Plastic Theatre Tennessee Williams By Richard Kramer

Kramer tells us that in Williams’ production notes, Williams himself says about ‘Plastic Theatre’, “Being a ‘memory play,’ The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention.” This immediately suggests that normal conventions are thrown out the window and the creative process is allowed to take over. The whole idea is a “closer approach to the truth”. Williams explains this statement when he writes, When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. (Kramer, 2) He means that having genuine articles/props and having the actors speak like the people they portray isn’t enough. That style is more like taking a photograph of a situation and presenting it as the truth. He says, “truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” (xix-xxii)

"The 'new plastic theatre' must make full use of all the resources of the contemporary stage—language, action, scenery, music, costume, sound, lighting—and bind them into an artistic unity conceived by the playwright“. Sculptural Drama on the other hand, is explained by Williams as an off-shoot of plastic theatre keeping with the sense of theatricality as opposed to literary. “It is clear that ‘sculptural drama’ invokes the same theatricality that ‘plastic theatre’ does in the Menagerie note. Williams speaks in the journal entry of the lack of realism in the innovative form and asserts that it would not serve the traditional Broadway play. He describes stylized, dance-like movement and stresses simplicity and restraint in acting and design and all the elements of the staging.”

When creating… Your own version, or take, on a scene from The Glass Menagerie, please be sure to read the synopsis I have provided for you here, the information at the following website, and your own research to produce a project that will clearly express your vision of the scene you choose, your understanding of what Tennessee Williams was trying to achieve, and how Williams changed the face of theatre in post war America. Follow this link to Kramer’s essay on Williams and his ‘Plastic Theatre’. http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer.htm