The Municipal Abattoir
by Tennessee Williams
*As of 9/14/2021 please note that the Sunday, 4pm performance has been cancelled.
This performance will be taking place outside at the Grace Hall Parking lot. The parking lot has two entrances, one is off of Bradford Street and Prince Street, by the Crowne Pointe Inn. The second entrance is off of Shank Painter Rd and Captain Bertie's Way by TD Bank.
Vehicles will be charged $2.50/hour to park in the lot for the performance, which is scheduled to run less than an hour long. This fee helps support the Town of Provincetown and makes Festival performances possible.
This performance can be viewed from your vehicle, with the sound for this performance being fed to car speakers via FM transmitter. Vehicles will be assigned a space and parked according to height to provide the best view of the performance. If you choose to exit the vehicle, please place your chairs in the front of your vehicle and do not exit your designated space.
Inclement Weather:
Rain performance venue will be inside Town Hall. An e-mail will be sent to all ticket holders prior to the performance incase of rain.
This performance takes place outside.
Estimated Run Time: 1 hour
Staged and directed by David Kaplan
“Condemned for interfering.”
-Tennessee Williams’ The Municipal Abattoir
“Your hearts belong to the State!”
-Tennessee Williams’ Acts of Love
“For the good of the State!”
-Tennessee Williams’ poem “The Death Embrace”
An abattoir is a slaughterhouse. Like the more recognizable word abate, the French abattoir derives from a Latin root: bat, the English beat, as in to beat down.
Williams connected this to factory work, where mindless repetition beat down the soul. His Municipal Abattoir is a State-run slaughterhouse, where good citizens, when summoned, go willingly to be killed.
Williams' play positions a government clerk en route to the abattoir, summoned there for asking a question: Did a squirrel (or was it a chipmunk?) running on a treadmill in a shop window, ever get a break? Perhaps the clerk has been summoned to the abattoir because he sent an appeal to the government when his daughter was drafted into the Municipal Whorehouse.
Appeals and questions are traitorous and ultimately stifled in the world of William’ play, as they were around the world when the idea of a Municipal Abattoir first occurred to Williams in the 1930s. Germany, Russia, Japan, and America required the discipline of citizens suppressing themselves for the greater good as they prepared for the inevitable second World War. After the narrator of Williams’ Glass Menagerie scribbles a poem on a shoebox lid he will be fired; he has interrupted the shoe factory’s efficiency.
The ruthless efficiency of a State-run crematorium is the subject of Williams’ 1940 poem “The Death Embrace” spun off from Acts of Love, his 1930s play with chorus and Spanish dancers in which guards say to factory-workers “Your hearts are doing the goose-step!”
Williams continued working on The Municipal Abattoir through the 1960s, when self-denunciations and public executions fueled the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. Viva! shouts the abattoir-bound municipal clerk as the procession of a military dictator passes by. Viva la muerte! shouts a woman in black in Acts of Love. "Assassination is the extreme form of censorship," George Bernard Shaw tried to say as part of his 1909 Statement of Evidence to the Joint-Committee on Stage Plays: Censorship and Theatre Licensing. Shaw was not allowed to submit his statement.