Festival Spotlight - The Knightly Quest
“Well? Am I too ugly?”
The Knightly Quest
Performed by Marcel Meyer
Directed by Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer
A gay vampire escapes from an American police state in a getaway spaceship. A very unusual story by Tennessee Williams (or by anyone else) adapted for the stage by Cape Town South Africa’s Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer. Performed by Marcel Meyer.
The Knightly Quest begins ominously. An epicene man named Gewinner Pearce returns to the small American city he was raised in, also called Gewinner. At the airport he’s picked up by Violet, his brother’s wife, who calls on her social status to get past the airport guards wearing steel helmets and radiation-proof uniforms.
In Gewinner’s absence the town has been taken over by The Project, an industrial plant guarded by barbed wire and dogs. Rumor has it The Project is developing a weapon capable of destroying the Earth.
Back in town, Gewinner returns to the turret of the Gothic castle where he lived as a child. He resumes his habit of prowling after midnight, wearing… a Persian coin, very ancient, that hung on a fine silver chain. He enjoyed the cold feeling of it as it swung pendulumlike across his ribs and bare nipples. It was carrying a secret.
Aided by carrier pigeons, Violet and Gladys (the newest waitress at Big Boy’s Burger Joint), enlist Gewinner to help thwart The Project’s plans for world domination.
The source material is a fifty-page novella (over 26,000 words) begun by Williams in 1949 but mainly written in 1965, published in 1966. The recognizable genres of the text morph from homecoming story to vampire tale, then to thriller. In its last page and a half “The Knightly Quest” lifts without warning from spy caper to science fiction.
In a letter to his publisher, James Laughlin, dated April 16, 1963, a month after The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore closed after a disappointingly short run on Broadway, Williams wrote “I have gone back to prose and am completing a novella I started ten years ago. There are some passages in it that I think equal the best of my prose writing.”
Williams’ novella has been relatively ignored by critics. A conspicuous exception: Spanish professor Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde.
By making a homosexual vampire (the quintessential expression of the Jungian shadow and the polymorphous perverse) the morally superior hero of a world in its death throes and the survivor in a future utopia, Williams is granting a privileged position to the demonized Other as the savior of the American dream of limitless individual freedom.
Atlantis (Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies), December 2012:
The “knight” of the title’s quest is Don Quixote, whose essential romanticism Williams claims as essentially American:
Then, of course, the businessmen took over and Don Quixote was an exile at home: at least he became one when the frontiers had been exhausted. But exile does not extinguish his lambent spirit.
