"It was an extraordinary time. I was very lucky."

Rabe had her Williams experience when she was a young actor starting out in Canada. She appeared in the 1980 Vancouver Playhouse production of Williams' The Red Devil Battery Sign and the following year was in the same company's world premiere of the playwright's The Notebook of Trigorin, adapted from Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. She has fond memories of the experience, and of Williams, who died a couple of years later from choking to death on a bottle cap at the age of 71.

"He was really gracious to me," Rabe says, adding wryly, "I looked like a young boy from behind".

More seriously, she says, "he was a Southern gentleman – manners meant everything".

Rabe says Williams loved actors and liked women and while he often seemed to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs, he was acutely aware of what was going on around him at all times.

"He was a performer, an actor."

But he was, first and foremost, a playwright. The Glass Menagerie, which premiered in 1944, was Williams' first successful play and was the start of a career that included such critical and commercial hits as A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Themes that were explored in his later plays – the collision between reality and illusion, the shattering of dreams, the mythology of Southern womanhood – were already present in Menagerie. This award-winning production, directed by Eamon Flack, premiered at Belvoir in Sydney and is now on tour. It's Rabe's first professional Williams play since her youth and her first time performing in Canberra since Andrew Bovell's Holy Day about 10 years ago.

The strongly autobiographical "memory play", as Williams called it, is introduced by the character Tom (played by Luke Mullins) – Williams' birth name – as his recollection of the Wingfield family in their cramped St Louis apartment in the late 1930s.

Long ago abandoned by her husband, Amanda (Rabe) is living with her son Tom and her physically disabled, painfully shy daughter Laura (Rose Riley) who creates her own world with her collection of glass animals. To make ends meet, Tom works in a warehouse while writing poetry on the side and Amanda sells magazine subscriptions by telephone to put Laura through secretarial college. Amanda is worried about her children, especially Laura, for whom she is obsessed with finding a suitor.

While Amanda is sometimes portrayed as a harridan, Rabe doesn't see her that way.

"She takes up a lot of oxygen, which was true of Tennessee's own mother ... but she's doing the best she can.

"She's someone who is desperately trying to survive," Rabe says.

"She's got two children living at home who are completely dependent on Tom's paycheck. He hates his job in the warehouse and writes poetry and she doesn't think that's practical at all."

When Tom, at Amanda's urging, brings home Jim O'Connor (Harry Greenwood), a workmate and old high school acquaintance, it marks a turning point for the whole family. It also brings out Amanda's faded Southern-belle airs, as she remembers when she was a debutante from a prosperous family. She, like her children, takes refuge in fantasy from the unhappy realities of life.

"Doing what families do, in the name of love and care, can wreak terrible damage," Rabe says.

While much of the play is autobiographical, it's far from pure naturalism. Williams wanted to capture what he called "plastic theatre", making use of all the theatrical arts – screens, projections, music – to go beyond realism in creating an expressionistic rather than naturalistic theatrical experience.

"It's a beautiful play ...there's something very special about a writer's first play," Rabe says.

"It's such great writing, poetic and lyrical and elliptical."

While The Glass Menagerie isn't as overtly violent or sensational as some of Williams' later work, Rabe says it does have plenty of implicit and emotional violence – at the time the story takes place, the imminence of World War II would be on an audience's mind, and there's always the possibility that these characters, trapped together at close quarters and each deeply unhappy and frustrated, will lash out at the others.

This production aims to go back to Williams' original intentions, using filmed segments to take advantage of modern technology and to tie in with Tom's infatuation with the cinema.

Going to movies is one of Tom's ways to gain relief from his dull life and the confines of the apartment, but the movies are not just about escapism. Indeed, sometimes they're just an excuse.

"They're about trysts with other people in the dark," Rabe says.

Mullins – who will be making his Canberra debut – says this production is looking at Williams as a queer writer and The Glass Menagerie, like all his works, as a queer text.

"If you read between the lines, and it doesn't take much to do so, there are so many references to queer life."

Tom is clearly not always going to the movies when he goes out – he comes home far too late some nights – and when he does, he's often meeting men in one of the few places such furtive assignations could take place in the period. Williams couldn't be overt about homosexuality writing in the 1940s but the implications were there for those in the know.

As a closeted gay man and a frustrated artist, Tom doesn't fit in to his environment and has a need to escape but feels torn between his family responsibilities and his own desires.

If he stays, he will feel stifled, personally and creatively, but if he leaves, his family's main means of support will be gone and his sister's fate, in particular, will be uncertain.

"It's a close, intense, relationship, co-dependent and self-destructive."

The members of the family care deeply about each other but also can't seem to help hurting each other. Mullins sees parallels with another major autobiographical American drama in which he has appeared in recent years, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, in which he played the playwright's surrogate, Edmund Tyrone. It also dealt with a family whose members were battling with complicated and conflicting feelings towards each other, though Mullins says the Williams play is less brutal and more humorous than the O'Neill.

Williams' mother Edwina had his mentally unstable older sister Rose lobotomised while he was away in 1943 and she was institutionalised. Williams would give half the royalties of The Glass Menagerie to his mother and ensured his sister was taken care of for the rest of her life.

"It came out of guilt ... The play is an apology to Rose for having left."

Mullins says Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller paid tribute to the lyricism and poetry of his fellow playwright's work.

"He said it didn't feel put on but felt very authentic and beautiful."

And that authenticity and beauty has retained its appeal to audiences for generations. The Glass Menagerie has remained one of Tennessee Williams' most often revived works.

"It's something specific which most often has a universal appeal," Mullins says. And by digging into his own experiences as well as his imagination and flair for language, Williams at the height of his powers was able to be both specific and appealing.

The Glass Menagerie is on at the Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, from May 3 to 7. Bookings: 6275 2700 or canberratheatrecentre.com.au.