Word: wingfield
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Williams wrote a play about people who inhabit the past and the present, and those who inhabit no time at all. There is Amanda Wingfield, a faded Mississippi belle stranded in the slums of St. Louis who is trying desperately to recapture the dead world of the Delta; Jim O'Connor, the gentleman caller, an engaging boor who represents the present Amanda is avoiding; Tom, Amanda's son, torn between love for his mother and sister and the desire to escape into the living world around him; and Laura, Amanda's daughter, a shy and delicately beautiful cripple...
Williams has peopled the U.S. stage with characters whose vibrantly durable presences stalk the corridors of a playgoer's memory: Amanda Wingfield, the fussy, garrulous, gallant mother of Glass Menagerie; Streetcar's Blanche DuBois, Southern gentlewoman turned nymphomaniac, and its Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in a T shirt...
...that best proves it is The Glass Menagerie. In it Williams held a mirror up to memory and caught upon it the breath of three lives: his mother's, his sister's and his own. In a lower-middle-class apartment in a Mid western city, Amanda Wingfield ("an exact portrait of my mother," says Williams) tries to cope with a peevish present by chattering of a fancied past. The son Tom (Williams) suffocates in a shoe factory and goes to movies to daydream of escape. The daughter Laura (Williams' sister Rose) has a mind...
...Mills introduced him to a one-foot shelf of influences: Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Chekhov, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, who became Williams' poetic idol. Tom introduced Mills to Rose. As Mills recalls it, Mrs. Williams "commanded Tom to bring home 'gentleman callers,' " as Tom Wingfield does in Menagerie; "Williams' poor sister was dressed in old-fashioned Southern costumes. She was very lovely. She never talked at all. Mrs. Williams never stopped talking-empty verbiage about their status in the South. The mother didn't give her a chance...
...Williams practices on the emotions of his audience with consummate skill, successfully using various theatrical devices to intensify the atmosphere. "The play is memory," says Tom Wingfield, who functions as narrator. "Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music."--and the music threads in and out of the action with a perfectly calibrated degree of obtrusiveness...