essay about laura in the glass menagerie

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Analysis of Laura Wingfield's Character in The "Glass Menagerie"

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Published: Dec 3, 2020

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Works Cited

• “Glass Menagerie-Character Analysis (Laura Wingfield).” Google, Google, www.google.com/amp/s/limegemini.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/glass-menagerie-character-analysis-laura-wingfield/amp/.
• Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. W. Ross MacDonald School Resource Services Library, 2017.

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The Glass Menagerie Essay

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Written by Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie is a masterpiece and it passes as a memory play for it exposits Tom Wingfield’s thoughts. A wishful poet, brother to Laura, and son to Amanda and ever absent Mr. Wingfield; Tom works hard in a shoe store to provide for his mother and sister. Amanda on the other side is a complicated mother who regales her children in this moment and scolds them in the next.

Amanda plays important role in Laura’s reticence and pathological shyness. While she cannot be blamed for making her shy in the first place, she is to blame for making Laura’s continued shyness.

Instead of supporting Laura emotionally, she goes out to look for quick fixes and material gains. First, she enrols her in a business school for her to earn some good fortune. After realizing Laura’s weakness has kept her out of school, she does not care to investigate the problem and settle it amicably; on the contrary, she resorts into finding her a fiancé.

These are uninformed decisions and she is to blame for Laura’s continued shyness. If only Amanda were supportive, Laura would probably gain self-confidence and have high self-esteem. Amanda’s reminiscences on her youth in the South are not reliable. They are too overstated to be true. How can someone get seventeen callers in one afternoon? This is unrealistic; therefore, judged from this platform, Amanda’s reminiscences are treacherous.

Throughout this play, there are different forms of music, movies, and legends. These elements create emotional impact in the play. The audience can connect with the main characters. For instance, the music and lightning used make the audience connect with Laura’s shortcomings, Amanda’s indifference, and Tom’s struggles.

This play suggests a repressed desire boiling under the surface. Tom holds this burning passion; he wants to get out there and explore the world. This burning desire explains why Tom visits a witchdoctor and finds a way of getting out of a coffin without the hustle of pulling any nail.

He coffin here represents Wingfield’s home. The object of Tom’s longing is to explore the world out there and this is why he plans to accompany Merchant Seamen to get out and explore the world. He says, “I am tired…movies tranquilize people, making them content to watch other people’s adventures without having any of their own…plan to join the Merchant Seamen” (Tennessee 62). This trip would finally quench Tom’s desire to explore the world.

Absence of Mr. Wingfield affects his children and wife greatly. Tom has to work for the family whilst Laura knows only a nagging mother. Perhaps she would gain self-confidence and self-esteem if she had her father around her. Amanda is ever worried because of her fatherless family.

She is too concerned about her family’s financial security that she would not let Tom leave without getting Laura a suitor who would provide for her. To counter her fears, Amanda enrols Laura in a business school hoping that she would be stable; provide for her self and probably for the family. This stems from the fact that she fears without a father; her family would be insecure. If only Mr. Wingfield were around, she would be financially secure.

Jim O’Connor is a “nice, ordinary, young man” (Tennessee 5). These adjectives come out clearly in the context of the play. Due to his ‘ordinary’ nature, he manages to win Laura’s confidence, dances with her, and finally kisses her. His ‘niceness’ drives away Laura’s fears and low self-esteem and she opens up to him. As the play closes, Tom tells Laura, “Blow out your candles, Laura–and so good-bye” (Tennessee 97). Audience may respond to this statement by concurring to it.

Laura has to blow out her candles and reach for the lighting that lights the world nowadays. Tom is the protagonist in this story. Tom is the most crucial to the play’s dramatic action because everything revolves around him. Without him, the Wingfields would not be, Jim would be unknown, and the central theme of illusions would not be realized.

Works Cited

Tennessee, Williams. “The Glass Menagerie.” Oxford; Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1968.

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1. IvyPanda . "The Glass Menagerie." July 9, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie/.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence, as he says, is not a depiction of actuality; its employment of symbolism is unusual; and in the very effective ending, a scrim descends in front of mother and daughter, so that by stage convention one can see but not hear them, with the result that both, but especially the mother, become much more moving and even archetypal. The play is also almost unique historically, in that it first opened in Chicago, came close to flopping before Chicago newspaper theater critics verbally whipped people into going, and then played successfully for months in Chicago before finally moving to equal success in New York.

The setting is the Wingfield apartment in a shabby tenement building, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the year 1937. The set has an interior living room area and an exterior fire escape.

Tom Wingfield is in the fire-escape area outside the Wingfield apartment. He explains the concept of a memory play. He enters the interior setting, where his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield, who wears a brace on her leg, are seated at a table, waiting to eat dinner. All aspects of the meal are mimed, and as Tom seats himself, Amanda begins to instruct him on how to eat politely. Tom abruptly leaves the table to have a cigarette. Laura rises to fetch an ashtray, but Amanda tells her to stay seated, for she wishes Laura to remain fresh and pretty for her prospective gentleman callers. Amanda recalls her Sunday afternoons in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, where she received and entertained countless callers. Amanda asks Laura how many callers she expects to have, and Laura explains that she is not expecting any callers.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Laura sits alone, polishing her glass figurines. Hearing her mother approach, Laura quickly hides her collection and resumes her place behind a typewriter. Amanda reveals that she has discovered that Laura has dropped out of secretarial school. Laura explains that she became ill during the first week of school and was too ashamed to return. Amanda pleads with Laura, asking her what she is going to do with her life. Amanda fears that Laura will be dependent on the charity of others for the rest of her life. Amanda warns Laura that there is no future in staying home playing with her glass collection and her father’s phonograph records. She implores Laura to set her sights on marrying. Laura confesses that she had liked a boy named Jim O’Connor in high school, but she is certain that he must be married by now. Laura acknowledges her disability as her primary obstacle in forming relationships. Amanda dismisses this claim and advises Laura to cultivate aspects of her personality to compensate for her disadvantage.

The same location as scene 2. Tom addresses the audience. He explains that Amanda has become obsessed with finding a gentleman caller for Laura and has begun selling magazine subscriptions to generate extra income. Amanda has a telephone conversation with a neighbor, trying to convince her to renew her subscription to The Homemaker’s Companion . Tom and Amanda quarrel about his habits, his writing, and his books. Amanda accuses Tom of being selfish and of engaging in immoral activities. Tom swears at his mother and bemoans his fate of working in a warehouse to support his mother and sister. In the heat of the argument, Tom accidentally crashes into Laura’s glass collection, shattering it to pieces on the floor. Amanda refuses to speak to him until he apologizes. Laura and Tom collect the shattered glass from the floor.

The same location as scene 3. Tom returns home from a movie and talks with Laura. She asks him to apologize to Amanda. Amanda sends Laura out on an errand so that she may speak with Tom alone. She and Tom make peace. Amanda warns Tom of the danger in pursuing an adventurous life. Amanda raises the subject of Laura and the need for Tom to bring a nice young man home to meet Laura. Amanda promises Tom that she will let him do as he pleases and leave after he has provided for Laura’s future. Amanda begs him to secure a nice man for Laura first. Tom grudgingly agrees to try to find someone. Amanda happily returns to soliciting magazine subscriptions.

On the fire escape, the exterior of the Wingfield apartment, Amanda suggests that Tom be more mindful of his appearance. She makes a wish on the new Moon. Tom tells her that he is inviting a gentleman caller for Laura to the apartment the following evening. Amanda inquires about the character of the gentleman caller. Tom describes Jim’s qualities and characteristics, and Amanda determines that he is suitable to call. Tom warns Amanda not to be too excited, because Jim is unaware that he is being invited for Laura’s benefit. Tom expresses concern that Amanda has unrealistic expectations of Laura. Amanda refuses to accept the reality of Laura’s condition. Tom goes to a movie and Amanda calls Laura out onto the fire escape. Amanda urges Laura to make a wish on the new Moon.

On the fire escape and in the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Tom speaks directly to the audience and explains the nature of his friendship with Jim. Tom makes Jim feel important because Tom can recall Jim’s high school glory days. In the living room, Amanda and Laura prepare for the arrival of the gentleman caller. Amanda dresses Laura and discovers one of her own former gowns. At the mention of the name Jim O’Connor, Laura refuses to participate in the evening’s events. Amanda chastises Laura and orders her to answer the door when the doorbell rings. Laura freezes with anxiety as Amanda forces her to welcome Tom and Jim. Laura hides in the kitchen while Amanda converses with Jim O’Connor. Tom goes to the kitchen to check on supper. Amanda summons everyone to the table. Laura maintains that she is sick and lies on the couch for the duration of the dinner.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, the lights in the apartment suddenly go out. Amanda quickly lights candles, asking Jim to check the fuses. Finding that the fuses are fine, Amanda asks Tom whether he has paid the electric bill; he has not. After dinner, Amanda asks Jim to keep Laura company. She gives him a candelabrum and a glass of wine to give to Laura. Amanda forces Tom to join her in the kitchen to wash the dishes. Settling down on the floor beside Laura, Jim asks her why she is so shy, and Laura asks whether Jim remembers her. She explains that they had singing class together in high school and reminds him that she was always late because of her disability. Jim confesses that he never noticed her limp and admonishes Laura about being self-conscious. Laura takes out her high school yearbook and Jim autographs it for her.

Laura shows her glass collection to him and Jim marvels over her delicate figurines. Hearing music from the nearby dance hall, Jim asks Laura to dance. She hesitates, but Jim persuades her to join him. They stumble into the coffee table, breaking Laura’s favorite figurine, a unicorn that she has had for 13 years. Jim apologizes, and Laura consoles him. Struck by Laura’s charm and delicacy, Jim kisses her. He chastises himself for his hasty action and informs Laura that he is engaged. Laura gives him the glass unicorn. Amanda gleefully returns to the living room with a pitcher of cherry lemonade. Jim apologizes and announces that he has to leave to collect his fiancée at the train station.

Amanda is horrified by the news and calls Tom out of the kitchen. She accuses him of playing a cruel joke on the family, but Tom explains that he had no knowledge of Jim’s engagement. Amanda again chastises Tom for selfishness and for lack of concern for his abandoned mother or his disabled sister. Tom finally leaves the Wingfield apartment for good. The lights fade on the interior setting, leaving Laura and Amanda in candlelight. Tom appears on the fire escape and offers the audience details of his departure and journey away from his family. He explains that no matter how much distance is between them, he can never forget his sister. He instructs Laura to blow out her candles, and she does.

A scene from The Glass Menagerie /New York Public Library

The Glass Menagerie began its life as a screenplay, The Gentleman Caller . This script was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” The script of “The Gentleman Caller” was submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the summer of 1943. Williams had hoped that this script would impress studio executives and ultimately relieve him from other contractual obligations at MGM such as writing what he scathingly termed a “celluloid brassiere” for the actress Lana Turner. MGM was less than amenable to Williams’s idea. They declared that the popular film Gone With the Wind (1939) had served up enough Southern women for a decade (Spoto, 97). In an oddly ironic twist, this response and its implicit preference for fiction over reality resonated with the play’s central theme.

Stylistically, The Glass Menagerie reflects its prehistory. The screenplay-turned-stage-script shows a number of elements more familiar, and perhaps more suited, to the cinema than to the theater. In theatrical terms, Williams’s approach is Brechtian: It uses devices meant to create what the German playwright and dramaturge Bertolt Brecht, a contemporary of Williams’s, called the “alienation effect.” In The Glass Menagerie , these devices constitute a sometimes disjointed sequence of tableaux (or scenes) rather than the more conventionalthree-act structure; a narrator/commentator (Tom) who also is a character in the play and steps in and out of the action; Williams’s scripted suggestions of legends to be projected onto gauze between the dining and front rooms, “to give accent to certain values in each scene”; the very strictly defined music, which assigns specific pieces or themes to certain scenes, especially in relation to Laura; and the lighting, “focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center.”

For Brecht, the alienation effect served to remind the audience that what they saw on stage constituted the real world. Williams takes this concept a crucial step further, in that he turns alienation— the conscious or unconscious loss of a person’s feeling of connection with his or her surroundings—into the mainstay of the play: It becomes a way of life for the characters. Brecht tries to prevent his audience from escaping into illusion. Williams forestalls his characters’ conquest of “a world of reality that [they] were somehow set apart from.” None of the characters is truly able to cope with the demands of everyday life; therefore, all seek refuge in their own dream world, to such an extent that illusion itself becomes subjective reality.

In this the characters are not alone. Williams declared this denial of reality symptomatic of an era during which individuals would seek out “dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows,” in order briefly to forget about their lives and their troubles. But the diversion cannot last, and the conflict between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe, remains irreconcilable. This is the central theme of The Glass Menagerie . From it emerge two related themes: the impossibility of escape and the trap of memory—or of the past in general.

The play is memory in more than one sense. As is much of Williams’s work, The Glass Menagerie is poignantly autobiographical. However, this is by far his most autobiographical work. In July 1918, Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, exchanged his job as a traveling salesman for a managerial post with the International Shoe Company in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cornelius, his wife (Edwina Dakin Williams), and their two children, Rose Isabel Williams and Tom, left Clarksdale, Mississippi, to take up residence in what then was the fourth-largest city in the United States and a major industrial center.

From their initial quarters at a boardinghouse they moved into and out of a succession of apartments, including one at 4633 Winchester Place in downtown Saint Louis. The apartment had “two small windows, in the front and rear rooms, and a fire escape [that] blocked the smoky light from a back alley” (Spoto, 16). The wording may be less poetic than Williams’s stage directions for The Glass Menagerie , but it accurately describes the Wingfield home, and the Williams’s tenement at 4633 Winchester Place in Saint Louis later became known as the “Glass Menagerie Apartments.”

For Rose and Tom, both delicate and accustomed to the rural gentility of Mississippi and the relative stability their maternal grandparents had helped to provide, the relocation and its effects on their home life proved traumatic. Tom was seven years old at the time of the move, old enough to recognize that “there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that [the Williams family] belonged more to the latter” (Tynan, 456)—with all the ostracism this entailed. Although the play’s references to the Spanish civil war and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937 set The Glass Menagerie nearly two decades later, during the depression, the social and economic context and its bleak inescapability are virtually the same.

The family’s reduced circumstances were due to Cornelius Williams’s compulsive drinking and gambling, and the domestic situation was worsened by a string of illnesses and operations Edwina Williams had after the birth of the Williams’s youngest son, Dakin Williams. Caught between a volatile father and an infirm mother, Rose and Tom each found their own ways of escaping into safer fantasy worlds. Tom fled into literature, at first reading voraciously (much to his father’s distaste), but when his mother gave him a typewriter, he started to write poetry. The consequences for Rose, however, were far bleaker. By the early 1920s mental illness began to manifest itself through psychosomatic stomach problems and an inability to sustain any social contact, which turned her enrollment at Rubicam’s Business College into a debacle. Her condition worsened over the next 15 years, until, in 1937, her parents agreed to a prefrontal lobotomy, which left Rose in a state of childlike, almost autistic detachment. Tom, studying at the State University of Iowa by then, was informed only after the disastrous procedure. From that point on, the spirit of his sister “haunted his life” (Spoto, 60).

It also haunts The Glass Menagerie . Though physically rather than mentally disabled, Laura Wingfield is painfully shy and socially inept, and she wears her physical difference as a stifling protective cloak. Nicknamed “Blue Roses” in a clear reference to Williams’s sister, she has stomach pain caused by nervous self-consciousness when exposed to strangers, and she visits the penguins at the zoo instead of attending classes at Rubicam’s Business College. The focus of her life, to the exclusion of everything else, is her collection of glass animals, which serves as a symbol of her (and Rose’s) fragility. When Jim O’Connor accidentally breaks her glass unicorn, the loss of the horn offers a subtle but nonetheless striking reminder of Rose’s lobotomy. As Laura states, her unicorn “had an operation” to make it “less freakish.”

Rose is not the only member of the Williams family to appear in The Glass Menagerie . With the exception of Dakin, all of the Williamses are cast. Williams himself infuses his namesake Tom, the trapped poet-narrator, who hides in a closet to write and dreams of joining the merchant marine. Tom is a warehouse worker for Continental Shoemakers, and his job fills him with the same desperate frustration that caused Williams to suffer a nervous breakdown after his father withdrew him from college and forced him to work at the International Shoe Company between 1932 and 1935. Cornelius Williams, an alcoholic and a former telephone company employee, is clearly identifiable as the absent head of the Wingfield household, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

A more oblique and more sinister reference, which plays on Cornelius’s middle name, illustrates Tom’s/Williams’s attempts to break away from the presence of the father. Recounting his nightly exploits to Laura, Tom launches into the tale of Malvolio the Stage Magician and a coffin trick, “the wonderfullest trick of all. . . . We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail.” For Williams, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a flesh-and-blood opponent; for the character, Tom Wingfield, he is a photograph over the mantel and the mirror his mother relentlessly holds up to him. This disembodied specter is all the more oppressive because it cannot be fought or escaped. Condemned to stay at home because his father ran away, Tom looks for vicarious adventure, always fancies himself on the brink of moving, but has no idea when or where. When he finally does make a break, it is at the expense of taking the past with him. True escape is as impossible for him as it was for Williams: Laura/Rose constantly haunts him.

Completing the family analogies, Tom and Laura’s mother, Amanda, is a replica of Edwina Dakin Williams. Both have pretensions to be Southern belles, both claim to have been pursued by countless gentleman callers only to marry “this boy,” both are capable of prattling incessantly, and neither can cook or bake anything apart from angel food cake. They also share a dangerously tenuous grasp on reality that materializes in their aspirations for Laura and Rose, respectively. Both mothers are convinced that their daughter’s problem—be it lameness or schizophrenia—will dissolve if only she finds the right man. In the autumn of 1933, Edwina invited a family friend, “the very handsome Jim O’Connor” (Spoto, 43), as a prospective suitor for Rose. The experiment concluded in only one brief visit, which apparently upset Rose greatly. In the same vein, Amanda badgers Tom into inviting his shoe company colleague, and former high school basketball hero Jim O’Connor, as a gentleman caller for Laura. This attempt leads to an equally devastating result. Jim, brimming with self-satisfied optimism and bent on self-improvement, has nothing in common with Laura. He has genuine affection for her and does manage to draw her out, but the relationship cannot go further, because he is engaged to someone else. This revelation occurs just as Laura is beginning to believe that her high school crush on Jim could be fulfilled. In other words, the Gentleman Caller breaks her illusions and her spirit as easily and as casually as he has broken her glass unicorn.

The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s recollection of the events culminating in the visit of the Gentleman Caller. Everything in the play happens in and from memory. Insight and perspective are counterpoised by that peculiar trick of memory that diminishes some things and enlarges others, according to their importance. Such distortion always serves to sharpen and explain. Likewise, Tom’s account, always slightly unreal, always slightly over the top, veers between caricature and canonization.

Reminiscent of the brittle translucency of glass, Laura is imbued with a “pristine clarity” similar to that found in “early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas.” In stark contrast to Laura’s otherworldliness, Amanda and her idealized Southern girlhood—grotesquely laden with jonquils and suitors—clash with the everyday contingencies of cold-calling, mastication, a disabled daughter, and an absconded husband in a way that is both painfully comical and brutally revealing. Even Jim cannot escape from the exaggeration of memory. Having failed “to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty” (53), he is shown to wallow in the sweet smell of former basketball glory, yearbook pictures, and the admiration of a shy, lonely girl. “Try and you will succeed” is the futile battle cry Jim and Amanda share in the face of stagnation.

Because he is an outsider and inhabits the real world, Jim is raised to a symbol of hope, “the longdelayed but always expected something that we live for.” For Amanda expectation does not stop here. Roger B. Stein makes a convincing case that Jim has been cast as a Christ-like savior figure or, at the very least, as Moses about to lead the Wingfield family to the promised land of harmony and happiness (Stein, 141–153). There is no such land, of course, and only Amanda has promised it. The pivotal scene between Jim, the flawed suitor, and Laura exposes this fallacy. “Unicorns, aren’t they extinct in the modern world?” he asks when Laura shows him her favorite glass animal. The unicorn is a mythical animal and an alien even in the unreal world of Laura’s glass menagerie. In fact, it is so strange that Jim cannot recognize it as what it is without being prompted, just as he is unaware of the real reason why he has been invited to dinner. At this point the unicorn stands for the Wingfields’ combined dreams of escape: Amanda’s hope of the miracle cure of marriage for Laura, Tom’s longing for adventure and motion, and Laura’s tentative, naive, and unformed dream of love. The shattering of the glass unicorn heralds the collapse of those dreams as much as it heralds the personal shattering of Laura. Unicorns are extinct in the modern world, Jim is engaged, and escape from reality is impossible. Tom’s last monologue underscores this fact. His own break from home has only succeeded in setting him adrift and the sole guilty resting point he has left are his memories. Ironically, it is precisely those memories that prevent his true escape, because they forever tie him to the past.

With The Glass Menagerie , Williams set out to create a new kind of “Plastic Theatre,” a highly expressionistic language of the stage that would replace what he saw as the stale conventions of realism. He succeeded, thereby revolutionizing American theater. Within two weeks of opening on Broadway in 1945, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Claudia Cassidy, present at the Chicago premiere, had predicted The Glass Menagerie ’s success: “It was not only the quality of the work as something so delicate, so fragile. It was also indestructible and you knew right then” (Terkel, 144). Cassidy was correct about the play’s indestructibility, although for a long time, critics either failed to see or attempted to marginalize the play’s achievement. For some, the lyricism of language and expressiveness of theatrical devices obstructed the action. This response was due to the fact that the critics were married to an American theater tradition that demanded realism, which is precisely what Williams denounced in the production notes for the play. Instead of scientific photographic likeness, Williams attempted and conveyed spiritual and emotional truth.

The acid test of audience reception bears this out. Not tied to ideologies and convictions, audiences understood and responded immediately and favorably to The Glass Menagerie . A generation after its Chicago premiere, critical attitudes and opinions had shifted markedly. Many acknowledge The Glass Menagerie as possibly Williams’s greatest achievement because of the breadth of its cataclysmic vision, a vision “not only of individuals who fail to communicate with one another, nor a society temporarily adrift in a depression, but of man abandoned in the universe” (Stein, 153). This is the explanation for the play’s enduring appeal. As are all great works of art, it is not limited by time and space but manages to transcend both by touching on matters shared and universal. Spoto surmised that nothing Williams wrote after The Glass Menagerie possesses the “wholeness of sentiment,” its “breadth of spirit,” or its “quiet voice about the great reach of small lives” (Spoto, 116).

O’Connor, Jim

Jim is a former hero of the high school Tom and Laura Wingfield attended. He is also a colleague of Tom’s at the International Shoe Company. Tom invites Jim for dinner at the Wingfields’ apartment. Jim does not realize that Tom’s mother, Amanda Wingfield, has the ulterior motive of presenting him as a gentleman caller and prospective suitor for Laura. The plan fails, as Jimis already engaged. The character of Jim is based on an actual Jim O’Connor, who was one of Williams’s fellow students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. On one occasion he was invited to the Williams home with the goal that he would become better acquainted with Williams’s sister, Rose Williams.

Wingfield, Amanda

She is the mother of Tom and Laura Wingfield. Living in a dingy, Saint Louis apartment and struggling to make ends meet by selling magazine subscriptions, Amanda finds solace in the romantic memories of her girlhood. Her concern about her children’s future prompts her to bully them to live her ideal life, that of Southern gentility. Her inappropriate sense of propriety makes Tom and Laura miserable. As does Esmeralda Critchfield in Spring Storm , Amanda places importance on the need to have Laura marry a socially suitable young man. This goal causes an unhappy tension in the household and bitter friction, especially between Amanda and Tom. At her insistence, Tom invites Jim O’Connor, a fellow shoe factory worker, to visit the Wingfield home as a prospective gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda Wingfield is based on Williams’s mother, Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams. Mrs. Williams acknowledged the similarity and recalled that in her youth she was always “the belle of the ball,” who proudly “made [her] debut in Vicksburg twice” (Brown, 119). Mrs. Williams also said that she greatly enjoyed the character of Amanda, especially when she was played by Laurette Taylor, a “real genius,” who adequately captured the “pathos” of the character (Brown, 115–116).

Wingfield, Laura

Laura is the daughter of Amanda Wingfield and older sister of Tom Wingfield. A childhood illness has left her with a shortened leg, for which she has to wear a brace. Laura’s self-consciousness about her disability renders her unable to attend business college, and she seeks refuge in her collection of glass animals, the eponymous glass menagerie. Her encounter with Jim O’Connor, with whom she has been secretly infatuated since high school, proves traumatic when she finds out that he is engaged. Laura Wingfield is based on Williams’s sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

Wingfield, Tom

Tom is the narrator and simultaneously a character in the play. He has ambitions to be a poet, but he is forced to work at a shoe factory warehouse to support his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield. His home life in their Saint Louis apartment is miserable. His mother repeatedly accuses him of being selfish and regularly looks through his possessions. Dreaming of adventure and escape from his depressing job and home life, Tom spends most of his evenings at movies. He becomes a reluctant accomplice in his mother’s plan to secure a gentleman caller for Laura. He invites his workmate and former high school associate Jim O’Connor to the Wingfield apartment for dinner. The evening is a disaster, and his mother blames the negative turn of events on Tom. As a result, he leaves home, abandoning Amanda and Laura to their own resources. Tom is forever haunted by memories of his sister, and the play is his account of events surrounding his departure. Tom Wingfield is Williams’s most autobiographical character. Tom’s leave-taking mirrors Williams’s own departure from his family’s Saint Louis, MISSOURI, apartment and from his emotionally unstable sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

FURTHER READING Brown, Dennis. Shoptalk: Conversations about Theatre and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer—and Tennessee Williams’s Mother. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992). Cassidy, Claudia. “Fragile Drama Holds Theatre in Tight Spell,” Chicago Daily Theater Tribune, December 27, 1944, p. 11. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Stein, Roger B. “ The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe without Violence,” Western Humanities Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1964): 141–153. Terkel, Studs. The Spectator: Talk about Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them. New York: New Press, 1999. Tynan, Kenneth. “Valentine to Tennessee Williams,” in Drama and the Modern World: Plays and Essays, edited by Samuel Weiss. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1964, pp. 455–461.

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The Glass Menagerie

Introduction to the glass menagerie.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play , written by a popular American writer, Tennessee Williams . The play was first staged in 1944 and became an instant hit, bringing fortune and popularity, both for the playwright on account of the autobiographical elements he has inserted in it. The story of the play revolves around a mother, her shy and introverted daughter, Laura , and her artist son, Tom. Originally written as The Gentleman Caller, the play won New York Drama Critic Award for the author in 1945 and became a masterpiece.

Summary of The Glass Menagerie

The play starts with Tom Wingfield, Amanda Wingfield’s son recalling his life. Amanda is a single mother, whose husband had forsaken the family years back in the past before the play begins. The cast shows Laura and Amanda, both daughter and mother, conversing with their only male member in St. Louis in the year 1937.

The play shows Amanda Wingfield living in a middle-class apartment in St. Louis, taking care of her small family. She recalls her glory days when the boys used to chase her due to her beautiful looks and outgoing personality. This future worry and not-so-bright prospectus of her son, who is working in a warehouse, has become another constant worry for her. Despite seemingly being a budding poet, Tom Wingfield does not find enough time due to his constant worry of everyday preoccupations and penchant for movies that he watches all night . Now her main anxiety is her daughter, Laura, who is crippled and naturally shy, does not seem to win any gentleman’s attention. Looking at her daughter’s youth, Amanda becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a gentleman for her. At dinner Amanda tells her daughter, Laura, to stay polite and pretty for her gentlemen callers even though she never had any callers and never expected one.

Amanda then proceeds to tell Laura to practice her shorthand and typing. A few days later when Amanda comes home from Laura’s school after getting to know that Laura had dropped out several months earlier, she is shocked. Amanda wonders what they will do with their lives since Laura never tried to help her and spends all her time playing with her glass menagerie and her old phonograph records. Amanda decides that to have a gentleman caller for Laura, and Laura reveals that she has liked only one boy in her whole life, a high school boy called Jim.

When Tom goes out to the movies that night, Amanda scolds him and asks him to do something useful other than watching movies. The next morning after Tom apologizes to her, Amanda asks him to find a nice gentleman caller for Laura. A few days later, Tom tells her that he has invited his colleague, Jim O’Connor over dinner. When Amanda comes to know about the arrival of Jim, she becomes jubilant, seeing the prospects of meeting with the future of her daughter. When Jim comes, she starts recalling her own budding youthful period and her own looks. However, Laura senses that she must have been attracted to Jim during her school years. First, she excuses herself to join dinner with them due to her supposed illness but later when she comes into the living room, she sees Jim alone waiting for the electricity.

As they start a conversation, Jim encourages her to think about their past and starts dancing quietly when he accidentally knocks down her menagerie, having her glass animals in it, breaking the unicorn. However, he immediately takes the situation in control by kissing her and paying compliments for keeping such a beautiful menagerie. Following this, he explodes the bombshell about his likely marriage soon. Laura, on the other hand, presents the broken unicorn to him as a gift after which he departs. Amanda, upon learning this, lashes out at Tom, who expresses his ignorance about such a thing. The play ends on a sad note of Tom leaving the house, asking his sister to extinguish the candles.

Major Themes in The Glass Menagerie

• Escape from Responsibilities: The play demonstrates the theme of escape from the heavy responsibilities of life as Tom desires to avoid family responsibilities like a magician, who shows the ability to escape the box without removing nails from it. The burden of a shy sister and a pestering mother remains heavy on his mind. He wants to remove this burden from his mind and escape to the world of magical fantasy . However, the memory of the family stays with him, reminding him of having family relations with Laura and his mother. On the other hand, both of them could not escape the financial constraints and social pressure due to the well-knit domestic setup. In the end, Tom realizes that this escape from responsibilities does not come without its cost which is loneliness and mental depression.
• Family : The major theme of family and its responsibility is shown through the Wingfield family, Amanda, the mother , Laura, the daughter, and Tom, who’s Amanda’s son. As the only male member, Tom has to assume the charge of the main breadwinner, though, he shirks taking up the responsibility of the whole family. On the other hand, Amanda constantly feels the stress of finding a suitable match for her daughter, Laura, whose social shyness and isolation are costing the family heavily. In this backdrop, the shadow of the disappearance of Mr. Wingfield is peeping through their mental stress. Tom, therefore, follows suit, but the realization of his being the patriarchal head does not recede.
• Abandonment: The theme of abandonment looms large in the background due to the disappearance of the head, Mr. Wingfield. Amanda has an acute realization of her husband’s abandoned presence and on her daughter who suffers from social abandonment. Her son, Tom, too, tries to take this abandonment on him by deciding to leave the family. He tries to hook Jim, but this, too, proves a futile effort on his part. Therefore, his own predicament shows his fear of being abandoned by his dreams and desires in life.
• Illusions and Reality: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of illusion and reality through the characters of Amanda and Tom. Her Southern legacy has caused the illusion to Amanda in that she visualizes patriarchy taking up the household responsibility but her son’s upbringing in the abandoned household is the stark reality staring in her face. It is because he has a constant reminder of the disappearance of his father, the reality which runs contrary to his presence as the responsible head of the family. Similarly, Amanda feels that the illusion of her being an outgoing girl in her past may be reflected through her daughter Laura, who is, in reality, a socially shy girl, having little prospects of finding a gentleman.
• Memory: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of memory and its undertones among all the family members of the Wingfield family. Amanda, the mother of the family, is constantly stuck in her memories of her blissful and pretty youth period, while the memory of her escaping husband makes these memories muddied. Similarly, Tom also recalls his sister by the end, the memory of which haunts him, while Jim is lost in his memories of boyhood, a thrilling period of his life.
• Shattering of Dreams: Despite a broken family, every Wingfield individual dreams about having a good life. Amanda, the mother, dreams of having her daughter married to a gentleman and her son, Tom, taking up the family responsibility. On the other hand, Tom dreams of having an independent life free from family preoccupations and burdens.
• Marriage: The play also shows the theme of marriage as an institution whose existence and preservation keep the family united and stable. Amanda wants her daughter to have a good gentleman to marry, but she fails, shattering her dreams. It is because Amanda’s husband married her but left her, leaving the family in the lurch.
• Alcoholism: The play implicitly shows the theme of alcoholism in that if a person drinks, he is irresponsible as Amanda experiences addiction as she recalls her fleeing husband. Keeping this in mind, she also questions Jim whether he drinks or not, having the point of family responsibility in her consciousness.
• Love: The theme of love in the play is quite implicit through the motherly love of Amanda for her daughter to marry a gentleman and for her son to take up the family responsibility.

Major Characters The Glass Menagerie

• Tom Wingfield: Tom Wingfield is the representative of patriarchy in the play and shows the memories presented objectively. His direct address to the audience shows his capability of objective evaluation of his situation. At the same time, his duality confuses the audience in understanding his role within the family. His artistic capabilities stand in contrast to his actual achievement for the family in the real world. Although his concerns about his sister, Laura, and mother, Amanda, shows that he takes care of his family, his frequent demonstration of indifference leads to the impressions of the audience about his cruel behavior. His breaking down of the glass menagerie, in the end, shows this cruel behavior, leading to contradictory arguments about him, having no role model in the family to follow.
• Amanda Wingfield: A remnant of the faded Southern beauty , Amanda represents the role of the fading matriarchy after having suffered an economic and social decline. Following her husband’s escape from the family responsibilities, she has to take up matters into her own hands despite having little experience of raising a family, the reason that the family is undergoing stress and turbulence. As the extrovert character , she tries to lead her son, Tom, to take up the role of the family head. Yet, she herself stays away from Laura instead of guiding her to mix in the society. Some of the flaws in her character lead to the comic and tragic issues arising in the family. Her failures are apparent from her monologue delivered in response to her children’s behavior.
• Laura Wingfield: A very innocent and mentally challenged character, Laura demonstrates compassion when she comes to know the situation of her brother. This behavior stands in stark contrast to the selfish attitude of Amanda, her mother, as well as, her brother, Tom. Her position in the family makes her the center of the play in that her mother and brother, both, are engaged in finding a suitable match for her. Although she is a young girl, her mother’s thoughts of her own glamorous past belittle her prospects when Tom brings Jim. Laura, though, seems an introvert and a shy character, shows her will at several moments which defies her real personality built by her mother and brother.
• Jim O’Connor: The character of Jim within the play is interesting and intriguing. He is a gentleman and Amanda encourages him to woo Laura. An ordinary but nice young man, Jim is a hero in Tom’s sight since his school days when he used to lead sports and theatrical productions. Having no haunting memories and present stigmas, Jim is a true middle-class young man who does not take fantasies at the face value. Sensing his fall in this abyss, he extricates himself and returns to his world on the pretext of his being already hooked.
• Mr. Wingfield: The significance of the character of Mr. Wingfield lies in his portrait hanging on the wall in the family apartment despite his shameful flight from the family responsibilities. A symbol of the deceitful patriarchy, he becomes prominent in the play on account of his absence. Amanda’s memories of his charm also belittle his patriarchal role due to her wrong choice among the responsible and noble gentlemen of her time.

Writing Style of The Glass Menagerie

As poetic, symbolic, and spontaneous, The Glass Menagerie establishes Tennessee Williams at his best. The characters speak in a lyrical style with spontaneity in their dialogues. The conversation is down-to-earth direct and simple, showing the characters in their true colors. As far as the sentence style and diction are concerned, they are informal and simple. Yet Williams relies heavily on metaphors , similes, and symbols to convey the meanings of the frustration the family members are in after the flight of their family head, Mr. Wingfield.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in The Glass Menagerie

• Action: The main action of the play comprises the life of the Wingfield family, the desires of Tom and Laura, and the wish of Amanda to marry her daughter to a gentleman. The rising action occurs when Laura allows her mother to decide that she should marry. The falling action occurs when Jim states that he has a fiancée waiting for him and leaves the house.
• Anaphora : The play shows the use of anaphora as given in the below examples, i. In Spain there was a revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago , Cleveland, Saint Louis . . . This is the social background of the play. (Scene-I) ii. Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread . (Scene-I) Both of these examples show the repetitious use of some phrases such as “In Spain there was…” and “have to push.”
• Allusion : The play shows amazing use of different allusions as given in the examples below, i. You simply couldn’t go out if you hadn’t read it. All everybody talked was Scarlett O’Hara. Well, this is a book that critics already compare to Gone with the Wind. It’s the Gone with the Wind of the post-World-War generation! (Scene-III) ii. I’m going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired assassin, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! (Act-III) iii. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! (Scene-III) The first example shows alluding to an author and her books, the second to a gang, and the third to Spanish locations. There are some other lurking allusions such as Pygmalion , a Greek mythical figure, Midas touch of King Midas, Biblical allusions of the Annunciation, and allusion of the Clark Gable.
• Antagonist : Amanda seems to be the antagonist of the play as she seems to have still the charm of her husband and the glamor of her personality having encircled her mind that she does not think about other family members.
• Antimetabole : Antimetabole is the reuse of words in the first and second halves of a sentence. The play shows the use of antimetabole as given in the below example, i. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (Act-I) The play shows the use of antimetabole as the reversely used phrase “Their eyes” show.
• Conflict : The play shows both external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is going on between Tom and Amanda, while the internal conflict is going on in Tom’s mind as he narrates the events of the play.
• Characters: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows both static as well as dynamic characters. The young man, Tom, is a dynamic character as he shows a considerable transformation in his behavior and conduct by the end of the play. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation such as Laura and Amanda.
• Climax : The climax in the play occurs when Laura comes to know that Jim is the same, her classmate, and faces freezing feelings that she has to get support to sit on the sofa.
• Foreshadowing : The play shows many examples of foreshadows as given in below, i. Tom’s departure from the scene foreshadows his escape from familial responsibilities ii. Music foreshadows the dance of Jim and Laura iii. Breaking of unicorn foreshadows breaking of Laura’s heart
• Hyperbole : The play shows various examples of hyperboles as given below, i. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment… (Scene-III) ii. I’m starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside — well, I’m boiling! (Scene-VI) Both these examples exaggerate things such as the first one says that the gentleman has become a ghost and in the second Tom says that he is boiling inside which is not possible.
• Imagery : The Glass Menagerie shows excellent use of imagery as given in the below examples, i. He had tremendous Irish good nature and vitality with the scrubbed and polished look of white chinaware. He seemed to move in a continual spotlight. He was a star in basketball, captain of the debating club, president of the senior class and the glee club and he sang the male lead in the annual light operas. (Scene-VI) ii. I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. (Scene-VII) These two examples show images of nature, color, and feelings.
• Metaphor : The Glass Menagerie shows good use of various metaphors as given the examples below, i. The play is memory. (Scene-I) ii. My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children!. (Scene-IV) These examples show that several things have been compared directly in the play such as the play itself has been compared to things recalled from memory or the mother compared to a witch.
• Mood : The play, The Glass Menagerie , shows various moods; it starts with a reflective mood but turns out highly ironic and melancholy at times.
• Narrator : The play, The Glass Menagerie , has been narrated by the first person, Tom, who happens to be one of its characters, too. In this sense, it seems a meta- fiction , a narrative within the play but still, it has a dialogue form.
• Personification : The play shows examples of personifications as given below, i. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting. (Scene-VI) ii. Wind blows the white curtains inward in a slow, graceful motion and with a faint, sorrowful sighing. (Scene-VI) These examples show as if the glass and the wind have life and emotions of their own.
• Protagonist : Laura Wingfield is the protagonist of the play as it is her fate that Amanda and Tom are going to decide or not decide.
• Setting : The setting of the play, The Glass Menagerie , is the middle-class apartment of the Wingfield family located in St. Louis in 1937.
• Simile : The play shows good use of various similes as given in the examples below, i. Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum! (Scene-I) ii. But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. (Scene-V) iii. Amanda has worked like a Turk in preparation for the gentleman caller. (Scene-VI) iv. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light. (Scene-VII) The use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things in the examples. The first example shows this between the mother and Jesus, the second shows between sex with a chandelier, the third between Amanda and a Turk, and the fourth between Laura and glass menagerie.

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The Glass Menagerie: Analysis of Relationships

The Glass Menagerie is a play about a dysfunctional family, each caught in between their feelings and dreams. The conflicts experienced in the Wingfield’s family primarily lie deep within themselves, but also intertwine with each other. This essay will analyze the complicated relationship between Amanda–the mother and Laura—the daughter and determine why Laura prefers to live in her world, along with glass animals and phonograph records.

Initially, the dynamic of Amanda and Laura is entirely different. Mother has a very flirty, outgoing, and strongly build complex character opposed to her daughters shy, notorious, and vulnerable. On this ground, women can never achieve peace.

Amanda always tells Laura to find a romantic partner, unable to see how closed up she is. The mother is obsessed with the thought of gentlemen coming to Laura and lives in a constant fantasy of her past, where she received 17 gentlemen to her house in one day. “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain – your mother received – seventeen! – gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all. We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house” (Williams 754). That old dream manipulates her current reality and does not allow her to see the world and her children as they are.

Laura on the other side lives in her own dream world with glass animals, which replace real friends. A young lady is so terrified of the world, that she could not handle taking on the test, resulting in her vomiting because of nerves. The distant relationship between mother and daughter and their constant avoidance of reality makes their relationship so distant and full of misunderstandings. A significant difference in characters results in continual misunderstanding. Amanda’s obsession with Laura’s life caused the daughter to distance herself from the outside world and create her own, where she feels safe.

Everlasting life in the dream world consumes mother and daughter. Amanda is constantly dreaming of the life when she lived in Blue Lagoon, still unable to accept the world she exists in now as an abandoned wife and single mother of two kids living in a small apartment in St. Louis. Amanda does not notice her kids’ struggles through the prism of her obsession. On the contrary, Laura’s fantasy world consists of only herself and her darling glass animals along with the phonograph. Laura rarely goes outside because she is embarrassed about a minor defect she has-a limp that has affected her entire personality. A young girl closes herself up to be in the imagined world she created.

Introverted Laura cannot handle stress or pressure well. Knowing that Amanda’s mother enrolled the daughter to the business school where she could not even undergo a week of studying and dropped out after failing to take her typewriting test. Laura was so ashamed she is unable to tell her mother about not attending it for six weeks. A young woman demonstrates no social skills and lacks communication with the real world.

Her mother is unable to recognize the struggles her daughter experiences, and it causes Laura to suffer in loneliness and constant manipulation and disappointment from Amanda’s side “I put her in business college—a dismal failure! Frightened so it made her sick at the stomach. I took her over to the Young People’s League at the church. Another fiasco. She spoke to nobody, nobody spoke to her. Now all she does is fool with those pieces of glass and play those worn-out records. What kind of life is that for a girl to lead?” (Williams 763). Laura’s fantasy world is the only place where she is able to control what is going on around her. Her mother intimidates her with never-ending talks about marriage and the way she is supposed to be instead of supporting and managing her fears.

Failure to understand the basic needs of children might be Amanda’s main problem. She refuses to accept the fact that they are not pursuing her imaginative goals. On that, ground Tom continually argues with his mother over the smallest thing “I haven’t enjoyed one bite of this dinner because of your constant directions on how to eat it. It’s you that makes me rush through meals with your hawk like attention to every bite I take. Sickening – spoils my appetite…!” (Williams 753), while Laura just silently agrees with her but still sticks to her own beliefs. Amanda wants what is best for her kids, but does not recognize Tom and Laura’s aspirations.

Laura’s weak character is incapable of resisting the pressure the mother puts on her. Probably glass animals are where she finds support and comfort at times when the mother nurtures her unreal dreams of what Laura should be like. Amanda does not show interest in her daughter’s aspirations and plans for the future, instead, mother blindly plants her own concepts of proper life. That lack of communication, support and mother-daughter relationship caused Laura to be the shy, introverted, isolated person she is. Laura requires a person in her life who would devote attention to her and provide the care she needs because on the inside Laura remains a kind, charming young woman.

To conclude, Laura’s constant presence in her imaginary world is caused primarily by the lack of proper communication within the family. People like Laura need constant support and mentoring from a person they look up to. Unfortunately, she never received that. Such lack of attention resulted in her creating a fantasy world where she feels control over her life.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie . Random House Inc., 1973, pp. 749-764.

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The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee williams, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In his monologue that opens the play, Tom announces, “The play is memory.” The play is Tom's memory of the past, and all of the action takes place in his head. That action is therefore dramatic, sentimental, and emotional, not realistic. As is fitting in a play that is itself a memory of the past, in The Glass Menagerie the past haunts all the characters.

Tom the character (the Tom who Tom is remembering as…

Abandonment

The male characters in the play all abandon Amanda and Laura . The father, whom we never see, has abandoned the family: he worked for the telephone company and “fell in love with long distances.” The traumatic effect of this abandonment on Amanda, and Amanda's resulting fear about her own helplessness, is clear in her relentless quest for Laura to gain business skills and then to marry. Jim ’s abandonment of Laura forms the play’s…

Illusions and Dreams

Tom explains that in creating the play from his memory that he is giving “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion,” and the stage directions of the play are designed to create a nostalgic, sentimental, non-realistic atmosphere to create the unreal yet heightened effects of a dream. The lighting in each scene adds emphasis and shadows: for example, the electric light that goes out, the candelabra, moonlight, the paper lantern that hides the broken lightbulb…

Escape in the play operate in two directions: from the real world into the world of memory and dreams, as Amanda and Laura demonstrate; or from the world of memory and dreams into the real world, as Tom desires. Amanda and Laura escape reality by retreating into dream worlds. Amanda refuses to see things as they are, insisting on seeing what she wants to see. Amanda still lives as a past version of herself, even…

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A bizarre thing happens when the actors Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez are out and about in public together, using mobility aids to get around: she a scooter, he a wheelchair. Inevitably, she said, strangers approach, presuming that the two are somehow in distress.

“People will be like, ‘Are you OK? What’s going on?’” Ferris said the other afternoon at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, where they are starring in the New Group ’s Off Broadway production of Laura Winters’s romantic comedy, “All of Me.”

And if several wheelchair users should roll down the street together, Gomez said, “then it’s like the circus is in town.” Such as the night a few friends of his from the Los Angeles dance team the Rollettes came to the play, and he and Ferris left with them afterward.

“Everywhere we went,” he said, “just stares, left and right.”

To Gomez, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain-biking accident in 2016, that kind of othering underscores the need for theater, television and film to depict more disabled people, and do it more matter-of-factly.

“Then it wouldn’t be so weird in real life,” he added. “It would just be people going about their day. Like, I don’t stare at you when you’re with your group of friends.”

Not that “All of Me” is intended as pedagogical, but he does think it could help.

The play opens with a meet-cute between Lucy, played by Ferris, and Alfonso, played by Gomez, outside a hospital. Unlike the actors who portray them, the characters rely on electronic text-to-speech devices to talk: the sardonic Lucy because her muscles have recently made it difficult for her to enunciate, the amused Alfonso because his vocal cords were damaged when he was a baby. Lucy’s joking immediately gives the audience permission to laugh.

The show’s comedy is, to a great degree, physical. There is nuance in Lucy’s and Alfonso’s faces and posture, and the positions of her scooter and his wheelchair. Reviewing “All of Me” for The New York Times, Naveen Kumar credited “much of its heartfelt appeal to its two leads,” praising Ferris’s deftness of expression and Gomez’s charm.

“All of Me,” which runs through June 16, came into Ferris’s life in 2017, when she was playing Laura in Sam Gold’s Broadway revival of “ The Glass Menagerie .” That show’s assistant director, Ashley Brooke Monroe, who is the director of “All of Me,” suggested her to Winters.

For Ferris, that spring was a disillusioning time. Gold’s production, which starred Sally Field as Amanda and Joe Mantello as Tom, was not well received, and closed early .

“I had envisioned the world being a lot more progressive,” Ferris said. “And then when I did ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ I realized how much it wasn’t. So much of the feedback that I, not received personally, but was written about me, was entirely about the way I moved and my physicality. And it wasn’t about the fact that I had poured my heart and soul into this character.”

In the years since, New York stages have seen an uptick in high-profile performances by disabled actors, like Ali Stroker, who won a Tony Award in 2019 as Ado Annie in Daniel Fish’s “ Oklahoma! ”; Katy Sullivan and Gregg Mozgala in the Broadway production of “ Cost of Living ” in 2022; Michael Patrick Thornton, who played Dr. Rank in Jamie Lloyd’s “ A Doll’s House ” last spring; Ryan J. Haddad, a 2024 Obie Award winner for his “ Dark Disabled Stories ”; and Jenna Bainbridge, an accessibility consultant on “All of Me,” currently on Broadway in “ Suffs .”

“Slowly,” Ferris said, “the tide is turning.”

It might turn faster if not for what Monroe suggested is a misperception by producers that plays involving actors with disabilities are “incredibly expensive” or logistically complex to stage.

“I know for a fact it is not as hard as people think it is,” she said.

Still, she noted, it goes more smoothly at a contemporary facility like the Signature Center, designed with artist and audience accessibility in mind.

“All of Me” made its premiere in 2022 at Barrington Stage Company , in Western Massachusetts. Gomez had joined the project in 2019, two years after Ferris.

During the show’s incubation, the cultural debate about who has the right to depict which kinds of characters has only intensified. Winters, whose initial inspiration for writing about disability in “All of Me” was the memory of watching her grandmother lose her mobility, is nondisabled.

As far as Ferris is concerned, that does not mean that Winters is out of bounds to have imagined the lives of Lucy and Alfonso.

“If anyone said that to Laura, I would probably beat them up,” Ferris mused, darkly. “I would probably, like, hit them with my scooter.”

For one thing, she said, Winters has listened to her and Gomez, rewriting the script to more closely match the actors’ experiences. For another, Winters and Monroe, who is also nondisabled, have enlisted experts as consultants, and hired disabled people behind the scenes.

Winters acknowledged sometimes having felt nervous about writing disabled characters. But she has rooted them in family relationships — most significantly, Lucy’s fraught dynamic with her mother, played by Kyra Sedgwick.

“I do know how to write families,” Winters said, “and I do know how to write sisters, and I do know how to write lovers, and I do know how to write people on a date. And all these other things that people with disabilities are also doing with their lives.”

Both Ferris and Gomez are hungry to play characters who are simply in the world, whether written as disabled or not.

Ferris has a whole list of dream roles, starting with Jean in Sarah Ruhl’s comedy “ Dead Man’s Cell Phone ,” the role Mary-Louise Parker performed Off Broadway in 2008. Also Catherine Sloper in the stage version of “The Heiress”; Natasha in “Three Sisters”; Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being Earnest”; and Lady Macbeth — “obviously,” she said.

But mostly, Ferris — who dismissed many depictions of disability as “a buzz kill” — would like to keep doing comedies, onstage and onscreen.

And Gomez, principally a screen actor, would like to work consistently. So it would help if writers stopped tying themselves in knots over disability.

“The number one thing I hear from writers in L.A.,” he said, “is like, ‘Well, how do I explain why you’re in a wheelchair?’ I’m like, ‘No one cares.’”

“If you don’t mention it,” he added, “or just write, ‘The man works at a coffee shop, serves a coffee,’ that’s it. Then you can move on with your story.”