Hershey Area Playhouse Announces Auditions For THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Hershey Area Playhouse is holding auditions for the spring production of its 2019 season, The Glass Menagerie, Sunday, February 10 & Monday, February 11, 2019, at 6:30pm. Callbacks, if needed, will be held on Monday, February 11, 2019, at 8:30pm.

Auditions will take place at the Playhouse, located at the corner of Sand Hill Road and Cherry Drive, Hershey. Those auditioning will be asked to read from the script. Characters to be cast are:

Amanda Wingfield: Laura and Tom's mother, Amanda is a proud, vivacious woman who clings to memories of the past and is at the same time courageous and foolish, charming and pitiable.

Laura Wingfield: Amanda's daughter and Tom's older sister, Laura suffers the results of a childhood illness which left one of her legs malformed and in a brace. As a result, Laura is painfully shy and has withdrawn herself the outside world. She is much like her beloved glass figurines: delicate and frail.

Tom Wingfield: Amanda's son and Laura's younger brother, Tom supports his mother and sister by working at a shoe factory, but he aspires to be a poet. Like the others, he is trapped and must decide what measures to take to escape his life's tediousness.

Jim O'Connor: The gentleman caller, Jim is an old high school acquaintance of Laura and Tom and now works in the same shoe factory as Tom.

A faded remnant of Southern gentility. Amanda Wingfield lives in poverty in a dingy St. Louis apartment. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by "gentlemen callers." Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy "crippled" daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura. In writing the play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller.

Performances of The Glass Menagerie will be held April 4-7 & 11-14, 2019, at the Playhouse. Additional audition information is available on the Playhouse's website, www.HersheyAreaPlayhouse.com.