Orientation

As a thoroughly modern play, The Glass Menagerie takes full advantage of twentieth-century technical features in lighting, staging, and set design. Williams wrote specific instructions regarding the lighting, features of the set, and music for the various scenes of what the character Tom refers to as a "memory" play. As such, it evokes a past operating at two levels of abstraction: first, Tom's reconstruction of the events which materialize on the stage, and second, Amanda's reminiscences of a life of "jonquils" and "gentlemen callers" that, perhaps, never existed back on "Blue Mountain."