Provincetown's Tennessee Williams Fest to Feature International Productions & More

Every September, the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (TW Fest) draws theater-lovers from around the globe to celebrate the life, work, and enduring relevance of America's great playwright in performances of his classics, his daring experimental works, and new works Williams has inspired. Since its founding in 2006, the TW Festival has presented 58 plays by Williams, including ten world premieres. In "Year Tenn: A Decade of Tennessee Williams", the TW Fest puts the spotlight on Williams' creative force in plays that span his life from his early to his later years through some of its landmark productions and inspired new works

Abrahamse & Meyer Productions from South Africa returns with its highly acclaimed THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE. The production company thrilled audiences at the TW Fest with their production of the play in 2013, as well as with KINGDOM OF EARTH in 2012. Both productions went on to win awards and accolades for acting, costumes and music in South Africa.

"This year we want to give a wider audience a chance to see this outstanding production of the seldom seen THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE with the original cast of Jennifer Steyn, Marcel Meyer and Nicholas Dallas, directed by Fred Abrahamse," says TW Festival Executive Director Jef Hall-Flavin.

Steyn won the prestigious Fleur du Cap Best Actress award in South Africa with her luminous portrayal of Flora "Sissy" Goforth in Williams' intimate and witty play about mortality. Her achievement was summed up by BroadwayWorld South Africa's David Fick as "a magnificent performance by Jennifer Steyn, who plays the central role of Flora 'Sissy' Goforth, a character that - taken on its own terms - ranks right up there with Blanche du Bois and Maggie the Cat."

This year, the Festival is also presenting Williams' genre-shattering play THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES in a repertory collaboration with the Abrahamse & Meyer actors. The play will be directed by TW Fest curator, David Kaplan, recreating his critically acclaimed original staging for the world premiere that he brought to the festival in 2009. Kaplan's scenic design toured Europe and America as part of the 11th Prague Quadrennial.

"This is Tennessee Williams' fantasia on the death of the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, whom Williams had met in Provincetown in 1940," says Kaplan. "In this play, which like MILK TRAIN has been influenced by Japanese theater, paintings are created and destroyed onstage. It's a dream to be working with the Abrahamse & Meyer ensemble who have such a deep affinity for Williams' language and theatricality."

Meyer, one half of the Abrahamse & Meyer production company, added "MILK TRAIN and THE DAY ON WHICH A MAN DIES is Williams at his most daring, theatrical and poetic."

To help explore the Japanese influence on Williams, Atsuro Hirota, translator of the recent Tokyo production of ORPHEUS DESCENDING, will be coming from Japan to participate in TW Fest's Tennessee Williams Institute, which provides graduate level theater students with a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in performances and seminars with Williams' scholars.

In TW Fest's tradition of bringing original works of modern theater artists who have been inspired by Williams, the festival welcomes the Spatfeather Theatre, a new company from London which aims to provoke and delight by subverting traditional expectations of music theater.

Spatfeather has adapted Williams' play THE CASE OF THE CRUSHED PETUNIAS, which was performed in a storefront at the 2009 TW Fest, about a young shopgirl who finds the courage to live free. SpatFeather's Colette Simple transports PETUNIAS to a musical theater here and now.

The Spatfeather collaborators have fused the poetry of the text with the parochial small town spirit through the musicality of cabaret and physicality of vaudeville in a heady mix of songs, dance, and acting. Directed by Matt Peover, eight writers with different points of view have reinterpreted Williams' distinctive style into songs boldly scored by Vincent Guibert, a 21st Century Kurt Weill and featuring new cabaret sensation Nathalie Carrington and actor Adam Byron.The libretto is the teamwork of playwrights Robert Holman and Amy Rosenthal, lyricist Adam Meggido, cabaret king Desmond O'Connor, actress Honeysuckle Weeks and rapper Charlie Dupré.

Carrington, who also functions as creative producer on the piece, says, "We wanted to touch a line between faithful and irreverent interpretation of (Williams') work," a vision they achieved with "charming and disarming quirkiness" according to Time Out London, creating "a plucky experiment in theatrical form, witty edge, and energy" (London's The Guardian).

For the full 2015 TW Fest programme, visit the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival website.

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