See the 2010 video recap
Under the Influence, the theme of our 2010 Festival, began with questions.
What did Tennessee Williams hear, see, live through, savor, laugh at and return to while creating his great plays and poems? How might those inspire today’s artists, too?
The answers to those questions became last year’s thrilling mix – innovative theater, dance, music, poetry, films and art installations – in an eye-opening variery of sites throughout our town.
It was an unforgettable weekend
2010 Festival Program
Written by Williams
American Gothic, of course, is the title of a famous painting by Grant Wood. This September 23rd, Boston’s Beau Jest theater company presented the world premiere of Williams’ play of the same name. Tennessee cast the thin-lipped farm couple in the theater of his mind as the disapproving parents of a gun-toting bankrobber desperate for a place to hide. Williams sweat-soaked erotic comedy, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, makes for a double-bill, both plays presented on the porch of an historic Provincetown mansion.
27 Wagons Full of Cotton -- Set on a sweat-drenched front porch in the Mississippi Delta, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton was staged on a historic porch in Provincetown. The delightful production, directed by Jeff Glickman, came from Big Finish Productions of Pensacola, Florida.
Orpheus Descending, (a play Williams was writing when he first came to Provincetown in 1940,) was our centerpiece. The timeless myth of a poet who travels to the underworld – and returns to our world to share his visions – of love and pain -- inspired Williams for decades. A seaside Provincetown church became our stage for an unforgettable production, performed as a morality play by New York’s Infinite Theater.
Escape -- picture a runaway from a Mississippi chain gang and an adolescent boy swimming away from his overbearing mother – these are the central images of two short plays by Williams – and the images that incited DanzLoop Chicago’s Paula Frasz to choreograph new work for her company to complement the performance of the plays (at the Provincetown Theater.)
Suddenly Last Summer, presented on the last night of the Festival, tells the story of a poet who descended to the underworld and never returned – his passage described to a doubting audience by the one witness who survived him. This variation on the Orpheus myth, inspired by and his domineering mother – and a garden Williams saw in a movie – was staged as a reading by Jodie Markell, the director of the 2010 Tennessee Williams’ film The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.
influences on Williams
Diff'rent is the play by that Williams saw in Provincetown performed at the Playhouse on the Wharf. Festival director Jef Hall-Flavin’s revival, seventy years later, brought O’Neills New England story of a sex-starved fool to the Boatslip, in full view of the harbor.
Bent to the Flame is the acclaimed one-person show performed by Los Angeles-based Doug Tompos, channeling Williams’ lifelong obsession with poet . Playwright , our guest in 2008, wrote to recommend we schedule it this year. We did, and it was brilliant.
The Jazz Funeral of Stella Brooks, a new musical written by Chicago’s and , offered another path between the underworld and ours: in this case an umbrella-wielding “second line” dancing down Commercial Street to honor Miss Stella Brooks – the vinegar-voiced singing sensation of Ptown’s 1947 cabaret season. Williams heard her often that summer while he was finishing up the script for the Broadway bound “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Can that famous cry of “Stella!” be an echo of Miss Brook’s curtain calls?
Laughing in the dark with Tennessee offered late night guilty pleasures, when author and film historian John DiLeo shared his private collection of Williams-related film clips. See what stars impressed or dismayed TW, enjoy how later films borrow shamelessly, pay tribute, or spoof Tennessee Williams.
Inspired by Williams
Orpheus in the Galleries traced a path for our passholders between three neighboring art galleries stocked with related installations by a half dozen artists . A history-making exhibition of ’s Orpheus-inspired collages and sculptures at the Berta Walker Gallery was a Festival highlight.
