Announcing our Fall Season!
TUTTI FRUTTI TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
An All-Williams Festival!
SEPTEMBER 22 – 25, 2022
Featuring six Tennessee Williams plays, highlighting his work from his entire career from the 1930s through the 1980s. With artists from South Africa, New Orleans, London, New York, Boston and more.
April 1, 2022 — (Provincetown, MA) The 17th Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival is pleased to announce its September program titled Tutti Frutti Tennessee Williams. This year we will feature six plays by Tennessee Williams, the first time the Festival will feature an All-Williams lineup since our first year in 2006.
This year’s program features some of Williams’ classics along with lesser-known works:
A Streetcar Named Desire: The 1940’s classic
One Arm: A new adaptation from South Africa of the Williams short story
Vieux Carré: A celebration of memory begun in 1939 and completed in 1977
The Magic Tower: A 1930’s dream of a happy marriage
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: The 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner
This is the Peaceable Kingdom, or Good Luck God: A caricature of enlightenment from 1981
The 2022 Festival will be produced and performed by artists from South Africa, New Orleans, London, New York, Boston and more. The Festival’s roster of live performances will be complimented during Festival week by parties and educational programming to celebrate the enduring inspiration of America’s great playwright.
“The season is called Tutti Frutti Tennessee Williams, meaning all flavors of Williams – tutti!,” said Festival Curator, David Kaplan. “From the 1930s to the 1980s, every decade that Williams wrote, from his crowd-pleasing Broadway hits to his radical writing – early and late – that continues to challenge audiences to savor, as he put it “the strange, the crazed, the queer.”
The Festival will be held September 22-25, 2022 in several locations in Provincetown. 2022 Festival Passes are now available for sale online at twptown.org and by phone at 866.789.TENN. The Carte Blanche Pass provides an all-access VIP experience, while the Flex Pass affords a more flexible menu across the full range of shows. The popular Festival Day Pass allows audience members to hop on a ferry from Boston in the morning, spend the day at the Festival, and return home the same night. Tickets for individual shows will be available later this spring.
The full details of the 2022 shows will be announced in the coming weeks, but the Festival is pleased to share a sneak peek at several of this year’s productions.
A Streetcar Named Desire: Arguably Williams’ greatest and most celebrated play, this 1947 classic traces the descent of Blanche DuBois, whose illusions of refinement have fallen on hard times. The last of a long line of pleasure-loving Mississippi aristocrats, Blanche ends up destitute in New Orleans, living with her sister, Stella, and her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. In celebration of the play’s 75th anniversary, South Africa’s Abrahamse and Meyer Productions bring a radical, revisionist interpretation to this iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama in a searing production that turns up the heat in this already scorching play.
One Arm: A short story by Williams, titled “One Arm” written in 1942 and initially published in an expensive limited edition, tells of an aspiring boxer who loses his arm in a car accident and turns to prostitution for a living. Abrahamse and Meyer have adapted that short story for the stage as a tour-de-force for two actors focusing on the relationship between the convicted hustler and a young Lutheran minister who visits him on death row. Explicit and daring, One Arm gives a graphic account of the homosexual underworld during 1940s while at the same time, being one of Williams’ most poignant portraits of a mutilated body and soul.
Abrahamse and Meyer first came to Provincetown in 2012 with their award-winning production of Williams’ Kingdom of Earth. In the ten years since, the Festival has been privileged to present Abrahamse and Meyer’s productions of Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (2013, 2015), Sweet Bird of Youth (2017), The Night of the Iguana (2019), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2017), Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms (2016) and Yukio Mishima’s The Lady Aoi (2014, 2019).
Vieux Carré: In 1939, Tennessee Williams landed in the French Quarter of New Orleans (the Vieux Carré of the title) where he was immediately inspired to capture the wonders of the city in poetry, short stories, and one-act plays. By 1977, Williams wove his memories of the Big Easy into a raucous haunting full-length play in which a young writer comes to terms with sexual identity, and a doomed young straight couple come to terms with their passion and mortality. The Festival's production, set in a ‘70s disco, is performed by a New Orleans-based ensemble, directed by Dennis Monn, whose staging of Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel wowed the 2021 Festival.
Plus Lagniappes! — A lagniappe is a New Orleans tradition of hospitality, offered as an extra treat to customers or guests. Along with its season of six plays by Williams, the festival offers two lagniappes in 2022.
Amy Jo Jackson’s Brass Menagerie, a campy collection of Broadway show-stoppers as if sung by the heroines of Tennessee Williams’ plays.
Nightingale, a series of haunting improvisations played on the piano by New Orleans cult figure artiste macabre Vinsantos DeFonte to accompany his own twisted tales about the valiant Mr. Nightingale from Vieux Carré.
The programming of the Tennessee Williams Institute, including scholars, and graduate level seminars, will be announced in the coming weeks.
For more information, visit twptown.org. You can also follow the Festival on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.