A friend of mine and former Music Theater major said it best: “Tennessee Williams sure has a penchant for writing intolerable women.”

The final production of CMU’s 2012-2013 Theatre Season, Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” featured an intolerable-but-magnetic female main character, Amanda Wingfield, portrayed by the incredibly talented Emily Lackner.

Mrs. Wingfield, a former Southern belle, finds herself and her two grown children far from the balls and glamour of the Old South after she is abandoned by her husband. Living in a small, St. Louis apartment, the three Wingfields long for very different things.

Tom Wingfield is a dreamer, spending his after-work hours in the refuge of a movie theater, no doubt to escape his overbearing and dramatic mother. Tom was portrayed on the CMU stage by Colton Pratt, who perfectly reflected the melancholic and dreamy style Williams’ male characters are often known for. Tom’s older sister, Laura, is described several times by her family as being “painfully shy”, a description the audience soon finds to be more than accurate. Crippled since childhood, Laura isolates herself from others and prefers to spend her time in the Wingfield apartment, obsessively caring for her collection of glass animals. Shannon Foley made the beautiful and awkward Laura Wingfield come to life with a childlike glassy stare and heartachingly soft-spoken lines.

Quite the opposite, the matriarchal Amanda Wingfield is volatile, yet charming. She dreams of reliving her romantic girlhood through Laura, but Laura’s introverted disposition makes the young woman unable to finish school or find a job, let alone attract a suitor that lives up to her mother’s idealistic standards.

Lackner’s depiction of Amanda was seamless. It was surreal to see a young actress take on the speech, accent, body language and sharp-mindedness of an old-fashioned Southern belle. Though beautiful and girlishly sweet at times, Lackner’s Amanda Wingfield was temperamental and a bit unstable.

Tension and uneasiness reach critical mass when, at his mother’s insistence, Tom brings a coworker home to meet sweet, shy Laura.

The gentleman caller, played by Ben Carlson, is confident, amiable and handsome, winning the hearts of both Laura and her mother. But after his sudden departure, the three Wingfields each seem to reach their own breaking points naturally in very different ways.

Lending to the easiness in which the audience was able to fall into the story of the Wingfields was the dynamic and lively set. Mirroring the conflicts of the individual Wingfields, the set featured a warmly-lit and inviting apartment, contrasted by the bleak brick walls and wrought iron railings of the city outside their door.

And while Carlson, Foley, Lackner and Pratt took the stage for the last time Saturday night, the Wingfields live on in a few movie adaptations as well as the original script by Tennessee Williams, who is best known for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”