Williams, The Glass Menagerie & Roby's Unseen Character
During a career that spanned more than fifty years, Tennessee Williams experimented with theatrical form and created characters in ways that mark him as one of the most important and influential playwrights of the twentieth century. He did so while testing the ability of language to define subtle and poignant shades of personality, place, and longing.
Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, Williams spent his early childhood in the Episcopal parsonage of Walter Dakin, his maternal grandfather. When he was seven years old, the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where his father worked at the home office of the International Shoe Company. His father, Cornelius, was an abusive alcoholic; his mother, Edwina, a neurotic southern belle; and his sister, Rose, fragile, shy, and prone to nervous breakdowns. He also had a younger brother, Dakin. Characters drawn from these family members feature prominently in Williams’s plays, and his mother and sister particularly dominate The Glass Menagerie. The locations of his plays reflect Williams’s preoccupation with the relationship between physical and spiritual landscape, and he chooses to set his plays in a geography that is deeply personal and palpably affecting.
In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes, Williams’s work was recognized by the Tony Awards and almost every other award available for American theatre. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
His work did not earn widespread attention until The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago in 1944 to positive critical reviews. Ever-increasing audience attendance landed the play on Broadway a year later. The original production, directed by Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones, featured Laurette Taylor as Amanda, Eddie Dowling as Tom, Julie Haydon as Laura, and Anthony Ross as Jim O’Conner. The Glass Menagerie, probably the most autobiographical of all of Williams’ plays, earned him a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945.
In 1950, Williams adapted the script for a full-length feature film directed by Irvin Rapper. The film stars Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence, and Arthur Kennedy, and it won Williams a New York Film Critics’ Circle Award.
The Glass Menagerie takes place in the St. Louis of Williams’s early adulthood and opens with a monologue by its narrator, Tom Wingfield, the stand-in for Williams himself. The story Tom relates occupies a space in the imaginative territory of recollected emotions rather than in the truth of recaptured events.
Tom is unhappily employed in a warehouse, helps support his mother Amanda and sister Laura, and devotes his energies to dreams of adventure and escape. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda clings to outdated memories from her days growing up on the Mississippi Delta and relentlessly uses guilt to keep Tom from following in his decamped father’s footsteps. Laura suffers from severe social anxiety and prefers the company of her glass figurine collection to the outside world. The fragile family dynamics developed in the first act break down in the second when an outside element is introduced, as Laura’s gentleman caller, Jim O’Conner, comes to dinner.
Roby’s constellated monologues lend “vivid and clear existence” to the unseen characters who flesh out the Wingfields’ memories, animating Tom’s, Laura’s, and Amanda’s hopes and longings. Thus MR. WINGFIELD, who left his wife and children more than sixteen years before Menagerie opens, returns to add a belated PS to his cryptic postcard from Mazatlan, Mexico, that said simply, “Hello, Goodbye!”
Similarly Roby inscribes explicit nuance into the voices of an alternative cast, all conjured by the Wingfields, whose narratives frame, implicitly, Williams’s dramatizations. Enter:
THE TYPING INSTRUCTOR, who informs Mrs. Wingfield that Laura dropped out of Rubicam’s Business College after suffering an anxiety attack on the first day of class.
WESLEY CUTRERE, the brother of one of Amanda Wingfield’s former beaux, Bates. Bates was shot in a fight at a casino.
MRS. DUNCAN FITZHUGH, the woman Amanda Wingfield would have become had she married the most eligible of the suitors she entertained as a girl.
EMILY MEISENBACH, who attended Soldan High School with Laura and Tom and was formerly engaged to Jim O’Conner.
IDA SCOTT, an acquaintance of Amanda’s to whom Amanda tries to sell a renewal of a subscription to the Companion Magazine.
MALVOLIO THE MAGICIAN, headliner at the theatre where Tom goes after he and his mother argue. Tom assists on stage as Malvolio turns water into wine into whiskey. Tom comes home drunk and has to be put to bed by Laura.
THE MERCHANT MARINE, author of a letter written to Tom that Amanda mentions as evidence Tom is dreaming of leaving. She acknowledges his desire for a different life, but asks him to make sure that his sister is taken care of before he pursues it.
Unseen Character, inspired by the play of light and shadow in Williams’ universe, flips a switch and offers its own signature illuminations for audiences at his centennial and beyond. 
Contributor’s
notes
Unseen Character Suite: Introduction and Menu