"The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams, Scenes 1–2

The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.

At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement.

This building is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and the sinister latticework of neighboring fire escapes.

Just beyond, separated from the living room by a wide arch or second proscenium with transparent faded portieres (or second curtain), is the dining room.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.

AMANDA [lightly]: Temperament like a Metropolitan star!

Why, sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them all.

Her eyes lift, her face glows, her voice becomes rich and elegiac.

Bates was one of my bright particular beaux!

She slips in a fugitive manner through the half-open portieres and draws them gently behind her.

At the sound of her ascent, Laura catches her breath, thrusts the bowl of ornaments away, and seats herself stiffly before the diagram of the typewriter keyboard as though it held her spellbound.

AMANDA: I’ll be all right in a minute, I’m just bewildered—[She hesitates.]—by life.

AMANDA: As you know, I was supposed to be inducted into my office at the D.A.R. this afternoon.

I’ve seen such pitiful cases in the South—barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister’s husband or brother’s wife!—stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room—encouraged by one in-law to visit another—little birdlike women without any nest—eating the crust of humility all their life!

Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect—hardly noticeable, even!