Festival Spotlight - The Men From The Polar Star
Directed by Tom Mitchell
@ The Harbor Hotel, 698 Commercial Street
“Yes, rub-a-dub-dub, six men in the Polar Star tub!”
In an intergalactic bar, the gossipy tale unfolds of a New Orleans widow who discovered time-travelling Captain Christopher D. Cosmos asleep in her bed. Then the crew of the Polar Star arrived. Adapted by Tom Mitchell from unpublished unfinished drafts of sensual science fiction written by Tennessee Williams.
In 1953 New Directions published a nine-page story by Williams, “The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly.” The “Something” is left a mystery in the story.
Williams thought deeply about what that “Something” might be, ideas he worked on in hundreds of pages of drafts for three other short stories and at least two different plays, none of these stories or plays published during his lifetime.
Williams seems to have been configuring a fantasy, more like a personal mythology parallel in its freedom to Weird Tales’ self-proclaimed “wholesome disregard for the self-imposed editorial limitations of other publications.” Variations of “Polar Star,” like Weird, mixed traditional folklore, pulp fiction magic, Gothic literary traditions, and science fiction in which as Weird’s editorial column, The Eyrie, announced in May 1927 “the future of the world is rolled back, the void of Space is peopled with flying ships, which can go backward and forward in Time as well as Space.”
Williams’ “Polar Star” drafts feature white mice carrying secret messages, a bearded “metaphysician” who reveals to Mrs. Holly that her soul comes from another planet, a spaceship that travels through time, witches, gizmos that listen in on an embryo’s potential to save the world, and Gothic ruins in New Orleans ala Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Williams offers his own Apocrypha to Christian dogma, something hinted at in the published story as the smell of a roasting apple, a holiday tradition for celebrating the Advent of Christ. In the drafts for “Polar Star,” Williams’ has the presumption to be writing the creation story of a second Christ, delivered to earth by a spaceship that is powered by an engine of love. Mrs. Holly learns this from her young lovers as a catechism:
“And what is the engine?”
“Love”
“And all of the rest?”
“The rest of it’s nothing that matters.”
“Precisely. It’s inessential!”
Under the title “The Men from the Polar Star,” director Thomas Mitchell has compiled a performance text made up of what he’s found: some of Williams’ most rhapsodic writing.
Several other young men from the Polar Star began to move in … All of them dressed in white with an arctic brilliance. They filled the house with the cold, sharp smell of the sea. Or was it the smell of space? She couldn’t distinguish. Their voices were loud and pealing together like bells. It seemed to the widow (scarcely a widow these days!) that she had taken up residence in a tower that rocked at sea with thousands of bells ringing through it.
