Amanda Wingfield A woman abandoned by her husband some 16 years ago, is trying to raise her children under harsh

financial conditions. Her devotion to her children has made her, as she admits at one point, a "witch," and she longs for the kind of Old South gentility and comforts which she remembers from her youth for her children. Once a Southern belle, she still clings to whatever powers of vivacity and charm she can muster. Laura Wingfield Amanda's daughter. She is slightly crippled and has an extra-sensitive mental condition. Tom Wingfield Amanda's son. He works in a warehouse but aspires to be a writer. He feels both obligated toward yet burdened by his family. Jim O'Connor A workmate of Tom's (a shipping clerk) and acquaintance of Laura's from high school (specifically named Soldan High School), is also the physical representation of all Laura's desires and all Amanda's desires for her daughter. He is invited over to the Wingfields' house for dinner with the intent of being Laura's first gentleman caller. He seems like a dream come true for the Wingfields. Mr. Wingfield Amanda's absentee husband, represented by a large portrait on the set and frequently referred to by Amanda. He never appears in person during the play. The play is introduced to the audience by Tom as a memory play, based on his recollection of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Amanda's husband abandoned the family long ago. Although a survivor and a pragmatist, Amanda yearns for the illusions and comforts she remembers from her days as a fted Southern belle. She yearns especially for these things for her daughter Laura, a young adult with a crippled foot and tremulous insecurity about the outside world. Tom works in a warehouse, doing his best to support them. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and spends much of his spare time watching movies in cheap cinemas at all hours of the night. Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor for Laura, who spends most of her time with her collection of little glass animals. Tom eventually brings a nice boy named Jim home for dinner at the insistence of his mother, who hopes Jim will be the long-awaited suitor for Laura. Laura realizes that Jim is the man she loved in high school and has thought of ever since. After a long evening in which Jim and Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for electricity to be restored, Jim reveals that he is already engaged to be married, and he leaves. During their long scene together, Jim and Laura have shared a quiet dance, and he accidentally brushes against the glass menagerie, knocking the glass unicorn to the floor and breaking its horn off ("Now it's just like the other horses," Laura says). When Amanda learns that Jim was engaged she assumes Tom knew and lashes out at him: ("That's right, now that you've had us make such fools of ourselves. The effort, the preparations, all the expense! The new floor lamp, the rug, the clothes for Laura! All for what? To entertain some other girl's fianc! Go to the movies, go! Don't think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who's crippled and has no job! Don't let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure. Just go, go, go to the movies !") At play's end, as

Tom speaks, it becomes clear that Tom left home soon afterward and never returned. In Tom's final speech, as he watches his mother comforting Laura long ago, he bids farewell: "Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger anything that can blow your candles out! [LAURA bends over the candles.]- for nowadays the world is lit by lightning ! Blow out your candles, Laura and so good-bye." Laura blows the candles out as the play ends.

Bertolt Brecht is arguably the most revolutionary force in twentieth-century theater. His most famous concept is verfremdungseffekt (sometimes translated as the alienation effect), and it completely changed the way artists thought about and created theater. The key to this concept was that Brecht did not want audience members emotional involvement to prevent them from thinking about the social and political issues presented in a play. More importantly, he wanted thoughtfulness to incite action and participation. Through music, song, and vaudeville-style theatrics, Brechts epic theatre becomes a world where actors acknowledge the artifices of the medium and communicate directly with the audience. His ideas challenged the dominance of realism and forever altered traditional notions of what theater could be.

Early influences
Increasingly interested in "living the part," Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterization in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy; he extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning "in character".[18] In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Petrovich Komissarzhevsky, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and leading tenor of the Bolshoi (and father of the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya), with whom he also explored the co-ordination of voice and body.[19] Together they devised exercises in moving and sitting stationary "rhythmically", which anticipated Stanislavski's later use of physical rhythm when teaching his 'system' to opera singers.[20] Komissarzhevski provided one of the models (the other was Stanislavski himself) for the character of Tortsov in his actor's manual An Actor's Work (1938).[21] A year later, in 1885, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School, where students were encouraged to mimic the theatrical tricks and conventions of their tutors.[22] Disappointed by this approach, he left after little more than two weeks.[22] Instead, Stanislavski devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of psychological realism in Russia.[23] Psychological realism had been developed here by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin.[24] In 1823, Pushkin had concluded that what united the diverse classical authorsShakespeare, Racine, Corneille

and Caldernwas their common concern for truth of character and situation, understood as credible behaviour in believable circumstances:[25]

Stanislavski as the Knight in The Society of Art and Literature's 1888 production of Alexander Pushkin's The Miserly Knight.

The truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings experienced in the given circumstances, that is what our intelligence demands of a dramatist.
Pushkin's aphorism, 1830.[26]

Gogol, meanwhile, campaigned against overblown, effect-seeking acting.[27] In an article of 1846, he advises a modest, dignified mode of comic performance in which the actor seeks to grasp "what is dominant in the role" and considers "the character's main concern, which consumes his life, the constant object of his thought, the 'bee in his bonnet.'"[28] This inner desire forms the "heart of the role," to which the "tiny quirks and tiny external details" are added as embellishment.[28] The Maly soon became known as the House of Shchepkin, the father of Russian realistic acting who, in 1848, promoted the idea of an "actor of feeling."[29] This actor would "become the character" and identify with his thoughts and feelings: he would "walk, talk, think, feel, cry, laugh as the author wants him to."[30] A copy of Shchepkin's Memoirs of a Serf-Actor, in which the actor describes his struggle to achieve a naturalness of style, was heavily annotated by Stanislavski.[30] Shchepkin's student, Glikeriya Fedotova, was Stanislavski's teacher (she was responsible for instilling the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, along with the stress on the importance of training and discipline, and the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication").[31] Shchepkin's legacy included the emphasis on a disciplined, ensemble approach, the importance of extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft.[32] As well as the artists of the Maly company, performances given by foreign star actors who would often come to Moscow during Lent (when Russian actors were prohibited from appearing)also influenced Stanislavski.[33] The effortless, emotive and clear playing of the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi, who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in 1877, particularly impressed Stanislavski.[33] So too did Tommaso Salvini's

1882 performance of Othello.[34] Years later, Stanislavski wrote that Salvini was the "finest representative" of the "art of experiencing" approach to acting.[35]