Tennessee Williams Festival Announces Lineup

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival has announced its 16th season under the banner “Tennessee Williams and Censorship.”

Running Thursday, September 23rd through Sunday, September 26th, the festival will celebrate “America’s greatest playwright” at various locations around Provincetown: four original plays from the master, as well as four texts from other writers that provide commentary on censorship. There are also two theatrical “special events,” as well as workshops and seminars to be announced soon.

The four works by Williams are Battle of Angels, a play from 1940 that courted controversy during its run in Boston, deemed at the time “lascivious and immoral!” by the Boston police commissioner; Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?, from an abandoned play set in Hollywood about an affair between a Black screenwriter and the white leading lady of his film; The Municipal Abattoir, directed by festival curator David Kaplan as a “Hitchcock-inspired thriller;” and, finally, The Demolition Downtown, the timely story of a family shuttered in their home as explosions rip through their capital.

Works from other writers include The Witch, a Thomas Middleton drama written in 1616; Penny Arcade’s Longing Lasts Longer, “a rock ’n’ roll manifesto confronting cultural amnesia as a form of censorship”; Mae West’s salacious first play, Sex, the hottest thing on Broadway in 1926; and, lastly, The Mahagonny Songspiel, written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. For more information and to purchase tickets and passes, visit twptown.org.