PROVINCETOWN — The Tennessee Williams Theater Festival blasts off next weekend, and this year, things are going to be a little extraterrestrial. Put your tray tables up and your expectations aside as the festival rockets into the author’s relatively obscure science fiction and fantasy catalog.
That might scandalize folks who think of Williams as a writer of Southern gothic fare like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Suddenly Last Summer. But Williams was prolific, eager to explore new styles and genres. For every Baby Doll he wrote, there’s also a Boom! And from Sept. 21 to 24, Provincetown will enjoy a rare peek at Williams’s otherworldly oeuvre.
The concept for the 2023 festival has been percolating for a while. “About four years ago,” says curator David Kaplan, “I came across a 1958 New York Times article by Williams where he wrote that his first published story [written when he was 16] was the key to his work. He wasn’t kidding.”
The piece is a short story called “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” which will be featured in a festival production called Killer Queens, directed by Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer. Published in Weird Tales magazine in 1928, “Nitocris” retells the Egyptian legend of a queen who exacts revenge upon the gods for the murder of her brother. In Killer Queens, “Nitocris” is paired with “The Pronoun ‘I,’ ” a much later, experimental work set in ancient England. It centers on Queen May, who is deposed from her throne in a moment of passion. Together, the pieces bookend Williams’s career, allowing audiences to compare the polar ends of his professional life.
These and other works show the value of fantasy as a tool for exploring real-world topics — which was hugely important to Williams.
“Writing science fiction and fantasy freed Williams to write about, among other things, politics, gay identity, and race, in ways that he could not if he was tied to the expectations of kitchen sink realism,” notes Kaplan. His literary counterparts like Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.R.R. Tolkien would wholeheartedly agree.
So, although the pieces in this year’s festival may not be among Williams’s best-known, they constitute an important snapshot of the author and his world. Check out the festival’s production of A Weird Anthology, featuring Philadelphia’s Die-Cast ensemble and directed by Brenna Geffers. As its jumping-off point, the work uses the aforementioned Weird Tales magazine, which debuted in 1923 and was a significant influence on young Williams. It published tales of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, and other now-legendary authors, inspiring Williams to follow suit. A Weird Anthology brings some of those works to life, as well as related pieces like the poem “Taking Tennessee to the Coast” by Williams biographer Paul Ibell. The result is a tour of Williams’s mind over the course of decades.
Sci-Fi Hotel Plays is another anthology-style production worth checking out. Williams fans will recognize the title as a riff on the “hotel plays”: short, realistic pieces that were typically set in hotel rooms, often performed at theater festivals in actual hotels. The difference is that in this performance (also featuring Die-Cast and directed by Geffers), the works on view are decidedly out there. And as Kaplan cheekily notes, they’re staged at the Harbor Hotel, “which is so far from the center of the town that going there is like voyaging to outer space.”
Among the many other pieces on view this year, Kaplan singles out Stairs to the Roof. Completed in 1941, this full-length play is infused with a heady mix of magic, interplanetary colonization, and, of course, love. But as fantastical as that may sound, the play is really a meditation on our own world just before World War II, addressing themes of freedom and humanity. And to make the performance doubly complex, the show is directed by Marios Mettis and performed by his ensemble from Cyprus.
“It’s always interesting to see someone who isn’t American take on plays about American identity,” says Kaplan.
In short, the 2023 Williams Festival is exciting not just because of the breadth of work on view, and not just because much of this work is rarely seen, but also because sci-fi and fantasy are as relevant to us as they were to Williams.
“We are living in a time of sliding reality,” says Kaplan. “For Williams, in his time, a sliding reality was set off by the repercussions of the atom bomb — and before that by the repercussions of World War I’s subversion of science, which seemed to improve life but was revealed in the war (with aerial bombings and poison gas) to make mass murder more efficient.” Though some of this year’s work is nearly a century old, it nevertheless offers new perspectives for viewing and making sense of today’s planet Earth.
The 2023 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival runs from September 21 to 24. For a list of performances and to purchase tickets, see TWPtown.org.
