But not all productions of The Glass Menagerie featuring non-traditional casting succeed. Selecting actors of colour to play the Wingfields can sometimes help to highlight certain facets of the text and to underscore the play’s ideas of what it means to be a hopeless outsider in American society. Originally portrayed by an all-white cast when it was first mounted in segregated America, many revivals have featured an all-Black or mixed-race cast.
One of the most common variations between productions of The Glass Menagerie is casting. As a memory play that is not bound to strict stage directions, the work permits great artistic freedom, giving directors the liberty to push the boundaries when staging the play in an effort to uncover new themes hidden in the text. In addition, The Glass Menagerie is a play that many directors want to get their hands on. Louis, contains themes that continue to resonate with audiences today. Williams’s story about the Wingfields, a broken family living in depression-era St. The Glass Menagerie, his first major work, has been produced on Broadway almost once every decade since it first premiered in 1944, and it is easy to see why.
Save for perhaps Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, no other playwright has had their work more often revived than Tennessee Williams. Today, revivals remain an important part of the theatre tradition, allowing directors to breath new light on old texts and a new generation of audiences to experience classic works. Old works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were brought back to life in order to compensate for the lack of new plays. When the golden age of Athenian drama began to decline in the third century BCE, Greek audiences saw a new type of production: the revival.
Joshua Chong, Senior Arts and Culture Editor This article was originally written as an critical essay on Tennessee Williams’s 1945 play The Glass Menagerie.
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