All about our 15th season: Tennessee Williams & Censorship

September 24-27, 2020

Under the motto “If we can, we will,” the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival announces its 15th Season: Tennessee Williams & Censorship.

Rising to the challenge of presenting live theater this year, the companies invited to perform in Provincetown have agreed to stay home and perform in place.  These productions will be shown live and outdoors around the country during the four days of the festival, each working with state and local guidelines to shape the possibilities of holding live events safely and responsibly September 24 through 27, 2020.

The 2020 Festival locations are Seattle, Washington; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York, New York; Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Marfa, Texas; and some special outdoor performances, if possible, in Provincetown, Massachusetts itself. Specific performance dates, times, and venues in the various locations will be announced later on the Festival’s website.

Provincetown specifics may be the last announced. The town’s balanced situation as a tourist destination with a high-risk year-round population requires local officials to cautiously determine the best course for public gatherings.

“If we can, we will” is the Festival’s motto for 2020, a season of plays related to censorship written by Williams and other writers. The theme is prompted by the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival in Provincetown, or rather it’s departure five weeks later, “leaving  Cape Cod’s curling sandspit to spiral into the Devil’s playground,” as Festival Curator David Kaplan says, “and begin the 400-year-old tradition of  independent thinking, what the Puritans called ‘flaunting,’ that continues today.”

The Festival’s censorship theme has been in the works for five years, following the invitation by Lisa Giuffre at Provincetown 400 to be part of the town’s commemoration of the Mayflower’s arrival in November of 1620. “In thinking it over, the Mayflower leaving was what defined P’town, and the attempts to find continuity with the puritans was a fantasy. Using the same facts it is possible, and desirable, to create another fantasy that predicts not the Constitution, but the writing of Tennessee Williams and America’s other wayward writers, including the provocations of Mae West, Penny Arcade, and any other future ‘flaunting’ we might imagine.”

Get details on all the shows in our 15th season here.