The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams
 
Amanda Wingfield believes in the talent of her two children,
Tom and Laura. And she believes in her own wealthy and
romantic southern-states background. But are these beliefs
based on fact? Or are they merely fantasy and wishful
thinking?
In reality, Tom is a frustrated warehouse-worker, trapped at
home by his family’s poverty and getting drunk every night
because he cannot find the peace to compose the poems
he wants to write. Laura is a painfully shy cripple, unable to
get a job or even talk to people - a girl as fragile and delicate
as glass.
 
The Glass Menagerie is one of the great masterpieces of
twentieth-century American theatre - a play about fantasy
and reality, about the unreliability and the pain of old
memories, and about the lies and deceptions to which we
resort in order to preserve our dreams.