The Glass Menagerie - Memory Play

I still don't know what to think about this play. It's a bit odd...not really like anything I've ever studied before. I think that mostly stems from the fact that it is a "Memory Play," so I suppose I'll devote the rest of this post to exploring what a memory play is, and what that means for the play itself. A memory play is, of course, a play telling the story of the main character's memories. To me, it seems a bit like a frame story, in that there is a play in which Tom addresses the audience directly and narrates the play, and then there is the play within, in which Tom is a character and acts out the story. The ultimate effect is that the play can take on a much more nonrealistic approach. When recalling a memory, things often seem quite different from how they would actually happen in real life. The most notable change is that most of the play is set to music, because "in memory, everything seems to happen to music," as put by Narrator-Tom. Also, the narrator can make reference to events that don't really make sense within the timeframe of the actual play. Tom alludes to Chamberlain, a person who really didn't matter to America at the time, since he hadn't even been elected Prime minister until 1937. Furthermore, the pace of the play is affected. When recalling memories, one does not remember the long stretches of time in which nothing happens. When watching the play, it appears that things happen one immediately after another, but really, it is apparent that things are happening at a far slower rate, and the boring parts are essentially just being cut out, like when Tom has to remind Amanda that she asked him to find a nice young gentleman at the warehouse. Ultimately, the purpose of the memory play is to allow the writer to use many different techniques that would be hard to employ otherwise.