The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie unfolds in 1930’s St. Louis, inside a cramped tenement apartment, where a mother, Amanda Wingfield, lives with her two grown children, Tom and Laura. Abandoned by her husband many years before, Amanda, a faded Southern belle, takes odd jobs to make ends meet, while Tom, a poet and dreamer, works discontentedly in a warehouse. Laura, painfully shy and slightly crippled, shrinks from the outside world. Each character copes through a different form of fantasy: Amanda repeatedly recounts her gentile Southern past; Tom escapes through the movies and his poetry; and Laura lives in a world of tiny glass animals and Victorola records. When Tom, at Amanda’s urging, invites a "gentleman caller" to dinner for Laura to meet, the family’s delicate web of hope and illusion is stretched to the breaking point.