Tennessee Williams's tender, autobiographical memory play unfolds in the cramped St. Louis apartment of the Wingfield family, narrated by Tom, a restless young man working a warehouse job he despises while dreaming of escape, who looks back on the fateful evening that changed his family forever. Tom's mother, Amanda, a faded Southern belle clinging desperately to memories of her own glamorous youth, pours her anxious hopes onto her painfully shy daughter Laura, a young woman with a slight physical disability who has retreated almost entirely into a private world centered on her collection of delicate glass animals. When Amanda pressures Tom into bringing home a "gentleman caller" from his workplace in hopes of securing Laura's future, the arrival of the affable, unwitting Jim O'Connor briefly cracks open Laura's shell in one of American drama's most quietly devastating scenes, before circumstances close it again for good. Williams's poetic, deeply personal writing transforms this small domestic tragedy into a universal meditation on memory, illusion, and the impossibility of fully escaping one's family. Its combination of lyrical language and raw emotional honesty established Williams as a major American playwright and made the play one of the most performed and studied works in the modern theatrical canon.

Wicomico High School Auditorium