Project #3 Statement

Producing the Play

            In The Glass Menagerie there aren’t many problems with the text at all, overall the language is pretty easy to understand with not a whole lot of things that have to be defined in order to understand what they are. I think the biggest issue throughout the script is the way to portray Tom. You can either direct it the way that the audience can look at him and recognize that he has done wrong things and still feel for him in a sense because of the pressures he is under, or you can direct it like he is just a purposeful asshole regardless of his circumstances. Having to choose between these two things is a very important choice in how the director would like the show to turn out. Either way you look at it because of the script Tom still has to do what is written and spend the money and abandon his mother and sister the problem however lies in how you want Tom to be viewed during and at the end of the play.

            Here at Sam Houston State we are often faced with the wanting to do a show but not having age appropriate people that the script calls for. In most educational settings and even here it is done quite often that all of the older roles are played by people who either look older or can act older even though they are within the same age range as the younger characters there is still that age contrast between the older and younger characters. In a show such as The Glass Menagerie the only real problem you run into is casting Amanda and how old you want her to actually be and you can cast the other three roles accordingly. So if we had someone that could reasonably play mid 50’s to early 60’s you could cast Tom and Amanda a little older looking but vice versa if Amanda can only pull off early 50’s.

Other productions that I was able to research were mostly professional theatres and so they were able to use that actual age range of people to cast in their show. So mostly they pulled it off in just regular fashion. However a select few were able to just adjust how old their Tom, Laura, and Jim looked according to how old Amanda was played. One of the productions at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company Tom was played by the director and after reading reviews he took a lot of liberty with his character that wasn’t necessarily needed. I was shocked after reading that because when I first saw the  director also  starred in the production I was expecting it to get much better reviews.

Most reviews I read about The Glass Menagerie were great reviews that had exceptional things to say about the show however, there were a few that got less than good reviews. Every critic in every review eluded to the fact that this was such a classic script and how much they enjoyed it just as a script and a literary work. With a production like this I think it is really hard to do something wrong since it is such a classic and there are not only examples of other productions out there but plenty of help if one didn’t know how to direct something in it. Almost all of the critics also focused on how well the ensemble of the cast was in the good reviews. The ensemble of characters is great in this show and can really make or break the show that the director wishes to produce.