Festival Spotlight - Killer Queens
Killer Queens: “The Vengeance of Nitocris” & The Pronoun ‘I’
Directed by Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer
“Pretty boys, pretty boys, if I didn’t have them I would have to invent them.” – The Pronoun “I”
In Ancient Egypt a sister avenges the death of her brother, the Pharaoh. In a very Merrie Olde England, Mad (shape-shifting) Queen May renounces her newest pretty lover, an enormously vain poet who cannot begin a poem without the pronoun ‘I.” Just what Provincetown needed: two more killer queens!
Adapted by Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer from Tennessee Williams’ first published story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris” (1928), presented in a double bill with Williams’ bawdy fantasy one-act, The Pronoun ‘I’ (published in 2008). The ensemble is a mix of artists from Cape Town South Africa and Cape Cod locals.
16-year-old Thomas Lanier Williams, studying the pulp market for fiction, would have noticed Weird Tales bought stories set in ancient Egypt. Exploiting public interest in the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb, from 1925 to 1928 Weird published pharaonic fantasies (including Williams’) in forty out of forty-eight issues. Most Weird Egyptian tales had to do with love affairs (gone right or wrong) between a (light-skinned) scholar/tourist/explorer/scientist/or artist and some (usually darker-skinned) beautiful mummified ancient Egyptian princess who, for better or worse, haunts the poor guy.
Williams’ Weird story differs. His princess is no passive woman come to life as a result of some man’s dreams. She’s the active chooser of her own destiny —and other people’s destinies. There is no love story across the millennia. Williams focuses his plot on a sister avenging her brother. Something else to consider: 16-year-old Williams’ appreciative gaze.
The figure of the pharaoh stood inflexible as rock. Superbly tall and muscular, his bare arms and limbs glittering like burnished copper in the light of the brilliant sun, his body erect and tense …
The Pronoun “I”, a play written by Williams fifty years after “Nitocris,” showcases Queen May of England, once Fair Queen May, now Reviled and Mad Queen May, her beautiful body masked beneath the appearance of old age. Like Nitocris she faces an oncoming mob.
Queen May: Once there were secret stairs and passageways through which one could take flight, but the stairs have collapsed and where do the passageways go?
In “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” the Pharaoh trips to his doom on a flight of stairs. Without stairs, Killer Queen May makes a very different accommodation with the hands of the rabble. The world premiere of The Pronoun ‘I’ was staged by and with Julie Atlas Muz and James “Tigger!” Ferguson in 2007 at our second Festival in Provincetown.
