Similarities between Streetcar and Glass

          Tennessee Williams is considered one of the greatest playwrights in American History. Two of his most famous plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie have many similarities. Both plays have a similar setting, they both take place in a small, dark, cramped area. Many of the characters have the same personality in the two plays, Blanche is similar to Amanda, and Stanley is similar to Tom. Also in both of Tennessee’s plays, he leaves the reader with an open ending, enabling the reader to ponder upon numerous scenarios. In these various ways in both plays, Tennessee gets the modernist view across to the reader that the American dream doesn’t exist, and that in the end someone will fall, and they will fall hard. Streetcar and Glass are two peas in a pod.

          Both of Tennessee’s plays take place in cramped, claustrophobic, dark areas. In Streetcar, Blanche asks Stella about her house when she first enters:

“You sit down and explain this place to me! What are you doing in a place like this? No, now seriously putting joking aside. Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you write me, honey, why didn’t you let me know? Why, that you had to live in these conditions!”

          In Glass, we see a constant repeat of the dark setting, which sets the mood and tone of the play. Right from the beginning, you can tell it will be a rotten ending just by the lighting, which reflects the personalities of the characters. The Narrator describes the scene as:

“At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and the  sinister latticework of neighboring fire escapes.”

          The constant use of the words dark and narrow give you a cramped uncomfortable feeling that reflects the sad outcome of the play. Both of these two plays are similar in that sense.

          Many of the characters in the two plays have the same personalities. Amanda and Blanche have similar personalities. Both are seen as very annoying to the other characters. In the heat of the argument, Tom yells at his mother Amanda:

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn ‘Rise and shine!’ ‘Rise and shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!'”

          “She’s not stayin’ here after Tuesday. You know that, don’t you? Just to make sure I bought her ticket myself. A bus ticket.” Stanley bluntly stated this to Stella because he couldn’t put up with Blanche’s lies and numerous problems anymore. And In the two previous quotes I’ve shown, Stanley and Tom are alike in a sense that they speak bluntly, say how they feel, are very dominant and can cross the lines with their actions, making both of the two types of characters very hard to like. In both of Williams’ famous plays, he has very similar characters.

          Both plays have very open endings, leaving the reader with many possible scenarios to fill in at the end of the book. Streetcar ends with Blanche being taken away out of the house, clearly psychologically unfit. At the end, no one is told about Stanley and Stella’s relationship, what ends up happening to Blanche or what happens to Mitch, the reader has to fill in what they think might happen with the characters. Also in Glass, the story is a recollection of Tom after he walks out on the family. We don’t know much about Tom’s new life, besides he is unsuccessful, we don’t know how Amanda and Laura get by, we don’t know what they do, we just need to fill it in. In all of these ways, Glass and Streetcar are very similar plays.