Written and Performed by Jacob Storms

@ Grotta Bar

Running time: 1 hour

I have made a religion of endurance.

-Tennessee Rising

The play explores the formative period from 1939 – 1945 during which an unknown writer named Tom blooms into the acclaimed playwright known as Tennessee, wherein his most iconic character emerges: himself. The audience becomes friend and confidant to young Williams as he experiences the unexpected highs and devastating lows of his early career.

This solo play comes to Provincetown after critically acclaimed engagements Off-Broadway and at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, where the play was nominated for an Off-West End (Offie) Award and dubbed an official shortlisted event for the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence.

Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams is written and performed by Jacob Storms and originally directed for the stage by Alan Cumming.

THE SCOTSMAN (Scotland's National Newspaper)
A Storming Insight into US Literary Great
by Joyce McMillan☆☆☆☆(Four Stars)

In this age of cultural upheaval and reassessment, the interest in the lives of famous writers and how they treated their partners, families, lovers - often seems to eclipse any real engagement with their work. Just occasionally, though, a biographical show emerges with the confidence and wit to treat the work as what it invariably was, an integral and vitally demanding part of the life; and the US writer and actor Jacob Storms’ Tennessee Rising, originally directed in America by Alan Cumming, is one of those shows: a deep, perfectly made narrative of Williams’s escape from his difficult southern childhood into the world of 1930’s literary America, and into eventual fame and fortune. The ties that bound Williams to that southern past are fully acknowledged, of course; the Williams of Storms’ play fully recognizes his own betrayal and abandonment of his vulnerable sister Rose, and the way in which he uses her pain in creating his own theatrical success. In Tennessee Rising, though - and in Storms’ brilliantly charismatic performance - we also meet the agents, producers, lovers and friends who played a key role in propelling Williams to fame. It seems, too, that we truly meet the writer himself: proud, beautiful, strong in his resistance to the rising tide of 1930’s fascism, and steely in his determination to write and to keep writing, at all costs.