Tennessee Williams Festival Continues Panel Discussion 9/24

The Albuquerque Theatre Guild continues its 2011 Tennessee Williams Festival celebrating the 100th birthday of the playwright with a panel discussion, Tennessee Williams Today: The Changing Legacy of a Great American Playwright. At 2 p.m. September 24, 2011 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center's Bank of America Theatre, the distinguished guest speakers will help the audience become better acquainted with the rich legacy of this great American writer, provide a variety of contexts and approaches to enhance the appreciation of his work by readers and theatergoers, and show how the Williams legacy is changing as a new generation of directors embraces the challenge of staging his plays in the 21st century.

"The centenary is an excellent and timely opportunity not only to bring Williams' plays to life for local theatergoers but also to educate the New Mexico public about his lasting cultural legacy," says Ray Orley, President of the ATG. "The panel will augment the knowledge of a substantial and diverse community audience, many of whom have recently seen or will soon see a Williams-related theatre performance. This will give the information presented by the panel an immediate pertinence or ‘edge.'"

The panelists are:

Dr. Lynn C. Miller, Professor Emerita, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas, Austin, will speak on the "Psychological Architecture" in Tennessee Williams' plays. She will look at Williams' use of visual metaphors that underscore qualities of character and landscape in his major plays. For example, Streetcar Named Desire, one of the works staged during Albuquerque's 100th anniversary festival, contains a scaffolding of metaphors that underscore the emotional disintegration of the character Blanche: the streetcar itself that evokes sexual yearning and which brings Blanche to the French Quarter, the claustrophobic apartment that Blanche cannot escape, and the lamp that Blanche masks to hide her age. The use of visual symbols aids actor and audience alike in apprehending the unfolding of Williams' plays, enhancing the theatricality of the archetypes the playwright employs and providing a tangible background to the action. Other examples under discussion come from The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The Night of the Iguana, two other plays being presented as part of the Festival, as well as Summer and Smoke.

Dr. David Richard Jones, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico, will speak about the fate of select Tennessee Williams plays on Broadway stages, beginning with The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire and climaxing with an historic string of failures in the early 1960s. He will examine the role of directors, especially Elia Kazan who was responsible for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He will also note Williams's interactions with legendary actors including Laurette Taylor, Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page and Tallulah Bankhead. His major thesis will be that Williams's passage through Broadway over twenty years made his reputation, elevated his work to great heights, and also strained his creative mechanism to the point that he could no longer function in that commercial theatre.
Dr. David Savran, Distinguished Professor of Theatre, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York and the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre, is currently working on the reception of Williams in both the US and western Europe from the 1950s to the present. His presentation will focus primarily on how Williams has been reinterpreted in the twenty-first century on European stages by directors whose work is radically different from that of most United States directors, which is still driven by realistic, Method acting. He will focus on Lee Breuer's production of Streetcar Named Desire for the Comédie Française, Frank Castorf's notorious Berlin Volksbühne version of Streetcar entitled Endstation Amerika, and productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Schaubühne in Berlin.

The panel funded by a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council. The Tennessee Williams Festival continues throughout 2011 at various venues around Albuquerque. Visit www.abqtheatre.org <http://www.abqtheatre.org/> for a complete list of performances.

About Albuquerque Theatre Guild

More theatrical performances take place every weekend here in Albuquerque than in any other U.S. city of its size. Our mission is to promote public awareness of theatre in the greater Albuquerque area, to encourage the growth of theatre audiences, to foster cooperation and collaboration among the member organizations, and to facilitate and assist the work of individual members involved in all aspects of theatrical production.