BEYOND SUCCESS:
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
& EUGENE O'NEILL

Our 11th season marked the centenary of the year Eugene O’Neill began writing groundbreaking plays in Provincetown. Festival programming offered new approaches to staging O’Neill from the perspective of Tennessee Williams’ genre-busting dramas. Both O’Neill and Williams at the height of their success — while winning Pulitzer Prizes and scoring Broadway hits — went beyond success to experiment with burlesque and cartooning, sentimental songs, Asian ideas of theater, and attacks on money-grubbing aspects of American culture.

The season’s shows included:

Kirche, Küche, Kinder by Tennessee Williams, the first production of this “outrage for the stage” since 1979.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Everett Quinton, a self-destructive painter wars with his hedonist wife.
A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot by Tennessee Williams, performed with puppets and live actors in an underground bar.
Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams. A crass menagerie of misfits in a small seaside bar survive on hope.
Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill, a production from South Africa, set in the 1890s. A British farmer brings home a Xhosa bride.
The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill from Philadelphia. A movement-based production, directed by Brenna Geffers, highlighting the athleticism of the text.
Marco Millions by Eugene O’Neill. An adaptation of an epic, performed inside a T-shirt store and the parking lot outside.


Other programming, Tango Christie, a danced adaptation from Samara, Russia, of O’Neill’s play Anna Christie conceived by Ala Korovkina; Stage Moms and Saloon Songs, in which the mothers of the playwrights appeared in a new play by Larry Dean Harris; a master-class in acting O’Neill with Brian Dennehy; and the showing of the 1923 silent movie of O’Neill’s Anna Christie with live piano accompaniment by Russian pianist/composer Vasily Tonkovidov.

“The most revelatory production was Williams’s “Small Craft Warnings,” … certainly this production, directed by Patrick Falco, made a powerful argument for its status as one of Williams’s best late play. Among the charms of this festival is its tradition of staging plays in unusual, intimate settings. For “Small Craft Warnings,” the Boatslip Beach Club, set on the water, was a suitable stand-in for the play’s setting, a seedy bar somewhere on the Southern California coast. It is here that the characters — drifters and grifters who spend their nights huddled over their drinks, and their days trying to forget their nights — assemble to find some solace for the waste of their lives.”

– Christopher Isherwood, NY Times, Sept. 28, 2016