『유리동물원』의 포스트-브레히트적 읽기

While serving as a preface to the play which is “memory and is therefore nonrealistic,” Tennessee Williams’s production notes to The Glass Menagerie are not just an introduction to this particular play but an usher to Williams’s poetics of plastic theatre. This paper aims to unearth more of an avant-garde and innovative dimension about Williams’s plastic theatre than Brechtian readings of the play have allowed it to be by proposing a postdramatic reading of a scene from scene 7, the alleged climax scene of the play. Such plastic devices as the screen device, the music, and the lighting in the mise-en-scène render Laura’s delicate nature and Tom’s feeling towards Laura visually and aurally on the stage, conveying the texture of memory which is fragile, delicate, but lingering. By shifting the focus from the cinematic to the materiality of the mise-en-scène, my ‘post-Brechtian’ reading ultimately intervenes in the succeeding and alternative relationship between the epic and the postdramatic as conceived by Hans-Thies Lehmann and problematizes the overpowering authority of Bertolt Brecht in the context of newer theatre aesthetics, not disregarding altogether the continuity between the avant-garde and the neo avant-garde.