Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece The Glass Menagerie (1944) no doubt qualifies as a classic of the modern theater, and so it joins the ranks of those works we often consign to the purgatory of our perpetual high regard. High school classes read it dutifully, college freshmen reread it grudgingly, and then it is forgotten unless it crosses our paths when a local theater puts it into its season, as the Hippodrome Theatre has done now. This is unfortunate, because The Glass Menagerie is a tremendously vivid and touching, even a radical play, that too often remains encased in our admiration, like one of the glass animals in Laura’s collection. 
 

A theater that wants to produce The Glass Menagerie today and an audience that wants to appreciate it are therefore charged with liberating it from the paralyzing patina of the classic and rediscovering its “fighting spirit.” We easily forget that almost any classical work was once, in its own time, new and radical. Williams is not often thought of as a radical playwright, of course, but his belief  was that art should be a “criticism of things as they exist,” and Glass Menagerie, for all its apparent delicacy, is an unsparing critique of the things that existed during a particular moment of the American Century, in a world increasingly “lit by lightning,” as the last words of the play run. 
 

The Wingfields and their gentleman caller alike are members, as Williams’ stage direction says, of a “fundamentally enslaved section of American society,” trapped in menial existences or cast aside entirely by the ravages of the Great Depression, or following, as does Jim, the tinny Siren song of self-improvement. Enveloped in their delusions of past grandeur (Amanda) or leading impoverished lives of symbolic displacements (Tom with his movies, Laura with her menagerie), they are almost a family of outcasts, even of ghosts. 
 

But if The Glass Menagerie were just a period piece, it wouldn’t be of much more than historical interest. In fact, the power of a classic such as this is that it delivers much more than just social analysis. Tennessee Williams’ great achievement is his deep and painful understanding of the American family, its joys as much as its pathologies, and his ability to create characters that resonate strongly with an audience. Amanda Wingfield, for example, who is perhaps the play’s central character, is the kind of benign monster we instantly recognize from somewhere in our own lives: suffocating in her affections and brutal out of a profound terror of the life outside. Laura, who resembles a wounded animal, mirrors our own fears of failure. Rebellious Tom, the play’s narrator, a poetic soul damaged by the strictures of reality who is forced to make an agonizing choice, becomes our surrogate. 
 

What is perhaps less obvious to today’s TV-accustomed audiences is the bold formal conception of Williams’ play. The Glass Menagerie is one of a handful of American plays around mid-century, together with such works as O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones or Miller’s Death of a Salesman, that developed a new language for the American stage: away from the conventions of realism to a more fluid, almost cinematic way of telling stories, of getting inside the minds of their characters. Even if some devices, such as the projections Williams specifies, strike us as quaint and overly self-conscious today, they were highly unusual and even controversial then. 
 

 Like many great plays, The Glass Menagerie is deceptively simple on its surface—no more, it seems, than a single incident in the life of a small family. It has no heroic characters, no high-flying speeches or awesome deeds. Why has it endured? Because it has what Brecht calls “fighting spirit”: it is indomitable and comes alive again on stage, while many more recent plays do not. May it remain a classic but be spared the fate of a classic.