Character Description in The Glass Menagerie

A Slap-Dash Production.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

This is a follow-up to the earlier post on authors' description of their characters. Included here is Williams' technique and criticism of the theatre. A second part might include a brief discussion of where this play fits in with others, and another topic or two.

In a play there are generally two ways characters are described: what a character says of self, and what characters say of each other. This is purely method. A third way, possibly used at the first showing of Williams's play, is the program brochure that identifies characters and players. The printed version of Williams's play has the names of the characters and a description of them; and this information might have come from a brochure. For example, one character, Amanda, is described, here shortened, as "A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place". A fourth device in The Glass Menagerie is a character who relates what occurs onstage, including remarks on other characters. This is Tom; and the first name of Tennessee Williams, who wrote an imaginary version of his early life.

In the production notes, Williams writes: "Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach to more penetrating vivid expression of things as they are."

He goes on to say that the straight realistic play "has the same virtue of a photographic likeness", which he finds unimportant. He states that the "plastic theatre...must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as part of out culture". He employed illuminated images, music, lighting to enhance his work.

The essay, "The Catastrophe of Success", looking back to the period of The Glass Menagerie, is interesting reading: https://genius.com/Tennessee-williams-the-catastrophe-of-success-annotated

It concludes:
“In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

Prosody

Castle Rotbone, the Outworld

Nineteen year old Eric took pride in the four portraits he'd painted. Dracula brides graced either side of Count Rotbone's bug-eyed Nosferatu visage. The vampire lord didn't have a lot to say about all these women invading his turf, though it did add a badly needed touch of class. No more skulls or tin cans littered the great-room floor.

Eric approached the table and its high-back chairs, leery of distant hollow clanks and moans despite his privileged status. The brides counted themselves much in his debt; if not for him, they'd still be haunting a ruined fortress near the Caucasus. Yet his purpose here might use up that largesse. It all depended on Cambris.

She swept downstairs, white gown and Cleopatra bangs undulant to some phantom current, gliding in that spectral way of theirs. Cambris: first and eldest, bossy and aristocratic, maybe her due as former wife of the village alderman. And also Dracula's biggest mistake. Patient centuries passed in her oblique undermining of the count, culminating in setting him up for vampire hunter von Halter.

They took adjacent seats at her bidding. Eric knew she sensed his pulsing blood, hoped she attributed it to youth rather than his shady agenda. Could you even plagiarize the undead? He merely wanted her character to sound authentic. That was the excuse, anyway.

Those yellow grackle eyes bored into his. "Your quest precedes you, Eric of Newcastle."

Heart attack time. "You mean my book idea? Well. . . .I thought I'd start out with your story, Miss Cambris." To be precise, your lyrical and fluid speech, to help make my mark with a story series on social media.

"I?" Imperious brow arch. "Have you such clerkliness of pen?"

Eric wrote that down. Clerkliness. Good, good. "To be honest, I'm no writer." Why did he say that? If she was magicking him. . . ."I mean, the other three brides can help me flesh out the centuries post-Dracula." Really? Emmy lacked speech, and neither Yelena nor Mirjana spoke English. "What I mean to say is, maybe not--you'd only have to translate for them." Which wasn't what he wanted at all.

Cambris went heavy-lidded with. . . .suspicion? Or perhaps her own saga was too personal to bear. "Set quill rather to your unmirrored and crated inheritance."

Unmirrored. He'd definitely use that. Wait a minute--a crate containing the family secret, passed on to him by his Granddad, whose occupant cast no reflection. "You mean Emmy?"

Eric had thought the girl in the box a cheesy trick, regardless of the mirror thing. But the setting sun made him a believer in the hissing, spitting wildcat. Still, Eric refused to follow Gramps' lion-tamer act, and spent several  nights--shakily assured she couldn't harm him--learning to communicate. Then he'd done the unthinkable, and set her free after four hundred years in the Harker clan. That led to her search for the other three with Eric's help. Now they lived (?) a privileged existence safe from an Earth that had outgrown them.

"That's a good idea," Eric allowed. As long as it kept her talking. "Even better if we knew some of Emmy's early history, like when Dracula shipped her out when he discovered she couldn't speak. I wonder if Count Rotbone would have done the same." That ought to do it.

Her pupils shrank to pinpoints. Damn scary. "The pangborn wastrel who was Dracula had not Rotbone's dullard jollity, else he must of needs grant Emmy harborage. Her sagacity e'er has him unawares." She watched Eric furiously scribbling. "Why do you scribe my words?"

His scalp tingled under her Mistral gaze. Would she bespell him, even beholden as she was? Best not to risk it. "I'll play straight with you, Miss Cambris. I could listen to you talk all day. I mean night. If I could write like that, I'd be in the big leagues."

If only vampires blinked. Her stare was unreadable. "Such prosody does not bear the telling overmuch. I would even tire of myself."

Prosody. Was that even a word? She did like to make up stuff. "Is that in the dictionary?"

"It refers vaguely to metrics, though I have decided it lies between writery and poetry."

Now she was making stuff up. Writery indeed. "Then you aren't mad that I came here under a pretense?"

The amused half smile bared fang tips. "Curious. I had thought you instead enraptured of Emmy."

"Whoahhh. . . ." Eric scraped chair legs in getting up.

Regal laughter echoed. "You are safe from my sunless designs, young Eric. Bring to me your Cambris rendition, and I will cause her to speak my words."

Eric steadily backed to the exit. "Perfect! My own ghost writer! Not that I'm calling you a--" He collided with the door frame, hastily adjusted course, clutched the precious notes. Maybe they'd be enough.

The Professor's Dilemma

Dawn

Dawn wore a blue dress
this morning
I saw her scampering up the hill
to the apple tree
covered by forged mantle of green
jeweled in gold
sculptured as in tempest
mountainous sculpture
towering and towering
upheaving and exploding
a dragon's lair — night within
Dawn stood a moment
looking up into the darkness
and seeing a bough coming down to reach her
she shinnied up in the early morn
disappearing into the night
But then from out the tree—
from out the branches and leaves
from the darkness within
her hair streamed down
swayed softly back and forth—
golden rays
against the mist
the calm
the sleeping earth
I went to her when she had stopped
she seemed so small-
a trace of blue in so large a heaven
her hair yet flowing down
as she lay
I asked what she was doing so still
she said: dreaming
and I asked: of princes and castles and roses
she answered: just...just dreaming
I gazed at her in her dream
wondering what kind of lady she would be—
a dreamer
a conqueror
a windswept mystical lady
a priestess
a wanderer
As I gazed
I loved
She turned her eyes to mine
as though she knew but I...looked away
She sat up
reached out her hand to an apple
took it
and drew it to her lips
slowly
dreamily
like the dawn

Words and brush: Character Descriptions

Words and brush: Character Descriptions: Good evening. I hope everyone has had a great couple weeks of productivity in their art or writing or both.  My topic tonight is o...

Character Descriptions

Good evening. I hope everyone has had a great couple weeks of productivity in their art or writing or both.  My topic tonight is on how authors describe their characters?  I tend to use a brief short paragraph or sentence to give a precise mental picture what I see to the reader.   I also have character sketches with their habits and traits, strengths and weaknesses, I might include a bad habit as well.  

How do you relate to your way of sharing how the characters reveal themselves?  

On another contrasting thought, an artist makes a portrait of themselves such as Picasso or Van Gogh. Might this be true in fiction writers?  I might have seen a bit of some characters reflecting the writer themselves.    The writer and artist both strives to express themselves well in their craft.

The Face In The Floor

The marble floor tiles in Sergio's cottage had long been the envy of his neighbors. Legend had it that the irregular pieces were leftovers from an ancient quarry, expertly fitted by a quarry master to pay a debt. All this came to grief the day the face appeared in one of the tiles.

Sergio's wife Lorena made the discovery in the best wifely tradition: dropping a platter of food with a scream. What began as a vague visage acted like a stain that would not be wiped away. Each passing day brought the thing increasingly human features, if one could call it that. Lorena didn't. She thought it was a lost soul looking for redress of some grievance. That this had to happen in her kitchen was a source of much discomfiture. In desperation, Sergio tried defacing the square with abrasive, to no avail. When he pried up the tile, there appeared on the soil a chalky outline that seemed to have no limit to its depth.

"Someone is buried here," Lorena decided. She also decided not to be around when the lost soul acquired the ability to either come out of the ground or to speak. And so the couple moved in with her mother for the time being. Sergio consulted the village elder in his forest hut.

The old man puffed on his pipe, nodding at the details. "That's the old general's quarters. I'm surprised it took so long to come to this. You see, the Roman Fifth Hispania was once based here. The quarryman offered the general a  new floor if he'd stop pursuing his wife. But after the floor was done, the quarryman suffered a suspicious and fatal accident. The bereaved widow accused the general, who had her exiled. Increasingly, strange things began to happen, and the general insisted the place was haunted. One day, he was found hanging from a crossbeam. Suicide? Who can say."

Sergio, despite his fear, felt compelled to go back; he'd sunk all his savings into the place, and he couldn't abide his mother-in-law's sharp tongue. Better to test the spirits than suffer the death of a thousand pecks. He stole into the cottage one evening.

Now there were two images. One was a rough-featured peasant with his hands around the neck of a patrician in opulent robes. A phantom breeze troubled the place, carrying a cacophony of voices as if a spectral audience was cheering its favorites.

Sergio had the place torn down, though he got a good price for the used marble from a foreign buyer. In time, the cursed plot grew a verdant cover of grass. On still days, when the blades are untroubled by wind, a certain grassy spot takes on an eerie semblance to a pair of combatants locked in infernal struggle.