Q&A with Tom Mitchell

Q & A with Tom Mitchell, director of The Men from the Polar Star

Q: How long have you been working on this project?
Tom: I’ve been working on The Men from the Polar Star for four or five years. I was working on a performed adaptation of another story, “Blue Roses and the Polar Star,” and found a reference to a mysterious Polar Star-ship in the files of the Tennessee Williams archives at the Ransom Center in Texas. I was intrigued because it was wacky and space-y–Williams always surprises me. During the pandemic months I began to work with the various pieces of text – some of which were only fragmentary – and tried to find a way to pull them together. It was an excellent way to fill the long hours of quarantine.

Q: What surprised you as you read the text?

Tom: When I first read The Men from the Polar Star, my mouth was open marveling at the bawdy, raucous dilemmas that confound the Widow Holly. The story also goes into a deeper, sensual and spiritual territory. I recently edited a collection of Williams’ short stories, Caterpillar Dogs. Many of them deal with death. I realized, while writing the preface, that for Williams, life is either gothic horror or absurd comedy – and often a blending of both. Men from the Polar Star is a gothic, absurdist, metaphysical vaudeville show.

Q: What did the rehearsal process reveal that you hadn't suspected?

The story is playful and bizarre. Adapting it for performance, we needed to be able to piece together several dramatized and narrative story versions, keeping them clear and the story comprehensible. In rehearsal we developed a Rod Serling-type narrator (from The Twilight Zone.) Rod allows us to try out these different versions of the story and effectively jump back and forth in time, or consider how time might operate in parallel dimensions. Like Rod Serling, our narrator always has an ironic point of view – understanding the story even while he is discovering it.

One of the practical choices we made was to double-up on some of the roles. Our small cast of 6 actors needed to cover 18 roles. In doing so we found that there is possibly an intentional ambiguity about some of the characters: is the octogenarian recluse Regis de Winter the same person as Captain Christopher D. Cosmos? Is the Cabin Boy also the poet Arthur Rimbaud? Perhaps so! The doubling also meant some gender-switching that brought out ideas regarding the nature of characters. I also chose to cast the adaptation with mature actors who related to the “impossibilities” with which TW fills the story. Old men can appear young and handsome. The “widow” Holly becomes pregnant with a miracle child. All the accumulated stuff of a lifetime can almost instantly be carted away. Time and space are flexible. Birth and Death exist side by side.

Q: How does this text relate to the rest of Williams' writing?

Tom: The Widow Holly at the heart of the story is a rooming-house keeper in New Orleans. She is a reflection of the denizens of the French Quarter that we know from Streetcar, Vieux Carré, and other plays by Williams. Mrs. Holly, however, is not wounded like many of the other characters, but rather “bewildered” as she tries to make sense of her life. With the arrival of the men from The Polar Star the tale opens up and takes on a global, metaphysical perspective. I think Williams was affected by the growing horrors of World War II and tried to find his own way to seek peace.