Notes on Unseen Character
As the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South, many of my projects centered on Williams and his work. I have felt compelled to pay homage to a writer whom I consider America’s greatest dramatist—especially in the year of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.
I have researched A Streetcar Named Desire in depth and have consequently written a one-man show based on the dozen interviews I conducted with people who knew and worked with Williams. In addition, I included many references to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in my original play Mercy Me, which was produced on Williams’s birthday.
I also have written many monologues inspired by his first great success, The Glass Menagerie. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s cast list is small. There are only four characters onstage, but at least thirty other unseen characters are mentioned or referred to.
While I have never really looked at “unseen character” as a literary device, I would also venture to guess that neither did Williams. However, I think of these people as living breathing characters just as are the ones seen by the audience. I agree with the observation of critic D.J.R. Bruckner, who wrote in a New York Times review of a 1994 production of a play Tip or Die, that the unseen, unheard characters “are triumphs of theatrical invention.”
I think these unseen characters in The Glass Menagerie are just as essential to Williams’s play as is “The Gentleman Caller.” They each seem to have a vivid and clear existence in the mind of the playwright. The absence of the father is essential to the story. Amanda talking about specific gentlemen callers is crucial to her memory and how she deals with the expectations that she bestows upon her daughter, Laura.
For me, I remember that the first time I read The Glass Menagerie, I immediately heard the voice of The Typing Instructor. She spoke directly to me just as clearly as Tom did. Tennessee Williams’s invention of Malvolio the Magician just may well be an invention of Tom’s imagination as well.
Williams not only gives many of these characters names, but he also gives them history and dimension. I could go on and on about each of these unseen characters. They provide much insight to the play. And it is for these reasons that I think it is important to bring them out front and center—out of the shadows, out of the wings, and to give each of them a voice, so to speak. 
Unseen Character (part 2): Introduction and Menu
Review | My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams by William Jay Smith