book review: glass menagerie

My mother and I have been teaching a series of canonical plays with our theatre course, and this was one of the new ones for me. I read Streetcar Named Desire when I was in high school, and loved it, and though Glass Menagerie was also quite good, it lacked the richness of setting and the violence of situation that seemed to make Streetcar so explosive as a text and as a visual experience. Part of the difficulty for me reading this text is that there were elements I kept connecting to personal experiences, things that felt a little too familiar. The same happened when The Fiance watched Death of a Salesman; it moved him in ways unfamiliar because the dementia was something so present in his own life, in his own loved one. Good literature does this, moves us in surprising ways.