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Playwright Tennessee Williams and his work is the subject of a four-day festival in Provincetown that begins Thursday.
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Lau Shau-ching (right) as Alma and Yau Ting-fai as the Traveling Salesman in the Hong Kong Repertory Theater’s production of “Eccentricities of a Nightingale.” |
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China, Atlanta and New Orleans meet in Tennessee
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
When the first annual Tennessee Williams Festival begins on Thursday it’s safe to say that it’s going to have national and international impact. Not only is there an eagerly awaited world premiere of a Tennessee Williams play but festival attendees can see Atlanta’s Capitol City Opera perform excerpts from Andre Previn’s opera based on “A Streetcar Named Desire” and watch the Hong Kong Repertory Theater deliver — in Cantonese — scenes from “Eccentricities of a Nightingale.”
If that’s not enough, several colleges are sending troupes to perform Williams plays and the Provincetown High School will render “The Glass Menagerie.” Ryan Landry will spin that play his way with “The Plexiglas Menagerie,” and playwrights and actors from the New Provincetown Players will turn in performances of 14 original short plays inspired by Williams in a single afternoon. Lowell Smith, former principal dancer for the Dance Theater of Harlem, has created a version of “Streetcar” that is a mixture of traditional theater and dance. David Landon will offer a look at Williams’ poetry set to live music in “The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer.”
There will be daily movies based on Williams work hosted by Jeremy Lawrence, an actor who “channels” Williams in his show “Talking Tennessee.” The Times Picayune in New Orleans, the site of a large annual Williams’ festival, describes Lawrence as “the festival’s living embodiment of the playwright, at ease, lascivious and very funny, but still showing us the writer he couldn’t help but be all his life.”
Rounding out the four-day festival are two free events.
Festival curator David Kaplan who is releasing a book on Williams later this fall, has gone the distance in putting together an eclectic and compelling festival program. Jerome Scally is the festival’s executive director and he has worked on not only the programming but local venues to host the events.
It was Kaplan who got permission to premiere a new Williams play, “The Parade or Approaching the End of a Summer.” “Parade” was previously profiled in-depth in the Banner but for those who missed that, the play was written and set in Provincetown in 1940. It’s a story of a young man waiting for love and for life to catch up to his dreams. It closely parallels Williams’ life at that time including his first major love affair with another man and it’s painful end. Kaplan has chosen the young actors of the Shakespeare on the Cape troupe, who have performed in town for the past two summers, to perform the play. He says their energy and freshness will merge perfectly with the play penned by a young Williams and fine-tuned by him more than 20 years later.
Many writers have sought the defining moments in life, the moments that support the belief that at least one thing was true or mattered. For many people, and especially Williams, that moment centers on love.
Many of his works rally around surrender whether it is surrender to the desire that drives one to take what one wants or surrendering to that which cannot be physically or mentally resisted.
In “Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” which will have six love scenes presented by the Hong Kong Repertory Theater and directed by Kaplan, Williams looked hard at his defining moments.
Kaplan explains the genesis of the play.
It began in 1945 when Williams wrote a one-act play about a spinster living on the Mississippi Delta who was in love with the local doctor who was not in love with her. Originally titled “Chart of Anatomy,” the play was expanded in 1947 into what became “Summer and Smoke,” in which the spinster’s love remains unrequited. Williams then returned to “Anatomy,” took out the characters and scenes he had added and took a different tack. This time, a two-act play about Miss Alma and Dr. John evolved in which she not only declares her love but asks him to give her one night of his passion. I don’t love you, he tells her, and she replies, “Give me the hour, I’ll make it last a lifetime.”
Later in the play she tells a traveling salesman she will soon sleep with, “There are living organisms, only visible through a microscope, that live and die and are succeeded by several generations in an hour, or less than an hour even.” It was as if she were saying, I have had my hour of life already.
Kaplan says the scenes will be delivered in Cantonese but a synopsis will be provided, and he believes the universality of the characters created by Williams will transcend language. Five members of the HKRT are coming to perform at the festival.
When he first directed the play in Hong Kong three years ago, the company asked for two casts to alternately perform. In one of the casts, the role of Alma is played by a man who makes no pretense of being a woman.
“Alma means soul in Spanish,” Kaplan says. “The man in the double casting is playing her soul not imitating a woman or wearing a dress.” That actor, Lau Shau-ching will perform in Provincetown.
“Streetcar” gets a double dose of creativity in two productions. The Capitol City Opera Company based in Atlanta will perform Andre Previn’s opera based on “Streetcar.” Five members of that troupe will attend and perform. They are Kimberly Rosquist as Blanche, Barton Gilleland as Stanley, Sherri Seiden as Stella and Charlie Bradshaw as Mitch. They will be joined by local actor Adam Berry in the role of the Young Collector.
Capitol City is made up of 60 singers and 40 instrumentalists and performs for 50,000 people a year in its various programs. The company just performed the “Streetcar” opera two weeks ago in Atlanta to critical acclaim.
In the second production, dance instructor Lowell Smith has created an entirely new production of “Streetcar” which uses the music from the film version and the dialogue from the play to make a hybrid that is part theater and part dance. Blanche will be played and danced by Lynn Sterling who was in “Cats.” He pairs her with two ballet dancers and two other Broadway dancers.
Smith, who teaches at the Dance Theater of Harlem and choreographed a ballet for them this summer, says that dance should offer more than calisthenics. His mentor, Arthur Mitchell who founded the Dance Theater of Harlem, drummed into him that dance was more than the movements, it was also conveying the full range of emotional content. It comes down to the magic of the individual character and making that magic come alive.
Smith, like Williams, is from the south and he likens successful dance with writing done the way Williams did it.
”In the South, we don’t say, ‘Do you understand what I mean?’ We say, ‘Do you see what I mean?’ We don’t talk in just words, we talk in pictures.”
He aims to show the Provincetown audience “Streetcar” in a new way.
The 14 NPP plays are each very short and were written by Albert Viola, William Mann, Guy Wolf, George Sauer, Eric Dente, Andy Reynolds, Tom Gladwell, Jan Donlevy, Gregory Moss, Daniel Cleary, Jerry Thompson, Candace Perry, Richard Ballon and Joshua Hill. Many of the playwrights also direct and some act in the plays. A wide assortment of Outer Cape actors and directors round out that ambitious afternoon of theater.
The first of the free offerings is a documentary, “Tennessee Williams’ South” by Harry Rasky that was shown on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Kaplan says it is a nice introduction to Williams. It was made in 1973 and runs approximately 80 minutes. Included in the documentary are scenes from Williams’ short plays with Burl Ives, Colleen Dewhurst and Jessica Tandy with voiceovers by Williams himself. As the playwright explains, the South is a place, but it’s a place in his mind. The documentary runs continuously from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily during the festival.
The second free event is a look at a work in progress, a play and song by Wendy Kesselman performed in an environment designed and built by artist Jim Peters.
“I wanted to show that the living theater and arts community in Provincetown was not provincial and not amateur,” Kaplan says. He asked Kesselman (author of many plays and movie work such as “Sister My Sister,” based on Jean Genet’s play “The Maids”), who immediately said yes, and they picked Peters who is known for his edgy and erotically charged canvases.
“Wendy and Jim have eloped creatively and they are giving us a look at some of what they have done so far,” Kaplan says.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Sep 28th, 2006