At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building, which runs parallel to the footlights, is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clothes-lines, garbage cans, and the sinister lattice-work of neighbouring fire-escapes. It is up and down these alleys that exterior entrances and exits are made, during the play. At the end of Tom's opening commentary, the dark tenement wall slowly reveals (by means of a transparency) the interior of the ground floor Wingfield apartment.
A version of the Winfield tenement can be found in virtually any country in the world now, as it could in 1944 when this play was written and even in the more distant past. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams shows us a hard, dirty, rough world, and within it lies the fragile existence of Tom, Laura, and Amanda Wingfield. The contrast between their home—with its lacy, tattered linens and the glass menagerie that Laura dreams over—and the bitter reality of the lower-middle-class tenement where they live is stark.
The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.
A modern production of The Glass Menagerie could be performed in a warehouse space, cavernous with brick and steel surrounding the delicate scenes of home life. It could also be performed in a just-scarcely-built Chinese megacity and with the Wingfields as rural migrants, with construction cranes and unfinished dams in the distance or looming overhead. The play's powerful poetry, its tragedies of sweet and shattered dreams, can be easily adapted from its America in World War II setting, back to the 1890's in Industrial Revolution Great Britain, or forward in time to a shabby suburban ghetto.
What was once St. Louis, Missouri, the original setting of Williams's play, could be Ferguson, Missouri, today, charting the struggles of a black Wingfield family. Most recently, there was a multi-racial cast in a production at the 47th Street Theatre in New York City in 2015. The first production of The Glass Menagerie with an all-black cast was performed in 1946, just two years after the play was written. Teacher and director H. D. Flowers produced several black cast productions of the play in the 1950's and 1960's, and he wrote,
the play was written by Tennessee Williams, one of America's most prominent authors to write of experiences in the South which are so close to the Black experience. Because the experiences in The Glass Menagerie are so real to the Black community, I found that performances by Black actors are more compelling. Most Black actors have witnessed or felt the problems and obstacles that confront Laura, Tom, and Amanda—even the Gentleman Caller.
Multiple productions have updated the setting surrounding the play to adapt to the times. In a 1987 production of the play, with a multi-racial cast,
It also included two dancing couples, a dance hall owner, a bag woman, and four street toughs (two men and two women). This production was imbued with revolutionary fervor capturing, through Williams's script, the spirit and turmoil of the early 1960s.
In his play notes for this production, director Thomas A. Brown points out:
In The Glass Menagerie, the Wingfield family is as much poised for revolution and the realization of dreams as was America. They are the microcosm. Amanda, Tom, and Laura are poised on the brink. It is the parallel of the two societies, and the intersection of myth and dream that form the conflict in The Glass Menagerie.
The revolutionary spirit of The Glass Menagerie, its intensely realized characters, and the poignant highs and painful lows of the family as they imperfectly try to find happiness and lives worth living give the play a universality that has clearly attracted many artists and audiences who recognize the play's truths. The basic structure of the play's setting, if thoughtfully and truthfully adapted, can be updated into many contexts, for the play's core humanity is recognizable to all people.
This explanation answers the first question of the two that appear above.
Two of the most important components of the setting to Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie are the apartment in which all of the action and dialogue take place and the era during which the play is set.
The apartment, as described in the hyper-detailed stage directions, can be entered only by a fire escape, which is part of the set according to the playwright's instructions. Both the literal and the symbolic meaning of the fire escape suggest that the apartment is a place of potential entrapment, a place that could be dangerous to the inhabitants. Tom's feelings of being trapped by a sense of duty are echoed
The play is set during the 1940s. Tom's memories of the 1930s are also significant to the audience's experience of the play. During this time in American history, the Great Depression was forcing many Americans to give up their dreams in the name of survival, and this theme comes into play at many points.
Components of the play's setting that are important to the drama are:
the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Wingfields' apartment
the urban setting
the fire escape
The time aspect of the setting could be updated; though Williams set the play in 1937, any time in the twentieth or twenty-first century would work equally well. The fact that the family is headed by a single, working mother who worries about her daughter's limited prospects for the future and the role she wants her son to play in it is integral to the play's themes. The dramatic situation is as plausible today as it was in 1937, when the play is set. Fathers who desert their families are an unfortunately timeless phenomenon.
The geographic setting could be any medium or large-sized city with densely populated apartment buildings. Williams chose St. Louis, but the Midwestern setting is not vital to the play's action. The apartment itself needs to be claustrophobic to convey the lack of privacy for the three adults living in close proximity to one another. The setting requires proximity to movie theaters and bars, the places where Tom retreats from his mother's demands and expectations. The building's fire escape, which serves as a symbol for Tom's longing to escape a situation that, metaphorically speaking, "threatens his life," is an important part of the setting.
That said, to bring the play completely up to date, Amanda and Tom Wingfield could both be telecommuters who work from home. Their 24/7 physical closeness could ratchet up the play's tensions. Laura could drop out of an online course. The gentleman caller could emerge from an online dating site. And Tom's escapes through alcohol and movies could be portrayed through furtive drinking at home and an immersion in streaming video.
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