Tennessee Williams’ 1944 “memory play” The Glass Menagerie draws on his own unhappy childhood and guilt about abandoning his sister Rose to an asylum. Set in St Louis in the 1930s, it tells of Amanda Wingfield, a neurotic, fading Southern belle, fallen on hard times, who longs for better things for her daughter Laura and son Tom. Painfully shy because of her limp, Laura has retreated into her own world, symbolised by her collection of glass animals. Tom, who acts as the play’s narrator, is a would-be poet desperate to escape his dead-end life. Nagged by his overbearing mother to bring “a gentleman caller” home for Laura, he invites Jim, a former school friend and co-worker, for dinner. Directed by Shannon Rush, Ksenja Logos plays Amanda, with Kathryn (Kitty) Adams as Laura.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

In a small apartment in 1930s St Louis, Amanda Wingfield and her two children, Tom and Laura, spin singular and separate dreams.

Tom is torn between his obligation to his family and his desire to break away from the suffocating embrace of his mother and his shy and frail sister, whose memory he will never escape. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in the American Deep South, when she was pursued by ‘gentlemen callers’.

Now she fights to provide a better life for her grown children, while they struggle for a future that seems unlikely ever to fulfil their mother’s hopes and dreams. But a change in fortune suddenly seems possible when a handsome and mysterious young visitor arrives without warning. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical evocation of loneliness and lost love, is one of his most powerful and moving plays; an unforgettable American classic.