Tennessee Williams claimed that all of his major plays fit into the "memory play" format he described in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie.
The memory play is a three-part structure: (1) a character experiences something profound; (2) that experience causes what Williams terms an "arrest of time," a situation in which time literally loops upon itself; and (3) the character must re-live that profound experience (caught in a sort of mobius loop of time) until she or he makes sense of it. The overarching theme for his plays, he claimed, is the negative impact that conventional society has upon the "sensitive nonconformist individual."
With their emphasis on the irrational, the desperation of humanity in a universe in which cosmic laws do not work, and their tragi-comic examination of the conflicts between the gentility of old Southern values and the brute force of new, Northern values, Williams's plays fit nicely into a genre critics call "Southern Gothic."
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Memory Play
