The description of Tom standing on the fire escape looking "like a voyager" (692) foreshadows his escape to the Merchant Marines. For example, as Tom is confronting his mother with the reality of his sister's handicap, "the music changes to a tango that has a minor and somewhat ominous tone" (687).ĭescribing characters' appearances and presenting messages upon the screen, the stage directions foreshadow and emphasize events. Throughout the play, music swells and recedes with the rising and falling of the characters' emotions. In scene four, "Ave Maria" plays softly in the background, symbolizing Amanda's duties as a mother. Music in the play can be symbolic or simply add to the emotion of a scene.
Yet, at the end of the play, and throughout its majority, the set is grim, characteristic of Tom's sad memory. For a short while, as Jim enters, there is a "delicate lemony light" (688), and a soft light from the new lamp brings out Laura's "unearthly prettiness" (695). Throughout the play the stage directions call for "a turgid smokey red glow," "gloomy gray" lighting and "deep blue dusk" which create the hazy images of a memory. That explains the fiddle in the wings" (699). In memory everything seems to happen to music.
In his opening narration Tom says, "Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. Detailed stage directions intensify the unrealistic setting, foreshadow and emphasize events, and develop the characters.ĭim colored lighting and symbolic melodies create the unrealistic setting for the memory play. In Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, however, stage directions are essential to the understanding of the play.
The lighting, music, costumes, props and movement of the actors are not necessary for the development of the play's characters or theme.
Some plays like Sophocles' Antigone do not require elaborate stage directions because the setting is not important to the play's structure.
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