2 - Entering The Glass Menagerie

Summary

In The Seagull Chekhov's Trepliov insists that “We need new art forms . . . and if they aren't available, we might just as well have nothing at all.” The statement is not without its irony given Trepliov's own incapacity, but it carried the force of a playwright who was himself dedicated to such innovation. Fifty-five years later, and in a world as much in transition as Chekhov's, Tennessee Williams was conscious of trying to create just such a new form, a “plastic” theatre which owed something, indeed, to the Russian writer for whom a detailed realism was never really a primary objective. As Stanislavsky had remarked of Chekhov's work, “At times he is an impressionist, at times a symbolist; he is a 'realist' where it is necessary.” A tracery of the real was an essential scaffold for his exploration of character and subtle recreation of mood, but his characters inhabit more than a tangible world and reach for something more than the merely material.