Festival Spotlight - Hotel Plays
Directed by Brenna Geffers
@ Harbor Hotel · 698 Commercial Street
"It was necessary to start the world over again"
The Strange Play
A Sci-Fi Fantasy of texts by Tennessee Williams performed in hotel rooms. Audiences move on separate tracks from room to room through the eerie boardinghouse of Williams’ The Strange Play. The boarders include a time-travelling sailor and a witch who collects tinfoil. The room where The Chalky White Substance performs is host to a young man in a desert after a nuclear war, waiting for his older "protector." In another room, the devotee of an unnamed Saint offers Chronicle of a Demise, an eye-witness account of an ascent to Heaven. Hotel rooms are familiar settings for plays by Tennessee Williams. Staging such plays in hotel rooms, offering portals to the alternate reality of each play, has been a Festival practice (and audience favorite) since 2009.
The Strange Play (probably written in 1939) takes place on the grounds of a ruined boardinghouse in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans. A witch rooming there collects tin foil and feuds with the witch who collects matchboxes. A visitor from the future arrives: a sailor looking for a room and for the daughter of the house, Isabel Holly, with whom he will populate a new planet. Time skips and slides from present to future. As befits good gossip, there's another explanation for Isabel Holly's pregnancy relayed in an unpublished short story "The Men from the Polar Star" (also dramatized as part of this season).
Chronicle of a Demise, based on a short story published in 1948, could easily be a tale told by another Strange Play roomer displaying mundane objects as evidence of a recently departed divine presence.
Some of these images lie below the surface of Williams' realistic plays. The glitter of the tinfoil collection is reflected in the animals of The Glass Menagerie (1945); the sailor departing into outer space is related to the paratrooper named Sky (!) in Williams' full-length Vieux Carré (1977), also set in a New Orleans boardinghouse.
The Chalky White Substance (written in 1980) is set by Williams along a dried-out riverbed. Arid winds blow toxic white flakes, the relics of a departed divinity, as in Chronicle of a Demise. With a poisonous sky and a scarcity of water there can be no escape as in other Williams' fantasies. Staged within a hotel room, a young man waits (like Laura in The Glass Menagerie) for “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for."
While The Chalky White Substance was being written the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down in March 1979, two days after Williams 68th birthday. Mount St. Helens erupted in March 1980. The destruction of the world through its own processes and the destructive power of the atom, predicted in “scientifiction” magazines from the 1920s, seemed possible to Williams and somehow probable. Williams’ sci-fi fantasies slide from jubilation to despair (and back).
