A Visit with The Knighly Quest Creative Team

Questions for The Knightly Quest creative team: director Fred Abrahamse and actor Marcel Meyer.

Q: A Gay Vampire! A Military Industrial Complex! A Spaceship! Where and how did you begin to adapt this?

A: The adaptation process for The Knightly Quest started with morphing Williams’ third-person novella narration into a first-person dramatic monologue for the central character, Gewinner Pearce. The story told is a heady amalgam of Tennessee Williams’ characteristic pathos, exquisite use of language, wicked sense of humor and his wild, expansive, mythic imagination.

The greatest challenge was deciding what to include and what to exclude within the parameters of the eighty-to-ninety-minute running time of a stage play. It was a delicate process of pruning to maximize the dramatic impact on a single hearing. Prose can be read by a reader at a leisurely pace, but an audience of a play hears it in real time – every word uttered is of the utmost importance.

Q: What role does the audience play?

A: Festival audiences will be welcomed aboard the romantically named spaceship, The Ark of Space. Hurtling through the stratosphere to infinity and beyond, co-passenger and notorious gay vampire, Gewinner Pearce will regale the audience with his fantastic life story that culminates in his escape from a nihilistic planet earth on The Ark of Space. Prior to take-off audience members will be encouraged to shape their own tinfoil hats to prevent any interference from external signals and soundwaves during this most private recounting of one of the most remarkable life-stories ever.

Q: How is this different from the other work you've presented at the Festival?

A: Over the past decade, we have been privileged to share a very wide range of Williams’ plays with Festival audiences, from universally acclaimed classics like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Night of The Iguana and Sweet Bird of Youth, to obscure, rarely produced masterpieces like Kingdom of Earth and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. But nothing can quite match the Baroque ripeness and mercurial brilliance of The Knightly Quest. This is also the first time ever Marcel Meyer will be performing a one-person play. This staging of The Knightly Quest is as intimate a one-on-one one can get with Tennessee Williams courtesy of a leading man who has played the gamut of Williams’ tragically doomed heroes under the direction of South Africa’s leading Willaims’ director/designer.

Q: You've done a lot of other work this year. Has any of that gone into Knightly Quest?

A: Yes, it has been quite the year, starting with a brand-new production of Hamlet, followed by a new production of Athol Fugard’s classic My Children! My Africa!, a radical staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, a revival of our musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the South African premiere of Pauline Viardot’s opera Cinderella, a return season of our award-winning play Contested Bodies and finally the world premiere of a ‘spoken drawing’ inspired by the life of vanguard French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.

The Knightly Quest is so rich and diverse a work that it echoes each and every work staged in our season. Like Hamlet, Gewinner is affectionately know to his family as “the Prince” and resides in a castle. Like the Fugard, Williams boldly addresses social ills. Like Oklahoma! Williams interrogates American identity. Williams’ Knightly Quest is as crazy and topsy-turvy as Lewis Caroll’s beloved tale, it has the ultimate happy ending like Cinderella, and it’s equally lush and operatic in its style and structure. It is as provocative and raunchy as Contested Bodies and is as poetic a one-person play as the Louis Bourgois piece. So, it is an entire season rolled into one unforgettable new adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ tallest tale.