The 19th Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival is pleased to announce the scholars of the 2024 Tennessee Williams Institute (TWI).
Bess Rowen will be joined by Greg Carr, Margit Longbrake, Tom Mitchell and Festival Dramaturg Thomas Keith. The sessions will be moderated by Ben Gillespie.
2024 TWI scholars’ seminars will provide context to the 2024 Festival performances of plays and short stories written by Tennessee Williams —and new work inspired by Williams— in which memory is a life-affirming, death-defying, creative act.
The cost to attend the Institute, including tickets and symposium, is $550 with a 10% reduction on tuition cost if enrolled by August 15.
The TWI graduate seminar begins Wednesday, September 25, the day before the Festival, with an overview of the programming from David Kaplan, festival curator, along with festival artists. Over five days, TWI participants attend lectures and scholarly presentations which provide context to the productions they will see that day. Discussions led by a moderator follow performances.
The last discussion, which is an overview of the season, concludes Sunday afternoon in time to take the ferry or plane to Boston. Those participants staying later or staying overnight on Sunday are welcome to attend the closing party on Sunday nights.
Seminar participants receive tickets to eight festival productions. The seminar attends performances as a group so that the discussion is about the same performance. Seminar participants are invited to the opening and closing parties. Seminar students are expected to prepare by reading the performance texts and related material assigned by Festival scholars and provided by the TWI education coordinator. The seminar is offered for credit through Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Independent scholars are enthusiastically invited to attend.
For more information and to enroll:
TWI Symposium Scholars
Our 2024 Tennessee Williams Institute scholars will provide context on the playwright in performance at the Festival and elsewhere.
Bess Rowen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in the Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies programs at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment was published by University of Michigan in 2021. Her recent work can be found in Theatre Survey, The Eugene O'Neill Review, Milestone in Staging Genders and Sexualities, and Studies in Musical Theatre. She is also the co-planner of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre.
Greg S. Carr is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis, MO. His essays have appeared in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre, Theatre Symposium Volume 21: Ritual, Religion and Theatre, and Theatre Symposium 26. At the 2022 Institute he hosted a conversation about Tennessee Williams & Race, providing context for the performances of Williams' play The Peaceable Kingdom and “peripheral” characters of A Streetcar Named Desire. At the 2023 Institute he spoke about Afro-Futurism, this year Green Eyes.
Thomas Keith has edited over twenty Williams titles since 2002, most recently as Consulting Editor for New Directions Publishing, and is responsible for bringing out much of Williams’ late work, including four volumes of previously unpublished or uncollected one-acts. He also is the scholarly editor of A House Not Meant to Stand, The Magic Tower & Other One-Act Plays, and Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws, an anthology of plays by Williams that includes two previously unpublished texts performed at the 2023 Festival: The Strange Play and A Recluse and his Guest. Keith is the co-editor of The Luck of Friendship: Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin, currently teaches at Pace University in New York City, and has served as the Festival’s dramaturg since its first year.
Margit Longbrake, senior editor at The Historic New Orleans Collection, acquires and edits books and museum publications and since 2016 has served as managing editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, where she has overseen the editing and first-time publication of a number of primary Williams texts unearthed from the archives.
Tom Mitchell is emeritus professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois and scholar-in-residence for the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. He has directed all of Tennessee Williams’s early full-length plays including 21st century premieres of the surreal Stairs to the Roof. Mitchell has edited the previously unpublished stories “The Lost Girl” and “Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?” for the Tennessee Williams Annual Review. The latter was adapted for performance at the 2021 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. Most recently, he edited The Caterpillar Dogs: Early Stories by Tennessee Williams, published by New Directions in April 2023, and anticipates publication of a larger, critical collection of stories from the University of Iowa Press in 2024. For the 2023 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival he has adapted materials from the Williams Collections at the University of Texas to stage Williams’ spaceship fantasy “The Men from the Polar Star.”
Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging, both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre.
For more information and to enroll
Archives
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