First Draft of the Written Coursework

My group performed the last scene of The Glass Menageries. In order to provide the audience with enough background information about the situation, we decided to start from Jim’s explanation to Laura from page 64 of the book. I played the role of Jim in this scene. In many ways, it was a challenging role to play. Firstly, it is not easy to play a character in the opposite gender than me. The fact that there is no strong emotion involved on his part made it even harder. However, I still chose to play this role because I want to find out more about him and his feeling towards the Wingfields. Does he feel sympathy for them or is he just trying to leave a good impression on them? In the book, Jim was really popular when he was in high school.(QUOTE) However, the spotlight on him had somehow faded. When he met Laura, who remembered all the shinning moment of his, it seemed that the spotlight had come back to him. (QUOTE) Being admired by someone is always a joyful thing. Therefore, when Jim talked to Laura, he seemed so confident and so inspirational. He talks about how pretty Laura is to make her be more self-confident. He hugs her. He even kissed her. But this is not love. As Jim said, “if I have a sister like you, I’d bring my friends home to meet her” He just want to tell Laura she is good and there will be someone who treats her like the “apple of his eyes.” In my opinion, Jim really didn’t mean to make Laura misunderstand his intention. He talked about Betty, his girlfriend, to Laura truthfully in a relaxing way. Just like chatting with a friend. He also explained the reason why he accepted the invitation from Tom: he thought it was just a normal invitation and didn’t know Tom was creating some chance for Jim to meet Laura and maybe even be her gentleman caller. After Amanda enters, Jim asked to leave. He tried not to mention the true reason to Amanda because he doesn’t want her to feel bad right away. Nevertheless, Amanda seemed to be expecting him to come over more and more oftenly. In order to avoid further misunderstanding, Jim told Amanda about Betty too. But the way he talked about Betty was nature too. He didn’t seem like he’s hiding from Amanda. He didn’t mention anything about gentleman caller to avoid embarrassing Amanda and Tom. In my opinion, Jim really tried not to hurt anyone’s feeling. Even when he talks about the thing that would destroy the last bit of Amanda’s hope, he was trying to get rid of the possibility to hurt her feelings more in the future. Jim had empathy towards the Wingfield family, also because he knew that Tom is going to leave. (QUOTE) He warned Tom not to make the boss mad anymore so that Tom can stay in his job. But Tom doesn’t care. Instead, he talks to Jim about leaving. Jim was so shocked that he couldn’t react to it right away. He stared at Tom for a while just to figure out if he heard it correctly. How could his sister and mother live without any incomes and support? With a question in his mind, he seemed even more empathetic towards Laura and Amanda.

We planned lots things for our version of the play in order to show our understanding of the characters in the scene and the relationships between each of them. We decided to take Laura out the scene because she only has two lines throughout the scene and these lines wouldn’t help the audience to understand what event is taking place on the stage. We decided to use some music before Tom’s monologue with lights all out to show that time had passed after Tom had that big argument with Amanda. We also inserted a few seconds form that video when Tom mentioned “perhaps, it’s a familiar bit of music.” in his monologue. We also designed some lighting cues. The video started with a spotlight on Jim. After Jim is done with his monologue, the light change into normal stage light. The light remains the same until Jim left the building. The light goes dim as Tom leaves, indicating the light of hope for Amanda when along with him. The lights go back to spotlight on Amanda and Tom when they were having their fight. In that way, the audience can feel the tension between them and focus more on the actors. The lights go out after Tom left home, indicating Amanda had pushed the only remaining hope she has and lived in darkness since then. When Tom presents his monologue, the spotlight was on him. When he talks about Laura, the one spotlight increased to three spotlight and goes out one by one when he says the last part of his monologue, “blow out your candles Laura, and so long, goodbye.” The lights go out one by one is imitating the image when candles being blown out by Laura one by one. We also designed some body movements for each character. For example, we thought Jim would stand up to show his excitement when he said the line “right away from the start, I knew it was, love!”. Another one would be that when Amanda spite the lemonade on herself, Jim should try to hand her some napkin so that it feels like she actually did so.  However, most of the body movements were improvised to our performance.