Tom addresses the audience directly at the play's opening, establishing that we're watching his memories. He sets the historical context of Depression-era America and introduces the play's dreamlike, non-realistic style.
The opening monologue of the play, delivered directly to the audience before the action proper begins. Tom enters in merchant sailor's dress, stands at the edge of the playing space, and addresses the house. Behind him, the fire-escape and the Wingfield apartment in St Louis are visible but unlit; the family is not yet present. He explains the conventions of the memory play — that it is dimly lit, that it is sentimental, that it is not realistic — and frames everything we are about to see as something he is remembering, and arranging, from a distance of years. He introduces the cast, the absent father whose photograph smiles from the wall, and the social and historical moment: the late 1930s, dissolving economies, Guernica, the long approach of the war. Then he steps into the scene as a younger version of himself.
Tom is two people simultaneously: the older Tom who has left his mother and sister and is speaking from somewhere later in his life, and the younger Tom who will shortly be quarrelling with Amanda at the dinner table. What he wants from the audience, very specifically, is complicity — permission to tell this story his way, with his selections, his lighting, his music. Underneath the showman's patter is unresolved guilt about Laura, and a need to confess it that he will not name directly until the play's final speech. The psychological state is controlled — he is the magician — but the control is brittle. The actor's job is to find the cost of the storytelling. Tom is not performing for fun; he is performing because he cannot stop returning to this material, and the audience are the latest people he has cornered to listen.
The pitfall is treating this as an announcement. It is intimate; the audience is one person at a bar at three in the morning. The famous line "I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve" should be specific — what tricks, what sleeve — and not chanted. Find the wry humour Williams writes in: Tom is funny, he likes the audience, he is enjoying being in charge of the lighting. Mark the shift when he names his father — "the fifth character in the play, who doesn't appear except in this larger-than-life-size photograph over the mantel" — there is private feeling there, brief and quickly covered. The Guernica/Berchtesgaden passage is the speech's political widening; let it land but don't sermonise. Tempo should be conversational and unhurried; Tom has all night. Costume and cigarette are useful; both Williams and most directors want them. Decide where "older Tom" is geographically — a port, a hotel room, a bar — and let that inform the body. Resist the southern-poet voice; Tom is from St Louis via Mississippi and the speech does not need perfume.
A workhorse audition piece for young men, particularly in American conservatory and MFA settings. It shows direct address, narrative control, comic instinct, and the ability to carry an audience without scene partners. Useful for Williams-led seasons, American classical work, and screen drama where interiority and voiceover instincts are being assessed. Very heavily over-used — every drama school in America has heard this piece hundreds of times — so bring it only if you have something specific and personal in it. If you are between this and the closing speech ("Blow out your candles, Laura"), the closing speech is fresher in the room and emotionally riskier. Strong for actors whose strength is text and presence rather than physical transformation. Avoid for commercial comedy auditions; the piece reads as serious and literary regardless of how lightly you play it.
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis... This is the social background of the play.
The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it. The other characters are my mother, Amanda, my sister, Laura, and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scenes.