The Glass Menagerie: A Peoples Light and Theatre Masterpiece

Theater: People's Light and Theatre
Show: The Glass Menagerie
Opened: February 13, 2008
Seen: March 2, 2008
Reviewer: Pat McGill
Submitted: March 3, 2008

The play The Glass Menagerie is one of sorrow, pain and loss. Tennessee Williams wrote this play years ago to express the feelings he had on his own life. If we look back upon the life of Tennessee it isn’t much different from the character “Tom” in the play. He started writing at a very young age and was, like in the story, living in many small crowded apartments in St. Louis. Throughout his life he suffered from extreme depression and anxiety. He always felt that he had no talent or anything within himself that was worth anything.

In this story the narrator and the character perceived to be Tennessee is Tom, a man that slaves over a job that compounds continually to his self destruct. He is pressured by a constantly nagging mother that lives almost completely in the past. His sister Laura, a girl crippled at a young age, is very shy and no one seems able to get through to her. Tom’s father left them long ago when both of them were young and is no longer in the picture. Tom supports the family through his job at the warehouse, though he secretly wants to become a poet.

In the second act Jim O’Connor, a person that works with Tom in the warehouse and also went to highschool with him, comes to their house for dinner. Little does Tom know that Laura has things hidden within her about Jim. The events between Jim and Laura conspire and a shocking truth is revealed about Jim.

At People’s Light and Theatre there is a wonderful time to be had. The actors, Kevin Bergen who played the part of Tom Wingfield, Elizabeth Webster Duke who played the part of Laura Wingfield, Marcia Saunders who played the part of Amanda Wingfield, and Darren Michael Hengst who played the part of Jim O’Connor, painted a beautiful picture upon the audience. The accents, the arguments, the love, and the pure emotion in the play is something to truly be proud of. Also, the accent of the costumes and lightly playing music transformed our talented actors into family and friends from the nineteen eighties.

The set placed many thoughts upon the audience and truly dragged in the viewer from the audience right into that crowded St. Louis apartment. The broken flat created the image of a memory tired and warped over time, and the grate from the roof pushing down on the small apartment created the feeling of being trapped within a miserable dungeon.