Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival Reveals Its 19th Season

The 19th Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival has announced its September 2024 program.  The fall line-up includes live performances of plays by Williams including Suddenly Last Summer, and Tennessee Rising, a play about Williams. Film, live music, video, and readings inspired by Tennessee Williams fill out the Festival’s four day roster, along with educational programming and parties to celebrate America’s great playwright.

The Festival will be held September 26-29, 2024 in several locations in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  

This year, the Festival celebrates Memory as a creative force.  “In plays by Tennessee Williams, those who tell stories are characters in a drama of their own making,” says Festival curator co-founder David Kaplan.  2024 Festival participants come from South Africa, Australia, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Provincetown, Truro, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

2024 Festival Passes are now available for sale online at twptown.org and by phone at 866.789.TENN.  The Carte Blanche Pass provides an all-access VIP experience, while the Flex Pass affords a more flexible menu across the full range of shows. The popular Festival Day Passallows audience members to hop on a ferry from Boston in the morning, spend the day at the Festival, and return home the same night. Tickets for individual shows are also available now at twptown.org.

Here are more details on this year’s performances:

The Glass Menagerie – A warehouse clerk turned merchant marine tries, unsuccessfully, to forget the mother and sister he abandoned. Tom Wingfield, a stand-in for Williams, tells the tale and is a character in this classic work that charms, haunts, and endures as “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” The Glass Menagerie was written in 1945, at the dawn of Tennessee Williams’ career.

The Festival’s 2024 production shares a new insight to The Glass Menagerie by staging it on the same set and with the same cast as Something Cloudy Something Clear, written in 1982 at the twilight of Williams’ life.  

Something Cloudy, Something Clear - Something Cloudy, Something Clear features a character named August, another stand-in Williams created for himself to tell the story of his first love affair—and be a character in it during the summer of 1940.

In the Festival’s repertory casting the actor playing Tom (John Dennis Anderson) plays August; the actress playing Amanda, The Glass Menagerie’s flamboyant mother (Sarah MacDonnell), becomes Tallulah Bankhead; Luke Bosco, the actor playing Jim, the Gentleman Caller, becomes Williams beloved Kip;  Vanessa Rose, who plays Laura, the abandoned sister in The Glass Menagerie, becomes the doomed waitress Clare in Something Cloudy, Something Clear; and Tom’s absent father becomes Death, played by Paul E. Halley.   

“These two pieces are spiritual bookends to a career that often overshadowed the life of its author,” says the designer/director of both performances, Dane Eissler.

Suddenly Last Summer – Suddenly Last Summer is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that recovers the trauma of watching a loved one doom themselves. This is a highly unusual approach to the text: memory-positive, in which recalling trauma is healing. The Festival’s production, directed by Brenna Geffers with her Philadelphia-based DieCast Ensemble, performed on the altar of the Unitarian Meeting House.

Green Eyes - Green Eyes is an erotic thriller by Tennessee Williams. Newlyweds in a hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter wake up from their honeymoon night. The bride is covered in bruises. The groom, a soldier on leave from a war in South East Asia, can’t remember what happened.  The Festival’s 2024 production, in which the audience circles a bed at the Boatslip, is directed by Brenna Geffers with her Philadelphia-based DieCast Ensemble.

Flight - As in The Glass Menagerie,  a clerk who is a secret poet, dreams of escape. In Flight, adapted from Williams’ story, “Episodes in the Life of a Clerk,” the secret poet jumps off the roof and, in his imagination, flies. From Baltimore’ Edgar Alan Poe National Theater, directed by Jennifer Restak.

Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams - Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams, is the critically acclaimed solo play written and performed by United Solo Award winner Jacob Storms. The play explores the formative period from 1939 – 1945 during which an unknown writer named Tom blooms into the acclaimed playwright known as Tennessee, wherein his most iconic character emerges: himself. The audience becomes friend and confidant to young Williams as he experiences the unexpected highs and devastating lows of his early career.  This solo play comes to Provincetown after critically acclaimed engagements Off-Broadway and at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, where the play was nominated for an Off-West End (Offie) Award and dubbed an official shortlisted event for the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence. Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams is written and performed by Jacob Storms and originally directed for the stage by Alan Cumming.

Lagniappes

A lagniappe is a New Orleans tradition: something extra from the chef, like a baker’s dozen. Lagniappes are a Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival tradition: a little extra programming.  Dates and show venues for the Lagniappes will be announced soon.

A Dollar a Page – Along with Tennessee Williams’ memories, A Dollar a Page presents the words and images of other visionaries—Anaïs Nin among them — who reported on (and fantasized about) the same fishermen, tourists, lovers, and sand dunes as Williams. In 1941, Nin, famous for her diaries, wrote “Life in Provincetown” erotica at the rate of a dollar a page.
 

Escape to Paradise - Festival favorite, virtuoso jazz pianist and theremin strummer, George Maurer. presents the soundtrack of Williams’ summers in Provincetown – Including musical settings of poems and prose by Williams and poet Harold Norse, who watched Tennessee Williams write The Glass Menagerie in the dune shack they shared in Provincetown.

In the Room Where He Waits – The American premiere of Timothy Despina Marshall’s critically acclaimed film In the Room Where He Waits.  Set during the pandemic, a Broadway-bound gay Australian actor (played by Daniel Monks), about to appear as Tom in The Glass Menagerie, secretly flies home to Brisbane for his father’s funeral. He rehearses by Zoom pretending to be in Los Angeles, lying to his director, his mother, but not the actress playing Laura or to himself. The hotel room he’s stuck in is haunted.

"In the Room Where He Waits is a chilling exploration of grief, identity, and the supernatural. Director Timothy Despina Marshall crafts a suspenseful tale that lingers long after the credits roll. Prepare to be both disturbed and moved by this haunting cinematic experience."  Neill Frazer, Out Loud Culture!

For more information on this year’s Festival, visit twptown.org. You can also follow the Festival on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

 

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