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Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival

    TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FESTIVAL

    Variations on the Theme of Memory

    At this year’s theater festival, what is remembered about the past is not always what really happened

    By

    Actor and playwright Jacob Storms says that an extraordinary high-school experience of theater gave him the courage to write a one-man play in which he cast himself as an up-and-coming Tennessee Williams. That play, Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams, will be one of the six main productions at the 2024 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, which takes place this year from Thursday, Sept. 26 to Sunday, Sept. 29.

    Jacob Storms wrote and stars in the solo show Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams at this weekend’s Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. (Photo by Ellen McDermott)

    Storms’s play covers the six years in Williams’s life from when he first began living on his own at age 28 in 1939 to his first theatrical success in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie. It includes details about Williams’s visits to Provincetown in the 1940s, when he stayed at Captain Jack’s Wharf in the West End.

    “Provincetown is a really important aspect of my play,” says Storms, who first performed at the festival in 2019 as a cabaret singer. “Those scenes are favorites for me and audiences.”

    The play won the top award at the United Solo Festival in New York in 2017 and was reshaped into its current version with help from actor Alan Cumming, who directed a production after the two connected over their shared love of Williams’s work. Following off-Broadway runs after Covid lockdowns, Storms presented Tennessee Rising at Williams festivals in New Orleans and St. Louis and at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

    Storms had known almost nothing about Williams until shortly before he started writing the script. But he did know his way around a one-man show. He first became involved in theater as a middle- and high-school student in Portland, Ore. When he was 16, a director gave him a script for Doug Wright’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife and offered to work with him for two years so he could perform the one-actor play as a senior in 2009.

    In Wright’s play, which is based on the true story of a transgender woman who survived both Nazi and Communist regimes in East Berlin, Storms played 35 characters. He became the youngest performer in the world to take on the demanding show.

    Kishia Nixon and Steven Wright will perform as newlyweds in the Die-Cast Ensemble’s production of the erotic thriller Green Eyes. (Photo courtesy Die-Cast Ensemble)

    After pursuing an acting career in New York City, Storms was invited back to speak at his high school. During his visit, he attended a middle-school fundraiser that screened the 1958 film version of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Intrigued, Storms visited Powell’s Books in Portland to learn more about Williams. A table at the front of the store happened to display the playwright’s 1975 memoir, which had been reissued with an early photo of Williams on the cover.

    “I didn’t even know what he looked like,” says Storms. “But I said to myself, ‘God, we could be brothers or something.’ So, I bought the memoir, read it over a couple of days, and was inspired to create this piece about him. It kind of happened out of nowhere.”

    It took Storms years of research, writing, self-doubt, and false starts — plus encouragement from actor colleague Taylor Negron and writer and entertainer Charles Busch — to eventually finish the play. Storms realized from his experience performing I Am My Own Wife that he could play Williams himself.

    While the Provincetown festival has rarely featured Williams impersonations, curator and co-founder David Kaplan decided Storms’s play should be an exception after seeing Tennessee Rising live and on video. Kaplan says he appreciates the show’s point of view and focus on Williams as a young man.

    The play also fits well with this year’s festival theme, “Memory Plays.” Kaplan emphasizes the theme is not about nostalgia but about recognizing that what we remember about the past is not usually what really happened. Each play features a character telling a story who’s also a character in the story. Storms’s version of Williams both experiences events and reflects on them over the course of the play as he relates to the audience as a “kind stranger,” or imaginary friend, whom he talks to directly.

    The concept extends to other plays in the festival. In The Glass Menagerie, for example, “Williams is leaving things out, polishing things, constructing a reality,” Kaplan says. “You can make what you’re writing work out however you want.”

    Vanessa Rose and Luke Bosco star in The Glass Menagerie. (Photo courtesy Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival)

    The Glass Menagerie is paired with Williams’s 1982 play Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Dane Eissler will direct both plays on the same set. The plays will also feature the same actors, all of whom have Cape connections: Wellfleet’s John Dennis Anderson and Vanessa Rose, New York-based Sarah MacDonell, who lives part-time in Provincetown; Luke Bosco, originally from Mashpee; and Paul E. Haley from Provincetown.

    Kaplan says that he and Eissler each came up separately with the idea of pairing the plays, then worked together on their execution. Actors play parallel characters. Anderson, for example, plays Tom in The Glass Menagerie and August in Something Cloudy. Both characters are stand-ins for the playwright. Even the sets for each play were conceived together: Eissler devised how the apartment in The Glass Menagerie could be transformed into Provincetown dunes for Something Cloudy by covering furniture with cloths.

    “Part of what the festival is about is to demonstrate the continuity between Williams’s early work and late work,” says Kaplan. “You don’t need to know anything going in, but if you saw both plays, you’d come out saying, ‘Oh, it’s a variation on the same idea.’ ”

    Playing With the Past

    The event: The 19th annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
    The time: Thursday-Sunday, Sept. 26-29
    The place: Provincetown Town Hall, Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, and other venues around town
    The cost: $40-$50 for individual tickets, multiple pass options available; see twptown.org for complete schedule

    TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FEST

    A Mad Pilgrimage of the Weird

    Philadelphia’s Die-Cast Ensemble takes on a less-known Williams legacy

    By

    The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival is no stranger to the strange, but this year is something else. At the 18th annual festival this week, Williams’s lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy takes center stage, as Richard Read wrote in last week’s festival preview.

    Brenna Geffers of the Die-Cast Ensemble of Philadelphia. (Photos courtesy Tennessee Williams Theater Festival)

    Festival curator David Kaplan is quick to point out that the standard Williams canon includes the flat-out bizarre and totally cartoonish. Anyone who’s been to the festival in recent years has likely seen something a little out there, whether it’s a Cocaloony Key bird the size of a human or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Brick played by, well, a brick. This year, that strangeness will be manifest rather than latent; the program eschews Williams’s classics in favor of his stories, one-acts, and other texts that demonstrate his lifelong love of the otherworldly.

    Some theater companies might see an obstacle in this focus; others see opportunity. “It’s important to remember that science fiction has been dismissed as a literary form,” says Brenna Geffers, cofounder and principal director of the Die-Cast Ensemble of Philadelphia, “but it is so rich and so inviting for the imagination.” The company relishes filling unconventional spaces, in a literal and metaphorical sense, with thought-provoking theater.

    Geffers and Die-Cast have performed at four previous festivals, including a memorable Pericles aboard the Provincetown Public Library’s replica of the Rose Dorothea in 2017 and, most recently, Demolition Downtown in 2021, exploring a suburban family’s reaction to Armageddon. This year, Die-Cast is presenting The Sci-Fi Hotel Plays at the Harbor Hotel and Weird Anthology at the Crown & Anchor. Geffers notes that the former has been in incubation for many months while the latter will come together only when the entire cast, crew, and staff of the festival converge on Provincetown.

    Kaplan and Geffers were both awed by Williams’s The Hotel Plays at the Gifford House in 2017, but they had to wait for the effects of Covid to diminish before presenting another version of the same conceit. The Sci-Fi Hotel Plays consists of The Strange Play, The Chalky White Substance, and Chronicle of a Demise — on the surface, plays that deal with time travel, nuclear war, and cult leaders. For Geffers, “they become a triptych of a world beginning to crumble, then in devastation, and then on the precipice of rebirth.”

    Die-Cast’s 2017 production of Pericles was staged on the Rose Dorothea.

    Eight actors and a musician, along with Geffers, have been developing this production since last November. “Sometimes our pieces take a year and sometimes a couple days,” she says. But the company cultivates a long rehearsal process that allows them to experiment not only with time and space but also tone, theme, sound, and movement. Geffers says that Die-Cast’s ensemble work combines Suzuki training, contact improv, and the percussive methods of the Attis Theater of Athens, Greece.

    Despite all the preparation, Geffers knows there is one actor the company will get to rehearse with only right before performances begin: the Harbor Hotel itself. “Hotels are infested with this sense of temporariness, which, for these three pieces on the precipice of change, will be helpful,” she says.

    Then, there’s Weird Anthology — exactly what it claims to be. This work, a premiere of sorts, is a mélange of texts from the ’20s and ’30s pulled directly from Weird Tales magazine — stories of witchcraft, aliens, and monsters, letters to the editor, and even ads, as well as some text from Williams himself, whose first published work, “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” appeared in the magazine in 1928. There’s a lot to learn about Williams’s early imagination here, to be sure, but Geffers adds, “It’s also a wonderful celebration of a weird vintage pulp world.”

    Kaplan and Geffers are proud to be including in Weird Anthology the poem “Taking Tennessee to the Coast” by Paul Ibell in an adaptation by Marios Mettis and his Cyprus-based company. In perhaps the most fantastical homage of the festival, the poem imagines a group of benevolent graverobbers who relocate Williams’s corpse from the family plot in St. Louis to where he actually said he wanted to be buried in his will: the Gulf of Mexico, as near as possible to the spot where the poet Hart Crane drowned himself in 1932.

    Marios Mettis has adapted the poem “Taking Tennessee to the Coast” for this year’s festival.

    The ocean as the great unknown is a theme that echoes across Williams’s work: Kaplan notes that Tom dreams of joining the merchant marine in The Glass Menagerie, while Mettis is most drawn to the fact that, in Streetcar, Blanche DuBois states her desire to die at sea and have her corpse thrown overboard. Mettis and his company have crafted a 13-minute multimedia piece to punctuate the performance and send off Williams’s weirdness with fitting aplomb.

    Burial at sea somehow feels apt for Provincetown, too. And it’s hard not to wonder if Williams, with his potent connection to the town, might have found a taste of the fantastic here at the end of the Cape.

    “There’s a sense of curiosity and grace, living on the edge,” Geffers observes, and Kaplan adds, “Provincetown is itself liminal — and time after time, Williams conflates going to sea with going to outer space.” That queer desire for elsewhere and the beyond helped catapult Williams and so many others to new frontiers of art and entertainment.

    “His style goes way beyond Streetcar,” says Geffers. “There’s always more to find.”

    The 2023 Tennessee Williams Theater Festival runs from Sept. 21 to 24. For a list of performances and to purchase tickets, see TWPtown.org.

    THEATER

    The Unsinkable Tennessee Williams Fest Returns

    With a theme of censorship, shows explore forbidden desire and expression

    By

    Putting on a festival of live theater — both indoors and outdoors — while the pandemic continues to rage is a risky and frustrating process. Yet that’s exactly what the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, the annual celebration of the renowned playwright who lived and loved here, is about to do from Thursday, Sept. 23 through Sunday, Sept. 26.

    Curator David Kaplan, a founder and guiding force of the festival, now in its 16th year, has invited theater companies from around the world to stage work by Williams and other artists throughout Provincetown. “The sensationalistic [Covid] news in July was very daunting for us, but it didn’t scare any of the artists away,” he says. “We normally get housing in July, sell tickets in July, but this year that had to wait.”

    Blessed Unrest performs an uncensored version of Battle of Angels. They’ll be at Provincetown Town Hall as part of the upcoming Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. (Photo Maria Baranova)

    The 400th anniversary of the “departure” of the ultraorthodox Puritans on the Mayflower from Provincetown, as the festival puts it, inspired its defiance-of-censorship theme of “independent thinking.” Covid, which forced the world into lockdown in 2020, put the kibosh on most of the September festival’s plans last year, except The Municipal Abattoir, a short Kafka-esque play by Williams that was staged on the dune above the Grace Hall parking lot for the benefit of a drive-in audience.

    The Municipal Abattoir will return this year, accompanied by the rest of the censorship-breaking program that was postponed last fall. Three other works by Williams will be featured: Battle of Angels, a rarely produced 1940 play about three women in a Mississippi small town with eyes for a good-looking stranger, which the Boston League of Decency effectively blocked from reaching Broadway; Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?, a new adaptation of a Williams short story about an interracial affair that he never finished drafting into a play or screenplay; and The Demolition Downtown, a 1971 play in which a suburban family hears explosions around them but can only imagine what’s happening because news outlets are silenced.

    A production of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel will feature the puppetry of Harry Mayronne alongside live actors in a Bas Relief Park tent, part of the festival. (Photo courtesy PTWTF)

    Also included in the festival: The Witch, a 1616 satire of heretical behavior by Thomas Middleton, staged by Megan Nussle in the National Seashore with an all-woman cast; The Mahagonny Songspiel, a cabaret revue by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill that was condemned by the Nazis at its 1927 German premiere; Mae West’s Sex, a 1926 Broadway smash that was shut down for obscenity and led to the brief incarceration of its star and author; and Longing Lasts Longer, a “rock ’n’ roll manifesto” by Penny Arcade.

    The festival is also offering two “lagniappes” — a New Orleans tradition of thrown-in extras — “Tennessee’s Latest Peep Show,” performed by neo-burlesque artist Lefty Lucy, 2011 winner of Miss Coney Island USA; and “Cut Blanche,” with Jef Hall-Flavin, juxtaposing scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire with a live reading of the excised naughty bits. Lefty Lucy and Penny Arcade will also host workshops, and the Tennessee Williams Institute will hold seminars.

    Because of the Mayflower connection, “We had planned 2020 to be an all-American season,” Kaplan says. “That ended up working in our favor, because it would have been impossible to bring foreign companies here. But the real story is how companies kept their projects fresh.

    “Jessica Burr and Blessed Unrest have been working on Battle of Angels for two years,” Kaplan continues. “She just performed it at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Women openly lusting, as in Battle of Angels, is also part of Mahagonny, which the AllWays Lounge is presenting. I saw these people perform in a dive bar in New Orleans, a place that smells of lube and booze.”

    Burlesque star Lefty Lucy will perform “Tennessee’s Latest Peep Show” at Pilgrim House as part of the theater festival. (Photo Xena Zeitgeist)

    Desdemona, Kaplan says, “is unfinished, but Thomas Owen Mitchell, who’s a scholar of early Williams plays and stories, makes that part of the drama. The narrator is a provocateur. Various drafts are left unresolved — it’s like Rashomon.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dept. of Theatre is bringing Mitchell’s version to Provincetown.

    To keep The Demolition Downtown fresh, Philadelphia’s Die-Cast ensemble has been performing the play in suburban homes. Taking work into relevant settings is a long-standing Williams festival practice — Sex, for example, will be performed at tea dance at the Boatslip.

    Kaplan is especially passionate about the censorship theme because Williams had always been attracted to forbidden material. “It was the impulse of the emperor’s new clothes,” he says. “Things that were never spoken, or, at most, spoken in whispers, had to be said. That was the moral impetus of why his plays had to be performed, and why we are having this festival.”

    Though Covid set productions back, Kaplan notes that it “allowed me to live like a hermit. I wasn’t directing or teaching. I could write.” Indeed, his book Shakespeare, Shamans, and Show Biz: An Impolite Guide to Theater History will be published this week. “The advantage was we could plan for the next two years,” Kaplan says. But with ticket sales late, and “people deciding at the last minute,” he’s still nervous: “This really is an act of faith.”

    All the Town’s a Stage

    The event: Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival

    The time: Thursday, Sept. 23 through Sunday, Sept. 26; programs daily, morning till night

    The place: Locations throughout Provincetown, from Town Hall to the Boatslip, Bas Relief Park to Pilgrim House

    The cost: Single performances $40 to $50; day passes $105 for three shows; flex passes, $275 for six shows; carte blanche passes $775 to $975 for 12 tickets; at twptown.org

    THE SHOW MUST GO ON

    As Covid Subsides, Theaters Push to Reopen

    Outdoor stages, new approaches planned

    By

    Few things in the life of the Outer Cape have been hit harder by Covid than theater. Live outdoor cabaret performances resumed after the lockdown, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival managed to put on a play in the Grace Hall parking lot to a drive-in audience. These signs of theatrical life were an inspiration to David Drake, artistic director of the Provincetown Theater, who desperately wanted to bring his company back onstage. Virtual events helped maintain a connection with his audience, but live theater has no substitute.

    By September 2020, he realized it was likely that playing indoors in summer 2021 would not happen. “We lost 90 percent of our income from ticket sales last year,” Drake told the Independent. “We can’t afford to do that again. We just didn’t know which direction the country and Covid were going. But by the beginning of March, with Biden in office and vaccinations happening, I came up with a plan.”

    That plan was to create an outdoor stage in the theater’s parking lot, behind the building at 238 Bradford St. Drake had been meeting with Christopher Ostrom, producing artistic director of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and Janine Perry, artistic director of Cape Rep in Brewster. “How do we go outdoors?” Drake asked. “We’re different ships, but we’re all in the same storm.”

    The other theaters had an edge: WHAT already had permits for outdoor productions on its property. And Cape Rep already had an outdoor stage.

    “I started reaching out to our abutters,” Drake said. There was also the problem of which plays to put on. The postponed slate from 2020 was unworkable. “Because we’re a non-union theater, we’re not allowed to issue guest contracts to performers. Two of the shows had Equity actors in them,” Drake said, referring to Actors’ Equity Association, the performers’ union.

    His board wanted him to limit casts to four actors or fewer to hold down costs. One postponed show, Jerker, a play about gay phone sex, would fit that limit, but it would have to take place in daylight, because of nighttime noise considerations. “It needs darkness,” Drake said. “In daylight, it’s camp. Sex in daylight is unromantic, unsexy. You’re looking at the wrong things.”

    Choices were limited. “I didn’t want to do Love Letters or The Gin Game,” he said. “No one would come unless I got Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon. I wanted to do The Skin of Our Teeth. I thought it would speak to our time — it’s funny and weird. There’s a giant pet dinosaur that could live in the parking lot. We could use a car to drive the actors out. But it had a cast of six.”

    He budgeted without concessions. The theater lacked an outdoor liquor license and would need to build a kitchen to serve the required food. “If you do the math, it won’t work,” Drake said.

    Despite opposition from some abutters, the licensing board granted permission on April 13 to set up an outdoor stage. Drake is basing his revenue estimates on 44 seats, but he’s hoping that the town will allow him more, based on the size of the parking lot. The theater is turning its indoor space into larger, safer dressing rooms.

    Most Cape theaters have not announced their summer schedules yet, but Drake offered a tantalizing tidbit: for one weekend in late June, he’ll present Neptune, by Timothy DuWight, an autobiographical piece about being Black and gay. The two remaining productions will be announced next week.

    Ostrom, at WHAT, is putting on four summer shows: two on the main stage in front of the entrance, for four weeks each; one limited-run event in the middle of the summer; and one show for kids in the tent out by the highway.

    “We plan on announcing by May 1,” Ostrom told the Independent. As an Equity house, WHAT follows union safety requirements. “We are a fully ‘bubbled’ company,” he said. “Because performers will be rehearsing and performing without masks, anyone who is onstage or interacts with those people is bubbled — tested weekly and quarantined if someone shows up positive. Those who don’t interact are working remotely. Six-foot social distancing applies to everyone. That’s been kind of a fun challenge to take on.”

    The actor-run Harbor Stage Company at Wellfleet Harbor was forced to wait out 2020. “We know that we will be back in the building for summer 2021,” emailed artistic director Robert Kropf. “We’re presently working through exactly what configuration we’ll use — if at all. Union concerns and safety protocols, ever shifting, require great resourcefulness. We’re hopeful that by August, we’ll be onstage again. The charm of the harbor, its rough-and-tumble-ness, is not easy to re-create elsewhere. Anything outdoors could remove us from the location proper, which we’re looking at as we wrangle out exactly what this summer will look like. The main challenge is remaining true to what we do and the way we do it.”

    Tennessee Williams Fest Passes on Sale

    By

    Passes for the 2021 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival are now on sale at twptown.org. The festival will take place September 23rd to 26th at live outdoor venues throughout Provincetown.

    The theme this year: “Censorship and Tennessee Williams.” “When we originally chose our theme three years ago, it had a more historical focus,” said festival curator David Kaplan in the announcement. “In 2021, the conversation about censorship has shifted dramatically.”

    The festival is offering an all-new day pass for $105. It includes three tickets (one per show) and invitations to all the mixers. Other passes range from $225 to $975.

    A spring gala fundraiser, during the daytime and outdoors, is slated for June 5th. In addition to a live auction, Amy Jo Jackson will perform her cabaret show “The Brass Menagerie,” described as “a romp through the women of Tennessee Williams … through song!”

     

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