The Glass Menagerie is a play by Tennessee Williams that was originally written as a screenplay for MGM, who Williams was contracted to. The play premiered in Chicago in 1944, and in 1945 won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Glass Menagerie was Williams's first successful play; he went on to become one of America's most highly regarded playwrights. The Glass Menagerie is accounted by many to be a biographical play about Williams life, the characters and story mimicking his own more closely than any of his other works. Williams would be Tom, his Mother, Amanda, and his sickly and disturbed sister Rose would be Laura.
anda Wingfield: You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!
m Wingfield: Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night! And will I be glad, will I be happy, and so will you be! And you'll go up, up, up! over Blue Mountain on a broomstick, with your seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly, babbling old witch!
m Wingfield: I'm going to the movies. anda Wingfield: I don't believe that lie! m Wingfield: No? Well you're right, Mother. I'm going to opium dens. Yes, mother. Opium dens. Dens of vice and criminal's hangouts, mother, I am a hired assassin, I joined the Hogan gang, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case, and I run a stream of cat houses in the valley, they call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, see I'm leading a double life, really, a simple honest warehouse worker by day, but by night a dynamic czar of the underworld, mother, I just go to gambling casinos, spin away fortune on the roulette tables, mother, I wear a patch over one eye, and a false moustache and sometimes I put on green whiskers, on, on those occasions, they call me "El Diablo," I can tell you many things to make you sleepless, mother, my enemies plan to dynamite this place, they're gonna blow us sky high! And I will be glad? I will be very happy, and so will you be. You will go up, up, up, over Blue Mountain, on a broomstick with seventeen gentleman callers! You ugly, babbling old witch!
m Wingfield: [to his mother] Every morning that you come in, yelling that goddamned "Rise and shine, rise and shine," I think to myself, how lucky dead people are.
anda Wingfield: Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine! m Wingfield: I will rise but i will NOT Shine...
Amanda Wingfield dominates her children with her faded gentility and exaggerated tales of her Southern belle past. Her son plans escape; her daughter withdraws into a dream world. When a "gentleman caller" appears, things move to crisis point. Written by Cleo
This first movie version of the Tennessee Williams play about a faded, aging Southern belle, her shy, crippled daughter and her "selfish dreamer" of a son more or less sticks to the original story, except for a compromise ending which strives to be more upbeat. Written by Eugene Kim
