The Glass Menagerie

Director
Scenery & Costumes
Lighting
Sound & Original Music
Properties
Production Stage Manager
David Elzer/Demand PR
Assistant Director
Merrill Davis
Master Electrician

Set Construction
Lighting Crew

SFX Programmer
Dialect Consultant
Waltz Consultant
Lighting Operator
Sound Operator
Stage Crew

Production Photographer
Graphic Art

Jessica Kubzansky

Michelle Ney

Jeremy Pivnick

Randall Tico

Robyn Taylor

Linda M. Tross

David Elzer/Demand PR

Douglas Clayton

Merrill Davis

Jeremy Bryden

Pro Sets West, Inc.

James King

Danny Barbosa

Watson Bradshaw

Sean Kozma

Jenni Steck

J.P. Pennington

Spencer Howard

Sean Kozma

Zack Gardner

Eleanor Wood

Michael Lamont

Doug Haverty, Art + Soul Designs

Tom Wingfield

Amanda Wingfield

Laura Winffield

Jim O’Connor

Louis Lotorto

Lisa Pelikan

Mandy Freund

Johnathan McClain

Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His mother was an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living, while his father, a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, was by turns distant and abusive. His sister, Rose, was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions, ultimately enduring a prefrontal lobotomy, echoes of which resonate in The Glass Menagerie.

In 1919, the shoe company transferred Williams's father, and the family moved to St. Louis. The move was hard on Tom and Rose — until they moved to the city, the children had hardly been aware that their family was on the low end of the economic scale. Living in a Midwestern city where the schoolchildren made fun of their Southern accents, and living in a dingy apartment in one of many cookie cutter buildings, it was difficult to ignore their poverty.

Williams attended the University of Missouri for a brief while, but this was during the Depression, and the family's lack of funds forced him to leave after a couple of years and take a job in the same shoe company that employed his father. “I hated the job," he said in an interview in the 1940s, "but I stuck with it until I had saved enough money to move on."

After several false starts as a playwright, and a brief but unsuccessful stint as a contract screenwriter in Hollywood, he wrote The Glass Menagerie in 1944, basing it on reworked material from one of his short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his unproduced screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to the premiere in Chicago (December 26, 1944), Williams had deep doubts about the production — the theater did not expect the play to last more than a few nights, and the producers prepared a closing notice in response to the weak initial ticket sales. But two critics loved the show, gave the play enthusiastic reviews, and continued to praise it daily in their respective papers. By mid-January, it was selling out.

However, no one connected with the production could predict how the play would be received in New York. The night it opened, March 31, 1945, has become legendary in the theatre, when the astonished audience brought the cast back out for an unbelievable 25 curtain calls. That night, The Glass Menagerie became an instant classic, and Tennessee Williams was hailed as a brilliant new voice in the American theatre.

He went on to write some of the seminal plays of the 20th century, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, and Orpheus Descending.

He died in 1983 in New York City.

Fact: A Google search of “Tennessee Williams” produces more than a million hits.