Tennessee Williams

overcrowded urban centres 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.

The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

The audience hears and sees the opening scene in the dining-room through both the transparent fourth wall of the building and the transparent gauze portières of the dining-room arch.

The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever licence with dramatic convention is convenient to his purpose.

[He tears the portières open. The upstage area is lit with a turgid smoky red glow.]

“Rise and Shine!” – “Rise and Shine”! I say to myself, “How lucky dead people are! But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self – selfs” all I ever think of.

LAURA [shrilly] : My glass! – menagerie… [She covers her face and turns away.]

[But AMANDA is still stunned and stupefied by the “ugly witch” so that she barely notices this occurrence. Now she recovers her speech.]

Try and you will succeed! [The notion makes her breathless] Why, you – you’re just full of natural endowments! Both of my children – they’re unusual children! Don’t you think I know it? I’m so proud! Happy and – feel I’ve – so much to be thankful for but – Promise me one thing, Son!

Promise, Son, you’ll – never be a drunkard!

Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom?

TOM: I go to the movies because – I like adventure. Adventure is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies.