Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival

Under the Influence, the theme of our 2010 Festival, began with questions.

What did Tennessee Williams hear, see, live through, savor, laugh at and return to while creating his great plays and poems? How might those inspire today’s artists, too?

The answers to those questions became this year’s thrilling mix – innovative theater, dance, music, poetry, films and art installations – in an eye-opening variery of sites throughout our town.

Passes on Sale Now

At this four-day festival you’ll enjoy

- well-known and unknown works of America’s great playwright
- our eighth world premiere Tennessee Williams play
- music, films and theater that influenced Tennessee's work
- new dance, visual art, music and plays that Williams inspired others to create
- parties, events and a special celebrity guest

Festival Program

Written by Williams

American Gothic, of course, is the title of a famous painting by Grant Wood. This September 23rd, Boston’s Beau Jest theater company presents the world premiere of Williams’ play of the same name. Tennessee cast the thin-lipped farm couple in the theater of his mind as the disapproving parents of a gun-toting bankrobber desperate for a place to hide. Williams sweat-soaked erotic comedy, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, makes for a double-bill, both plays presented on the porch of an historic Provincetown mansion.

27 Wagons Full of Cotton -- Set on a sweat-drenched front porch in the Mississippi Delta, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton will be staged on a historic porch in Provincetown. The production, directed by Jeff Glickman, comes from Big Finish Productions of Pensacola, Florida.

Orpheus Descending, (a play Williams was writing when he first came to Provincetown in 1940,) is our centerpiece. The timeless myth of a poet who travels to the underworld – and returns to our world to share his visions – of love and pain -- inspired Williams for decades. A seaside Provincetown church becomes our stage for a full version of the text performed as a morality play by New York’s Infinite Theater.

Escape -- picture a runaway from a Mississippi chain gang and an adolescent boy swimming away from his overbearing mother – these are the central images of two short plays by Williams – and the images that incited DanzLoop Chicago’s Paula Frasz to choreograph new work for her company to complement the performance of the plays (at the Provincetown Theater.)

Suddenly Last Summer, presented on the last night of the Festival, tells the story of a poet who descended to the underworld and never returned – his passage described to a doubting audience by the one witness who survived him. This variation on the Orpheus myth, inspired by Hart Crane and his domineering mother – and a garden Williams saw in a movie – will be staged as a reading by Jodie Markell, the director of the 2010 Tennessee Williams’ film The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.

influences on Williams

Diff'rent is the play by Eugene O’Neill that Williams saw in Provincetown performed at the Playhouse on the Wharf. Festival director Jef Hall-Flavin’s revival, seventy years later, brings O’Neills New England story of a sex-starved fool to the Boat Slip, in full view of the harbor.

Bent to the Flame is the acclaimed one-person show performed by Los Angeles-based Doug Tompos, channeling Williams’ lifelong obsession with poet Hart Crane. Playwright John Guare, our guest in 2008, wrote to recommend we schedule it this year. We have.

The Jazz Funeral of Stella Brooks, a new musical written by Chicago’s Terry Abrahamson and Michael Carlson, offers another path between the underworld and ours: in this case an umbrella-wielding “second line” dancing down Commercial Street to honor Miss Stella Brooks – the vinegar-voiced singing sensation of Ptown’s 1947 cabaret season. Williams heard her often that summer while he was finishing up the script for the Broadway bound “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Can that famous cry of “Stella!” be an echo of Miss Brook’s curtain calls?

Laughing in the dark with Tennessee offers late night guilty pleasures, when author and film historian John DiLeo shares his private collection of Williams-related film clips. See what stars impressed or dismayed TW, enjoy how later films borrow shamelessly, pay tribute, or spoof Tennessee Williams.

Inspired by Williams

Orpheus in the Galleries traces a path for our passholders between three neighboring art galleries stocked with related installations by a half dozen artists . An history-making exhibition of Varujan Boghosian’s Orpheus-inspired collages and sculptures at the Berta Walker Gallery promises to be a Festival highlight.

September 23 - 26, 2010