PAST FESTIVALS

2006 Festival: Plays Williams Wrote in Provincetown

The first Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival established the playwright's connection to the Cape with performances of plays written in Ptown performed by professional companies from around the world, a Williams film retrospective including famous classic and less well-known adaptations, walking tours of Provincetown sites connected to Williams, and a celebration of Williams’ fine poetry with live music. The festival concluded with a demonstration of Provincetown’s continuing artistic community: a play written by a living Cape author, Wendy Kesselman collaborating with a living Provincetown artist, sculptor Jim Peters. A highlight of the programming was Shakespeare on the Cape’s production of The Parade, a previously overlooked text of gay romance in the summer of 1940.

Colleges from around the United States presented Williams one-acts plays and danced adaptations of his prose. Atlanta’s Capital City Opera sang excerpts from Andre Previn’s opera of A Streetcar Named Desire; Lowell Smith, the original Stanley in the Dance Theater of Harlem’s ballet of Streetcar restaged the crucial danced sequences of his interpretation. Bennington College provided a heartbreaking modern dance adaptation of Williams’ diaries and letters from Provincetown. From its first year on, the festival has encouraged students and professionals to rebut critical clichés about Williams in order to establish new and vigorous approaches to his texts.

2007 Festival: The Tennessee Williams Late, Late Show

The 2007 Festival moved away from Williams’ realism-based work and towards his more avant-garde writings – that are reflective of his time in Provincetown. The second festival was filled with the playwright’s previously unpublished, unperformed and relatively unknown plays, Williams-inspired works as well as dance, music, poetry and original film.

Once overlooked, the work Williams created after the age of 60 warrants reexamining as its context has changed with the world around it. While camp humor, melodrama, grotesquerie, cruelty, and paranoia, are present in his later writings, the 2007 Festival acknowledged and made them theatrical – often with stunning results: the world premieres of Sunburst and performance artist Julie Atlas Muz burlesque version of The Pronoun I. Festival curator David Kaplan staged Williams autobiographical The Traveling Companion and The Chalky White Substance, Brooklyn on Foot dazzled with a street theater production of Camino Real. Playwright John Guare spoke movingly about his lifelong debt to Williams, as did playwright-provocateur Amiri Baraka.

The 2007 Festival also focused on the role of women in Williams’ work. By featuring performances directed by women, original work created by women writers, choreographers and performance artists, the festival continued to celebrate Provincetown’s cherished diversity.