1154 Williams, Tennessee
the play begins, of the affair Maggie had with Skip-
per, which she claims was committed in a desperate
attempt to bring Brick closer to both of them. As
punishment, Brick refuses to sleep with his wife,
which has a twofold effect. For one, the tension
between the sensual Maggie and aloof Brick is elec-
tric on stage. More important, Big Daddy will not
leave his fortune to Brick unless his son can produce
an heir and leave the patriarch assured his legacy will
move on through generations.
Williams contrasts Brick’s unwillingness to live
as an adult with Maggie’s desperate attempt to
do just that. Having grown up in poverty, Maggie
used her looks and charm to win Brick. Through-
out the play, she continues to use her wiles to wear
her husband down. The conflict between the two
is fascinating, as neither refuses to give an inch.
Although Maggie’s character is troubling (she does,
after all, seek to have a child in order to secure her
position in a wealthy family), her tireless attempts to
break her husband’s alcoholism and have him accept
responsibility earns the admiration of the audience.
Among William’s famed female characters, Maggie
stands out because she possesses a strength that is
as palpable as the fragility that defines most of the
playwright’s heroines.
The resolution of the conflict between Brick and
Maggie is complicated as well. Williams submitted
a draft of the play to the famed director Elia Kazan,
who had previously helped the dramatist achieve his
most noteworthy successes. However, the director
was unsatisfied with the ending, one in which Mag-
gie essentially wears Brick out and forces him to go
to bed with her. This ending is troubling because it
offers no sense that Brick is a man ready or willing
to accept responsibility. In response to Kazan’s criti-
cism, Williams wrote an alternate ending that was
subsequently used for the Broadway production and
earned the aforementioned Pulitzer. In this version,
as a result of the blistering conversation with Big
Daddy in act 2, Brick slowly realizes his faults and
comes to stand by his wife’s side against his older
brother, Gooper, who is shameless in his attempt
to wrest control of the family fortune from Brick.
Furthermore, Brick himself gains the kind of admi-
ration for Maggie that the audience feels, and the
two achieve a harmony that is absent from the initial
version Williams himself preferred. In short, Brick
remains stunted in the initial version, while he man-
ages to grow up in what has become known as the
Broadway version. Ultimately, the playwright pub-
lished both versions of the play, leaving the audience
to decide which ending offers the proper resolution.
Chris BellwiLLiamS, TENNESSEE The Glass
Menagerie (1944)
The 1945 Broadway production of The Glass Menag-
erie—which premiered in Chicago in 1944—lifted
its then 34-year-old playwright out of obscurity
and to the forefront of American drama, where he
would remain for nearly two decades. With Menag-
erie, Tennessee Williams introduced playgoers to his
unique brand of expressionism, dubbed by the play-
wright himself “plastic theater,” an innovative man-
ner of using the stage to liberate American theater
from what the dramatist believed were the stifling
conventions of realistic theater. Williams called the
drama a “memory play” and used unconventional
modes of light and music to craft a poetic atmo-
sphere that moved the relatively conventional plot of
a woman attempting to find a suitor for her troubled
daughter into the realm of poetry. With the aspiring
writer Tom, Williams forever changed the possibili-
ties of characterization, as he successfully made this
part operate as a character, stage manager, director,
and narrator all at once. The atmosphere onstage
complements the play’s action perfectly. Williams’s
stage technique enhances the world of illusion in
which the Wingfields are trapped.
Amanda, a faded southern belle living with her
adult children in a tenement apartment in St. Louis,
makes a miscalculated but valiant attempt to find
a husband for her emotionally crippled daughter,
Laura. However, in enlisting her son Tom, she finds
an unwilling ally who ultimately chooses to abandon
his family rather than carry through his mother’s
mission, particularly since the first attempt to do so
ends in a colossal failure, leaving the audience with
the knowledge that Laura’s tenuous grip on reality
will not hold. When Tom leaves, Amanda and Laura
are alone, with no prospects for the future.
Chris Bell