![]() For Muñoz, the “best performances do not disappear but instead linger in our memory, haunt our present, and illuminate our future” (104). Muñoz argues that it is not only possible but necessary to “push beyond the impasse of the present” in the aftermath of the ephemeral performance (31)-specifically, in reconsidering what it means for a performance to be here-to see or sense the flickers of past encounters in a messy, heavy, dark present. This particular Broadway run is over, but in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José E. The concept of a queer aesthetic, however, allows Laura-and the play itself-to be read as actively resisting heteronormative narratives of the good life and as conjuring alternative options for female desire and agency. Laura’s fragility has been read in varying ways-by the playwright, director, characters, audience, and critics-and the stakes are high: the conditions for female bodies in The Glass Menagerie are poisonous, if not fatal. ![]() In the “Author’s Production Notes” that precede the text of the play, Williams instructs readers that Laura’s situation is “grave” because of a “crippling” illness that shortened one leg, the cause of her increasing separation: “she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf” (129). On the page, Laura emerges more subtly, a young woman whose body and behavior do not conform to constructed notions of success and beauty. This strangeness-figured in part as Laura’s uncommon beauty-is in many ways the problem of The Glass Menagerie, creating anxiety in Amanda and making Tom feel trapped. ![]() The unusual entrance suggests strangeness and otherworldliness: it is the production’s first reading of Laura’s difference. Each of the four times I attended, the audience gasped at this emergence. In the 2013–14 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany, the character Laura Wingfield is pulled out of the couch by her brother, Tom, during his opening monologue. Tennessee Williams ’s The Glass Menagerie Alicia Andrzejewski
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