Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

The Glass Menagerie


Characters:

• Amanda Wingfield
• Tom Wingfield
• Laura Wingfield
• Jim O'Connor
• "Blue Roses"

Summary:

• This play is a memory play based on Tom Wingfield's memories.
• Tom works in a shoe factory to support his mother and sister. He is unhappy and finds escape in movies and literature.
• Laura is a shy girl conscious of her leg in a brace as a result of her condition, pleurosis. Her mother is eager to find a suitor for her. She enrols Laura in business school but Laura drops out due to her shyness.
• Tom invites Jim O'Connor, a friend of his from the factory, back to his house for dinner on his mother's prompting. Jim turns out to be Laura's crush from highschool.
• Tom confides to Jim that he has used the money for the electricity bill to join the merchant marines. After dinner, the lights go out as a result of the unpaid electricity bill.
• Jim and Laura talk and Jim tells Laura that he nicknamed her "Blue Roses" because he thought that was what pleurosis was. They dance and Jim accidentally knocks the horn off her glass unicorn. Laura notes it is now a normal horse. They kiss but Jim suddenly explains he has a fiancee and leaves.
• Amanda rounds on Tom for not realizing Jim was attached. Not long after Tom is fired from the shoe factory and leaves Amanda and Laura. However he cannot leave behind memories of Laura.

1. But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?

2. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old saying a bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! . . . A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!

3. LAURA: Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here’s an example of one, if you’d like to see it! . . . Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! . . . You see how the light shines through him?

JIM: It sure does shine!
LAURA: I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one.
JIM: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?
JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome. 

4. JIM: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?

LAURA: Now it is just like all the other horses.
JIM: It’s lost its—
LAURA: Horn! It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

5. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

A Streetcar Named Desire


Characters:

• Blanche Dubois
• Stella Kowalski
• Stanley Kowalski

Summary:

• Blanche arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella. She informs her that she has lost Belle Reve, their ancestral home. 
• Blanche is disdainful of the cramped quarters of the Kowalskis' room and the apartment's location. She is immediately disliked by Stella's husband. Stella was happ to leave behind the social pretensions of her background in exchange for the sexual gratification she gets from her husband and is pregnant. Stanley suspects Blanche has cheated Stella out of her family inheritance. Blanche is also a heavy-drinker.
• During a poker game, Blanche annoys Stanley when she tries to get close to his friend Mitch. Stanley bursts into the bedroom where they are talking and throws the radio out the window. When Stella yells at Stanley and defends Blanche, Stanley beats her. The poker game breaks up and Blanche and Stella escape to their upstairs neighbor Eunice's apartment. 
• Stanley is remorseful and cries to Stella to forgive him. They eventually reunite. Mitch comforts Blanche.
• The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man with an equal social status. She suggests contacting Shep Huntleigh, a millionaire. Stanley overhears Blanche and Stella's conversation and later threatens her with hints of rumors of her disreputable past. 
• One evening, Blanche is waiting for Mitch to take her on a date. She ends up paying the paper boy who came for his dues with a kiss. Later she reveals her past to Mitch - that her husband had committed suicide after she discovered his homosexuality.
• One month later, Stella is preparing a dinner for Blanche, Mitch and Stanley when Stanley comes in telling her news of Blanche's past. After losing the DuBois mansion, Blanche moved into a motel from which she was evicted because of her sexual liaisons. She was also fired from her schoolteacher job because of her affair with a student.
• During the dinner party, Stanley gives Blanche a one-way ticket back as a birthday present and indicates that he is aware of her past. The onset of Stella's labor prevents the imminent fight.
• Several hours later, Blanche is sitting alone in the apartment when Mitch arrives. He confesses he can never marry her but tries to have sex with her instead. She forces him to leave by yelling "Fire!"
• Stanley returns home from the hospital and Blanche tells him she will be leaving New Orleans with Huntleigh. They each celebrate their good fortune but things turn contentious when Blanche spurns Stanley. He ends up raping her. 

1. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

2. There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly! . . . The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.

3. Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve.

4. I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Characters:

• Brick
• Maggie
• Gooper
• Mae
• Big Daddy

Summary:

• it is the story of a Southern family in crisis, focusing on the turbulent relationship of a wife and husband, Maggie "The Cat" and Brick Pollitt, and their interaction with Brick's family over the course of a weekend gathering at the family estate ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of patriach and tycoon "Big Daddy" Pollitt
• Maggie, through wit and beauty, has escaped a childhood of poverty to marry into the wealthy Pollitt family, but finds herself suffering an unfilling marriage
• Brick, an aging football hero, has neglected his wife and infuriates her by ignoring his brother's attempts to gain control of the family fortune. His indifference and drinking date back to the recent suicide of his friend Skipper.
• Although Big Daddy has cancer, his doctors and family have conspired to keep this information from him and his wife. His relatives are in attendance and attempt to present themselves in the best possible light in order to receive the definitive share of his wealth. 

You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

"You told me! I told you!"

She had a naked child with her, a little naked girl, barely able to toddle, and after a while she set this child on the ground and give her a push and whispered something to her. This child come toward me, barely able t'walk, come toddling up to me and—Jesus, it makes you sick t'remember a thing like this! It stuck out its hand and tried to unbutton my trousers!

You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—you dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you'd face the truth with him!

Yep, they're no-neck monsters, all no-neck people are monsters