amanda emerges in a gaudy, frilly, girlish dress from her youth and affects a thick Southern accent, as though she is the one receiving the gentleman caller. Laura is so overcome by the whole scene that she refuses to join the table, instead lying on the sofa in the living room.
After dinner, the lights in the apartment go out because Tom has not paid the electricity bill––instead, as Tom and Jim know but Laura and Amanda don’t, Tom has paid his dues to join the merchant marines. Amanda lights candles, and Jim joins Laura by candlelight in the living room. Laura slowly warms up and relaxes in Jim’s gently encouraging company. Laura reminds Jim that they knew each other in high school and that he had nicknamed her “Blue Roses,” a mispronunciation of her childhood attack of pleurosis. Jim tells Laura that she must overcome her inferiority complex through confidence. Laura shows Jim her glass collection and lets him hold the glass unicorn, her favorite. They begin to dance to the strains of a waltz coming from across the street. As they dance, however, Jim knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn.
Jim kisses Laura but immediately draws back, apologizing and explaining that he has a fiancée. Laura is devastated but tries not to show it. She gives him the broken glass unicorn as a souvenir. Amanda re-enters the living room and learns about Jim’s fiancée. After he leaves, she accuses Tom of playing a trick on them. Tom storms out of the house to the movies, and Amanda tells him to go to the moon. Tom explains that he got fired from his job not long after Jim’s visit and that he left his mother and sister. However, no matter how far he goes, he cannot leave his emotional ties behind. The play is his final act of catharsis to purge himself of the memories of his family.