The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
by Tennessee Williams
by Tennessee Williams
AWARD-WINNING DRAMA
A sold-out highlight of 2013, Milk Train is a tour-de-force for Jennifer Steyn as the unforgettable Flora Goforth. Using Williams' original Kabuki stagehands, this surprising, witty, and elegiac play is not to be missed.
directed by Fred Abrahamse
ABRAHAMSE & MEYER PRODUCTIONS
Cape Town, South Africa
a co-production with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
“...this production of the text makes for an engrossing night at the theatre,
all the more so because of 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.”
- Broadway World
About The Play
Y’KNOW WHAT I NEED TO SHAKE OFF THIS, THIS – DEPRESSION ? … I NEED ME A LOVER.
--THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE
If wit, personal charm, sexual prowess, physical beauty, and chunky diamonds could ward off death The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore would end happily, as most comedies do. Two agile stagehands, though, and a handsome poet, are on hand to ease the legendary Flora Goforth on her passage through, as critic Michael Paller calls it, “The Day on Which a Woman Dies.”
The much married Flora ‘Sissy’ Goforth, a legendary diva (and former Ziegfeld showgirl) is dictating her memoirs atop the mountain of her Italian Riviera estate above Italy’s Divina Costiera. The Angel of Death drops in to seduce her, the approach countered not so much with love, but undignified lust. Even if this is the summer she might pass, unlike Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer , Flora’s no martyr, she’s hungry for life.
Williams wrote the text in the early 1960s, while his estranged lover was dying of lung cancer, and Freedom Riders were being shot dead in Mississippi, the state where he was born. The play was ignored in 1963 when it premiered on Broadway during a newspaper strike. Revived on Broadway in 1964, and reviled, the play closed after five performances.
Boom! is the final word of the play. The annihilation that great souls in Williams’s plays long for - and achieve - in this play resounds at the edge of the sea in the sound of the waves, like a Hindu’s mantra, or a Zen master’s koan: Boom!
About The Production
"Steyn gives the performance of a lifetime in this role.
Her work is rangy, deeply engaged with the inner life of this complex woman,
and her transformation into the character is complete."
- Broadway World
Abrahamse Meyer Productions from Cape Town, South Africa thrilled Festival audiences with Kingdom of Earth in 2012 and Milk Train in 2013. In South Africa, Jennifer Steyn won the prestigious Fleur du Cap Best Actress award for her luminous portrayal of Flora “Sissy” Goforth.
The revelatory award-winning South African production seen in Provincetown in 2013 returns under the elegant direction of Fred Abrahamse and the tour de force performance by Jennifer Steyn as Flora. The Kabuki stagehands once thought superfluous exotica turn out to be the key to the play’s meaning.