Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival Announces Programming Lineup

This year art will also convey the spirit of music in Williams' works.  The Festival is collaborating with artist and musician Bill Evaul, the well-known master of the white-line woodcut, Provincetown's distinctive art form.  Evaul is creating a series of ten original woodcuts that capture the musical essence of the program's individual shows.

 

Festival co-founder and Curator David Kaplan says, "Williams' musical tastes were wide and varied, influenced by the jukebox, the radio, New Orleans jazz, the sounds of the Mississippi Delta where he grew up, and the foreign countries he visited repeatedly:  Mexico and Italy.  Williams invited music onstage, often ironically, as an important element of a vibrant theater, revealing character and conflict."

 

"We present Tennessee Williams the writer in full at our Festivals," says Kaplan. "He was a dramatist, a poet, a short story writer. He wrote classics that are continually produced, and he wrote numerous one-act plays that set out the roots for his longer works, often experimenting and stretching the boundaries of theater.  Conventional critics of his time didn't always like when he went beyond their expectations of lyrical realism, but nowadays artists from around the world look at Williams' writing with a fresh eye and interpret texts in ways that give us new pleasure in his creative genius." 

 

Festival Executive Director Jef Hall-Flavin says, "We bring Tennessee Williams into the 21^st Century by presenting innovative productions from theater artists who continue to be creatively inspired by him in new work. This year we have exciting productions coming from Italy, South Africa, Alabama, Boston, and New York and we'll present them in different venues around the town.  Not only will you know Williams more fully, you'll enjoy the unique seaside village of Provincetown more fully."

 

The Glass Menagerie 

In this masterpiece, Williams' narrator Tom tells us, "In memory everything seems to happen to music."

In this bittersweet classic Williams remembers with regret the lost chance his sister had for love. There's a fiddle in the wings and old records on a wind-up gramophone that move the audience to feel Laura's longing.

This inaugural production of The Actors Theatre of Alabama in Birmingham stars Celeste Burnum as Amanda and is directed by Jamie Lawrence.  Burnun has memorably played many of Williams' roles.  The Birmingham News says she 'rules the stage here as Blanche." 

 

Ten Blocks on the Camino Real

Masks, marionettes, and a mariachi band enliven Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in this "enchanting" dreamscape from Boston'sBeau Jest Theater, the multi-award winning New England theater company known for their imaginative productions and a joyous physical acting style.  Beau Jest also staged the past world premieres of TW Fest's The Remarkable Rooming-House of Madame LeMonde and American Gothic. 

             Ten Blocks was written in the 1940's at the peak of Williams' creative powers. It was meant to be an impressionistic melding of poetry, music, masks, and dance to capture the world we live in with a new kind of "plastic theater." The play was never produced, but was expanded for Broadway as the more convoluted and realistic Camino Real, which was not well-received by critics.  With this production, director Davis Robinson, is the first to ever follow Williams' stage directions.

 

Kingdom of Earth 

Williams describes the set of this play as having "the mood of a blues song whose subject is lonliness." 

Abrahamse and Meyer Productions, an award-winning classical theater company of South Africa, will present the Williams rarely performed masterpiece, Kingdom of Earth (aka The Seven Descents of Myrtle.) This is a tale of half brothers battling for possession of a new bride while a flood threatens to consume them.  This savage, sexy and darkly comic play deals poignantly with racial discrimination, land ownership and familial dysfunction, themes that resonate deeply within a South African context.  

Acclaimed South African composer and musical director, who is also collaborating with Eve Ensler on I Am An Emotional Creature, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder has created a soundscape and score for this show.

 

i blues di Tennessee Williams – American Premiere

From Bergamo, Italy, two actresses, two languages, three musicians, four scenes in variations and improvisations that exalt the rhythm and blues of the writing of Williams. The scenes present fourteen essential characters from four short Williams' plays:  This Property Is Condemned, Portrait of a Madonna, The Unsatisfactory Supper and The Dark Room.  The live music -- including counter bass, trombone, and guitar -- was conceived as a character adding a language of its own. 

            Alessandra Ingoglia and Maria Teresa Galati, who created the unique event, will perform in English (and Italian).   The MatèTeatro company, now in its seventh year was awarded the CRT Teatrodi Milano for this production's originality and emotional impact on the public.

 

I Never Get Dressed Till Before Dark on Sundays – American Premiere

Pratfalls, shame, and terror mix into this hilarious nightmare of a rehearsal in which the actors complain to their Southern playwright about his florid language, written by Tennessee Williams in 1973.  Popular songs play on and the borders between comedy and tragedy drop as do the borders between performance and reality.

     Directed by Infinite Theatre's Nick Potenzieri, who staged TW Fest's outstanding hit production of Orpheus Descending in 2010 and 2011.  Craig Dudley, a friend of Williams from the 1970s, plays the slumming British stage director late for a dinner party in the Hamptons.

 

Auto-da-fé

Performed on the side porch of the Gifford House, Auto-da-fé blazes with a parade of live music from the Hot Tamale Brass Band, and extraordinary costumes direct from New Orleans, courtesy of the Krewe of Armeinius.

     Upsetting letters with unseemly photographs have been mailed to a young New Orleans' man who doesn't want his mother to see them and will do desperate things to keep that from happening. As he evades sharp questions on the porch there's the persistent sound of music approaching.  In this production it's the flamboyant Mardi Gras Krewe of Armeinius in a feather-studded march down the street accompanied by a live Dixieland band.

 

Autumn Song

Minneapolis composer George Maurer plays piano and conducts his celebrated jazz ensemble in a song cycle – a dramatization where the poet Tennessee Williams and German poet Rainer Maria Rilke meet in a musical conversation of poetry infusing jazz, gospel and art song. 

            In the summer of 1940, when Williams first moved to Provincetown for the season, he fell wholeheartedly in love for the first time, writing and rewriting poems. That summer he read Rilke's romantic poetry, which he knew from college, with new understanding and passion.

            Maurer is one of Minnesota's premier jazz pianists and his work as performer, arranger and composer has taken him all over the world.  He has shared the stage with Eric Clapton, arranged music for the Chiffons, and written two original scores for the Saint Paul City Ballet, among other accomplishments. 

The original Minneapolis production comes to us directed by Festival Executive Director Jef Hall-Flavin.

     

The Tennessee Williams Songbook

Twice Tony-nominated Broadway actor and singer Alison Fraser, a hit in last year's festival "Dirty Shorts" performs a sparkling lounge act with powerhouse pianist Allison Leyton Brown known for raising the rafters will entertain with a jewel box of pop songs from plays by Tennessee Williams and other unexpected delights from country-western ballads, Mississippi blues, and Latin love songs. The collection of songs and direction is by Festival Curator David Kaplan.

  

Gift of an Orange

Beating drums and the smell of gumbo cooking welcome the Festival audience to the hidden outdoor Garden Wa, an oasis in the heart of Provincetown in this production from Boston's New Urban Theatre Laboratory, a theater company created to investigate the stories and voices of those who exist on the margins of society.

     A hitchhiker down on his luck falls off the beaten path in Tennessee Williams short story "Gift of an Apple" (written in1936).  Award-winning playwright Charlene Donaghy, inspired by images of a young man's innocence and an older woman's body wisdom has written this new play, Gift of an Orange, set in the wilderness of the Louisiana bayou. The play won a 'Love Experiment Award' from the NutLab and was chosen to open their 2012 season, directed by Jackie Davis. 

 

The South is Everywhere

This new Austrian documentary explores Tennessee Williams' roots in the Mississippi Delta and his international reach today, concentrating on the Vienna Theater -- with interviews from the Delta and rare footage of a Tennessee Williams interview in rehearsal in Vienna.  Filmmaker Herb Krill will attend the showing to answer questions.

 

Other events at the Festival will include parties with the actors and jam sessions with musicians.

 

Ticket Info:

Tickets are on sale online at www.twptown.org or by phone at 866/789-TENN (8366). Tickets can be purchased individually or in special packages, such as the Carte Blanche VIP all access pass, the Flex Pass which allows you to create your own package, and the Discount Student Study Pass for full time students. Discounts are also available for groups.  Many hotels and restaurants also offer discounts for festival-goers.