Staging,+Lighting,+Sound,+Music

The staging, lighting, sound, and music that is used within //The Glass Menagerie,// illustrates and helps the reader to visualize what is occurring. The stage directions help the setting come to life, and has the power to emphasize the events within the play, while the music sets the tone, and lighting the mood.


 * Staging:**

The staging of the play consists of using the Wingfield house. All the scenes are played out within the house. Some props that are important is the glass menagerie, glass sculpted animals that Laura collects and takes care of, and the fire escape which is used as a divide between the real world and illusion within the Wingfield house. Most of the play takes place in the kitchenette, small kitchen, and then it finally ends in the parlor.

"//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. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of those huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire escape is part of what we see-that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it," (1,27).//


 * Sound:**

The only sound that is heard throughout the play is music. At random moments in the play, music begins to play, but you don't know what it is.


 * Music:**

The music that is played is a single tune named "The Glass Menagerie." "When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken," (Pg. 25). The music mainly focuses on Laura and how she is metaphorically seen as glass, being seen as fragile and delicate. However there is another piece played called "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise" that comes from the Paradise Dance Hall when Tom is addressing the audience in scene five.


 * Lighting:**

The lighting in the play resembles Tom's memory, therefore the stage is dim. However, throughout the play, even though Laura has no active part, the light is more focused on her, leaving everything else more dimly lighted. "The light upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas," (Pg. 26).

"[Before the lights come up again, the violent voices of Tom and Amanda are heard. They are quarreling behind the portieres. In front of them stands Laura with clenched hands and panicky expression. A clear pool of light is on her figure throughout this scene]" (3, 49)