The Glass Menagerie Research Paper

Throughout history man has adored the art of acting and scripted entertainment in the form of books, plays, and movies. Every so often a writer comes along who experiments with new technology in abstract ways. Tennessee Williams, most noted for his work in The Glass Menagerie, is one of these people who, in his time, created many of the modern ideals for a scripted production. This essay will answer what is spectacle and how it promotes realism, how it was revolutionary at the time and how it compares to today, and how it is used in The Glass Menagerie to promote the storyline and set the tone. Tennessee Williams’s play, The Glass Menagerie, is an excellent example of spectacle being used to convey realism. Realism is often hard to convey

Before Tennessee Williams many plays were the same they always had been, an acting of a script about some wild tale of love and loss. This form of play made it hard for the audience to feel like they were there, in the story, with the characters because they were not able to relate with the play. In The Glass Menagerie Williams uses a common family in their daily life struggles so a viewer at that time could perceive this play a real event that may have happened. As for spectacle, that was easily the icing on the cake. The Glass Menagerie consists of many stage directions like this,

The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism …

Tom enters dressed as a merchant sailor from alley, stage left, and strolls across the front of the stage to the fire-escape. There he stops and lights a cigarette. He addresses the audience. (Page 752, Line