Fourth Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
The Fight for Life is the theme of our fourth year’s program. A dozen one-of-a-kind events from near and far will gather in Provincetown to respond to Tennessee Williams challenge that theater — to survive as a force for life — needs to be passionate, powerful and disciplined.
Three plays swell with the fighting spirit. In Williams’ masterful A Streetcar Named Desire the stratagems of camouflage oppose an ex-soldier’s assault. Williams’ homage to Jackson Pollock, titled The Day on Which a Man Dies, pits a dedicated artist against his faithless mistress. 
Williams found inspiration for these contests in August Strindberg’s classic play Miss Julie — in which a stable groom tries to take down a countess.
The common foe of all contenders, The Enemy: Time is the title of Williams’ one-act sketch for Sweet Bird of Youth, the Broadway stage hit and Hollywood film in which “monster meets monster” in a fight to the death. We’re presenting the play and the movie.
Within Williams’ vision of life as ceaseless conflict, hotel rooms offer battle-weary fighters the dream of peace —or at least a truce — a place to forget where they have been and dream instead about where they might go. The Festival is presenting two series of short plays set in hotel rooms, written by Williams during six decades. Two TW plays written in the early 1980’s return to such scenes. 
In Clothes for a Summer Hotel the ghosts of long-gone love sustain the mind of Zelda Fitzgerald. A boarder in The Remarkable Rooming-House of Madame LeMonde takes the fight for life to raucous new lows.
When Williams first arrived in Provincetown in 1940, an armada of ships in Cape Cod Bay practiced maneuvers for the inevitable world war. Williams imagined that a notions shop in town ringed by Crushed Petunias might stock Life on the shelves alongside the merchandise of death. In 2009 our festival begins with a 21 Gun Salute broadcast on WOMR from the same Provincetown Harbor, celebrating those who carry on the fight for life.
Join us for four days of carrying on
