Tennessee Williams And His Play The Glass Menagerie

At the time after World War II when Eugene O'Neill was writing his last great play, two young playwrights totally unlike one another, rose up to take his place, Williams's plays portray the loneliness and isolation of modern man, revealing depths of frustration, sex and violence underneath a veil of romantic politeness. His style is a combination of coarseness and poetry.Tennessee Williams is perhaps one of the most prolific, versatile American playwrights after Eugene O'Neill, also the most disputed figure in the literary circle that has drawn considerable attention and criticism. For decades from 1940's, his plays had dominated American theatre. His outstanding contributions to American drama won him two Pulitzer Prizes, four New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and other honors.The Glass Menagerie was a semi-autobiographical memory play and also Williams's first successful play staged in 1944. It has a profound and lasting influence on the 20th century American drama and therefore is considered as "the great American play" and "his legacy to the modern theater."In Menagerie, Tennessee Williams practices the "new plastic theatre" by using a variety of non-theatrical approaches, such as poetic dialogue, theme and background music, sound effects, impressionistic lighting, and transparent stage settings as well as cinematic techniques to express abstract themes and to create theatrical excitement. These expressionistic techniques, common today, were an early embodiment of Williams's manifesto for a "plastic" theatre. It explores what he called "the unlighted sides" of human nature with great insight. His concern is with isolation, the difficulty...