Tennessee Williams classic ‘The Glass Menagerie’ shows limits of a parent’s love

A mother’s love can be well-meaning but overbearing. From a child’s perspective, that love can feel supportive, but also suffocating.

In “The Glass Menagerie,” single mother Amanda Wingfield wants the best for her children Tom and Laura but can’t help but compare their lives to her once-privileged life, working tirelessly to set her children up socially and financially.

With that stifling love, Laura is more content to stay inside, while Tom is itching to step out on his own.

“The Glass Menagerie” opens with Tom (Max Quintal) speaking to the audience, telling them that what they’re about to see is a memory play based on his recollections of his time with his mother (Deborah Marlowe) and sister (Bridget Pretz).

Amanda is a former Southern belle who now lives in an apartment in St. Louis with her son and daughter, resilient after her husband left her yet still yearning for her days as a debutante. Amanda worries about Tom and Laura’s futures and tries especially hard to find a suitor for Laura, who is painfully shy and would rather spend time with her collection of glass animal figurines.

For his part, Tom is more social, but bored with his job at a shoe warehouse, and everyday life in general, and spends a lot of his time going to the movies late at night.

After pressure from his mother to help find someone for Laura, Tom invites Jim O’Connor (Timothy Ian Malm), a friend from work, to dinner. But that night, and the days following, don’t end as hoped.

“The Glass Menagerie” opens Friday and runs through April 4 at Spokane Civic Theatre. The play was written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Troy Nickerson.

The women Williams writes are interesting, complex characters, said Marlow, who sees Amanda as a strong, Southern woman who does everything from a place of love. Most prominent, perhaps, is that she’s a single mother in the 1930s.

Overbearing as it may seem to Tom and Laura, Amanda wants the best for them. She wants Tom to succeed, because, though she picks up jobs here and there, it’s Tom’s salary that is helping keep the house afloat.

And she wants Laura to succeed, because at that time, one of the most respectable paths for a woman was to find a husband and settle down. But Laura, in all her shyness, makes that difficult.

“She can be a little overbearing, a little much, but it does stem from truly a place of love for her children,” Marlowe said. “She’s had to be mother and father. Yes, Tom brings in the paycheck, but everything else has fallen on Amanda. It has not been an easy road.”

And while traveling down that road, Amanda has spent much of her time trying to compensate for the fact that her younger self’s dreams of marrying a Southern man and living in a big house with lots of land didn’t come true.

Marlowe said many times in “The Glass Menagerie,” Amanda talks about how she wasn’t prepared for what the future held for her, everything from her husband’s abandonment to her children not living the lives she hoped for them.

“We see her understand that, realize that and try and compensate for that, make up for that as best as she can,” Marlowe said.

Despite her best efforts, Tom and Laura don’t end up as she dreamed.

When Amanda gets on Tom or Laura, Pretz said the pair can recognize their mother trying to help while also exchanging “Not this again” glances with one another. The pair, she said, have heard their mother’s stories of the good ol’ days time and time again, to the point where Tom even recites a bit of one of Amanda’s stories word for word.

Through her research and the help of a dramaturg, Pretz learned Laura was inspired by Williams’ sister Rose, who underwent a lobotomy, which left her institutionalized for the rest of her life.

Audiences don’t learn Laura’s fate at the end of the show, though Pretz said she feels pity for the character because of the events we do see, believing that because of Laura’s anxiety, she likely would be someone who ends up in a sanatorium.

Typically cast as the loud character, the funny character or the villain, Pretz had a bit of anxiety about tackling a minimal, soft-spoken role like Laura. She was able to move past that anxiety by running ideas by Nickerson and being communicative with her castmates, telling them, for example, that she wouldn’t be making much eye contact in scenes but would instead speak while fiddling with her glass animals or records.

“She has her glass menagerie and for Laura, that’s basically her own world right there,” Pretz said. “That’s where she can feel safe … When she’s away from it, I looked for other things on stage that she could use. When her mother is talking to her, she instantly needs comfort, so she fiddles with the couch, she clasps a pillow or she also has her Victoria record player, so she knows every groove and piece of wood, so anything that would instantly bring Laura comfort is stuff that I would like for on set.”

As much as Amanda might hope, life is not “like mother, like daughter.” Pretz believes Laura is happy in her world surrounded by her glass menagerie and records, yet when she’s brought back to reality by her mother, things change.

“She knows she’s not going to live the life her mother wants,” Pretz said. “She tries to live up to her mother’s expectations, but it’s not feasible, because that’s not who she is.”

As “The Glass Menagerie” is a memory play based on Tom’s memories, the audience doesn’t get a lot of insight into what life was like for Amanda and Laura after Jim comes to dinner. What would the story look like if the play was told from the perspective of Amanda or Laura?

Maybe the pair continued to simply co-exist, not exactly understanding why the other is like the way they are. Or maybe they came to some sort of understanding, with Laura learning to look people in the eye, and Amanda learning the comfort of little glass animals.

We don’t have answers, but it’s interesting to think of potential happy endings for those two.