Weekend Show - The Glass Menagerie

My mom is part of a book club that also has season tickets to the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center. The Mark Taper is known for doing more of the artsy plays. The Ahmanson does all the big shows and the Mark Taper does the straight plays that tend to be on the weirder side. This past Sunday, they had tickets to see The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and they had an extra ticket and I really wanted to go. I, of course, learned about Tennessee Williams as a theatre major and all the symbolism in his plays and how they're pretty much all about his messed up family. Well, The Glass Menagerie is probably the closest to an accurate depiction of his family. Usually, he just used his family as inspiration for his plays, but this one was almost spot on. I was a little disappointed though. All of his plays have a major climax, but this one doesn't. Yes, the play is very sad, but there's no huge event that turns your guts, you know.

In real life, Tennessee Williams's father was a traveling salesman who also happened to be an alcoholic, his mother was borderline hysteric and his sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This play portrays a father who is a traveling sales man who never returned home, a mother who is kind of nuts and won't leave him the hell alone and a sister who is crippled and super shy. At the end, the Tennessee Williams type character leaves and never returns. Kind of sad, but also kind of boring. I wanted an explosion. I was waiting for an explosion. At intermission I was preparing myself for an explosion between the mother and the son. The son kept talking about a boy he was going to bring home for his sister and I wanted the son tells his mom the boy is his gay lover. After all, Tennessee Williams was gay. But nope. That didn't happen. So all in all, I was bored and disappointed. All of Tennessee Williams's plays have a crazy climax that changes everything. I want to rewrite this one and give it a huge climax.