As any Williams aficionado will tell you, The Glass Menagerie unfolds in the memory of its narrator Tom Wingfield, a young man who, like his father before him, deserted a stifling family life for one of adventure.

We never learn whether Tom’s dad (“a telephone man who fell in love with long distances”) looked back with regret at the life and family he abandoned.

What Williams’s play does make clear is that Tom’s decision to abandon his mother Amanda and more especially his sister Laura still weighs heavily on his conscience, even years later.

The playwright makes it equally understandable why Tom might have wanted to flee from the drudgery of a day-to-day that began each morning with the grating call of “Rise and shine” from his faded Southern belle of a mother, followed by a tedious factory job which slowly but surely was killing his spirit.

Whatever his reasons for leaving, Tom Wingfield has found himself unable to forget Laura, and The Glass Menagerie revolves around a pivotal incident in his sister’s life, the evening she received her first—and quite possibly her last—“gentleman caller.”

Gentleman callers were hardly lacking in Amanda Wingfield’s debutante years. In fact (or as legend would have it), she once had seventeen of them on a single evening, something which she does not let her son or daughter forget.

Tom, at least, has the escape that even a drudgery-filled job provides. Painfully shy Laura has no such out, and stigmatized by a slight limp and incapable of completing even a week of the typing class Amanda still thinks her daughter is attending, she chooses now to spend her days taking solitary walks in the wintry cold.

Only Laura’s “menagerie” of tiny glass animals seems to give her a reason to live, that is until Tom invites fellow factory worker Jim O’Connor (, a former classmate of Laura’s—and the object of her secret affection—to dinner.