Tennessee Williams was the heir to the innovations in staging that Eugene O'Neil brought to American theater two generations earlier. Imaginative sets, abstractions, complex lighting sequences, a fluid use of the stage itself for shifting scenes of action-all are features that Williams incorporated into his own productions to create his expressionistic effects. As a "memory play," The Glass Menagerie reflects an adaptation of expressionism come to the stage-the dependence upon feelings to interpret the human condition. The essential conflict is a yearning for stability, best expressed in Amanda's reconstructed and reconstituted past, set against a stream of inconsequential and futile acts that take up time and space of their lives, but which get nowhere-Amanda's meager attempts to sell magazines, Tom's monotonous work at the warehouse, and Laura's incessant devotions to her glass "menagerie."

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