The Glass Menagerie is a play that is about a very poor dysfunctional family that lives in St. Louis. The three characters are Amanda who is the mother, Tom who is the son and Laura who is the daughter. They all live together and Tom is the one who works to pay the bills for the family. Tom is 22 years old and is works in a shoe factory. He has dreams of being a writer but is stopped by his mother Amanda. In our performance project, we performed the first dinner scene mixed with one of the arguments between Amanda and Tom. We included costumes, music, lighting and props in our performance. I feel like it was an okay performance because sometimes we were off on the lines and stage directions. I believe that our group worked fairly well together, however, there were numerous times where the lines were changed so that definitely effected the way that I performed and even the rest of my group members.
Tom is a very angry person. One moment he is quiet and minding his own business and then the next moment he is yelling. This is for good reason though because Amanda is always telling him what to do. For instance, in the scene we performed, Tom had just arrived at home from his job and sat down and started eating. Amanda notices and starts to tell Tom how to eat his food in great detail. This always makes Tom mad enough to where he has to leave the room and get a cigarette. His feeling towards Amanda is very negative. Because she constantly disturbs him, Tom has an extreme motivation to leave the house and let Amanda and Laura live on their own which is nods up happening at the end of the book. When I was playing Toms character I felt the anger he was feeling in the book. Playing his role really helped me to understand how angry he was because I needed to understand when to raise my voice. Tom feels trapped and the only thing that calms him down is smoking and drinking.
One of the only reasons that Tom stays is because of Laura. Toms stays because he knows that Laura would have nothing if he left because she is so afraid to do anything accept play with her glass menagerie. She does not have any life skills to use and Amanda allows her to not do anything. However, by the end of the book, Tom is so fed up with how Amanda treats him, that he leaves anyway.
In my performance we acted out a combination of the first scene and the argument between Tom and Amanda when he goes to the movies. We also included some of the beginning of Toms monologue. In the monologue I was talking very slowly and very sad. The monologue was to show that Tom is all on his own in the world. In the monologue, I felt like Tom was upset with himself because he left, but then he remembers all that had happened to him when he was living with Amanda and he then remembers why he did leave. In our performance, Tom entered into the scene from the bridge. We did this because we wanted to show Tom entering into his own memories. After the first scene that we performed, Tom exited out of the scene through the bridge.
There were two monologues that we did in our performance. The first one was for Tom and the second one was for Laura. We did this because Laura did not have very many lines but also because we wanted to show the audience what Laura thinks about when Tom and Amanda are fighting. Tom and Amanda froze and the spotlight was on Laura and she started to talk about her glass animals. This is important for Laura because she always keeps her feelings to herself and does not like to talk to other people at all. When Tom and Amanda are fighting, this is what Laura thinks about because she cannot deal with all of the arguing.
Our second part of the performance was the climax of what we performed. It was the breaking point for Tom. This was our way of showing that Tom left them for good. In the beginning of this scene, Tom is minding his own business and writing. Laura tells Amanda that Tom is trying to write and so instead of leaving him alone, Amanda starts to bother him by telling him to turn the lights on and to sit up. She does not understand that Tom wants to be on his own and he gets very angry very quickly. Amanda treats Tom like he is a child even though he pays for the house and he does everything for both Amanda and Laura. She does not own a single thing in the house yet she refers to the house as her own and Tom raises a valid point when he asks her "who pays the rent on the house?"
There are a few other aspects that can be included about the performance such as the staging that was planned, the lighting and the music that was played. On outer stage their was a bridge in the background because that was how Tom would enter and exit his memories. This is something that the audience might not have picked up on but that was the reason why I exited out of he first scene on the bridge. The lighting was used often in the performance. We sometimes had spotlights on certain characters at certain moments in the performance, and other times we had lights all over the stage. This was done so that the audience was forced to focus on certain things that we wanted them to focus on. Finally, the music that we played was a key part in the performance. The times that we played the music was in the beginning monologue with Tom, and the end of our performance. The music served as a dramatic extra to the scene. What I mean is that the music helped to make the scene even more dramatic along with the lighting.
When I was on the stage, I realized the complete frustration that Tom felt. Sometimes, when reading a book, you empathize, you hate or love a character that you are visualizing. As I was reading the book, I empathized with Tom. He was a 22 year old man who had hopes and dreams of a bright future in becoming a writer, and instead he is working in a warehouse and is being forced to take care of his mother and sister. Not only that, but his mother continuously badgers him about every little thing that he does. Tom goes through a transformation in this book. There is one common theme though throughout the book and that theme is the fact that Tom is constantly angry all the time. There is never really a moment in the book where he is happy with his life. Everything he does is done with a "bad attitude." He fully admits that he hates the way his life is going and that he wishes sometimes that he were dead. He expresses this in our second half of our performance. For some reason, Amanda thinks that she is in charge of the house and that she own everything, when in reality, Tom is the one paying for everything and working everyday to put food on the table. He is jealous of his father because he feels stuck in the situation but at the same time knows that he can let go at any point.
This house is very dysfunctional and Tom gets so sick of the same thing every day that he leaves at the end of the book and does not care what happens to Laura or Amanda. Tom had enough of the same day over and over again. Amanda drives him so mad that he does not care what happens to anyone accept himself. His conscious was wiped away by the annoyance of Amanda and the daily life of mediocrity that he was being forced to live. At the new of this whole process I definitely take Toms side of the argument because I was able to simulate the experience of this characters life. He was driven to the edge of his patience and then decided to jump off the cliff of his sanity and acted in an insane but understandable way.
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