Editor’s note: This column invites local organizations to write about interesting aspects of upcoming events in their own words.

Tennessee Williams called “The Glass Menagerie” “a memory play.” The memory belongs to the character of Tom, who is remembering and narrating his family life in a 1930’s St. Louis tenement before he left home. But Tom’s memory is based on the author’s memory, and as a result this may be the most personal and autobiographical play in American drama. 

When Tennessee Williams was 8 years old, his family moved north from their home in Mississippi. He was adored and almost smothered by his mother, was very close to his sister Rose, and wary of his hard-drinking dad, who was sometimes violent, often away, and who had only contempt for his effeminate son.

Their new life in a congested city was a shock. Their apartment, Williams wrote, was “about as cheerful as an Arctic winter.” There were windows with a view only in the living room and kitchen. In between, the bedroom windows looked out on a narrow cul-de-sac they called “Death Valley.”  Cats would fight and die there, and the scene was so ugly that Rose always kept her window shade down. She relieved the gloom by adding white curtains and painting the furniture white, too. She also kept a large collection of little glass animals on the shelf, which managed to find what little light there was, and make the space the only pleasant room in the apartment. Williams later wrote, that his sister’s animals “came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollections of things past. The area where the cats were torn to pieces was one thing — my sister’s white curtains and tiny menagerie of glass were another. Somewhere between them was the world we lived in.”

This world in between, touching both edges, is the world of “The Glass Menagerie.” The apartment of the play is very like the one Williams lived in. The Wingfield family has a dad, too, also gone missing. Tom has an older sister, named Laura, who he is close to, and Laura, like Rose, is emotionally distressed. Rose was afflicted with severe depression; Laura thinks of herself as crippled, and is overwhelmed by uncontrollable shyness. They are both shut-ins.

And this family has a mom, too, Amanda, and like Tennessee’s mother Edwina, she is a real mother of a mother.  Miss Edwina, by all accounts, was a woman of legendary volubility. Williams once wrote that she will “still be talking for at least a half hour after she’s laid to rest.”  From a distance the talk was comical, but close up it was absolutely destructive. She was full of “complaint, contention and concern” and usually at a hysterical pitch. It’s like that with Amanda, too: At one moment she’s ridiculous, hilariously so and at another she’s a monster.  She’s constitutionally self-centered and oppressively devoted. You can see how foolish she is, how desperate, even how charming. She will do anything for her children, which means she nags, she cajoles, she lectures and she drives them nuts. She’s loving and she’s completely impossible. She makes you cry, she’s so awful, and then she just makes you cry. She’s one of the great and fabulous roles in American drama.

We never leave the apartment but we’re always aware of the harsh and unfriendly world outside. Amanda struggles for survival by selling subscriptions to romance magazines, and she has to fight for each and every one of them. Tom works in a shoe factory — a dead end,  mind-numbing job. Laura is almost too frightened to go out at all. Quite understandably, everyone is looking for an escape.