Encountering The Glass Menagerie

Cherry Jones

I’m from Tennessee so I probably was aware of Tennessee Williams earlier than many children just because I was captivated by his name. My mother was an English and American literature teacher so I’m sure she must have taught The Glass Menagerie, and I must have heard his name. I don’t remember reading it in high school, but I did This Property is Condemned at high school speech tournaments and used that piece to get into Carnegie Mellon when I was seventeen. The first time I saw The Glass Menagerie was probably in a regional theater production in Syracuse, New York on a very snowy night. I took the train from New York City to Syracuse to see my friend Victoria Boothby as Amanda. And I’d probably at that point already auditioned for Laura, one of the many, many times I auditioned for Laura with no success. I think I was a little too large for most Lauras—I was tall and big-boned; an equally tall young man, whom I auditioned with to play Laura to Julie Harris’s Amanda, suggested that the two of us could never play Tom and Laura unless Nancy Marchand was playing Amanda. I never wanted to play Amanda, ever. Ever. But here I am with an extraordinary group, blessed to play this part. Life is surprising this winter, wonderfully so.

Celia Keenan-Bolger

I first read Tennessee Williams on a trip with my dad to Tulum, Mexico. I borrowed a Tennessee Williams anthology from the library and read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire. I remember, as a high school student who was obsessed with musicals, thinking how much I could hear the music of The Glass Menagerie, both in the music cues that Tennessee Williams had included in the script and also in his characters’ language. I’ve admired Cherry Jones for as long as I can remember, and I remember seeing Black Watch and thinking that if I ever got to work with John Tiffany or Steven Hoggett, I’d go anywhere and do anything. So when I found out that all of those people were going to be working together on a production at A.R.T., I just wanted to be a part of it so badly.

Zachary Quinto

My first experience with Tennessee was in high school reading A Streetcar Named Desire and then in college watching people work on little snippets of his plays here and there. But I somehow always felt distant from what was underneath the work until it became clear that I was going to be working on this play, and I started to learn more and more about him. I realized how many echoes there were for me in his experience and in what he was trying to unlock inside of himself. Playing this character has necessitated a deep delving into his personal life and experiences, so I feel like my biggest connection to him is through this production and playing what is ultimately the most autobiographical character in his canon. I feel so connected to him now on such a personal level, and I don’t think that would have been possible when I was younger. There’s something about coming to this play at this particular time in my life that has allowed me to really, really understand him, his work and his poetry on a much more intrinsic level.

Brian J. Smith

I remember studying The Glass Menagerie in high school. We watched the movie with John Malkovich, and I just remember lots of amber light and gauze and fog. It was a very academic approach… in high school, and I guess the play didn’t mean much beyond a high school reading project. I think Tennessee Williams really started becoming meaningful to me when I started reading his notebooks, and I started drawing my own connections to his life and why he wrote plays and the struggles that he went through writing them. The thing I always take away from The Glass Menagerie is the idea of freedom and that there’s a price for freedom. Anything I read by Tennessee Williams always makes me want to go out and live my life. I don’t want to stay home, and I don’t want to be safe. I want to go on an adventure. I want to meet new people, go to new places, use parts of myself I haven’t used before, and just explore being alive. I think that’s what Tennessee did so beautifully, and I think that’s what is great about this play, that it’s a call to do that, even if there is a price for it, and even if it does hurt a little bit.

Compiled by Alexandra Juckno, first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.