Third season:
Tennessee Williams and the Healing Power of Love
The 2008 Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown will take place
Thursday, September 25th, and run through Sunday, September 28th.
There will be a dozen events, some of them repeated twice or three times during the weekend.
As in years past we will include plays, film, dance, and live music.
Highlights of our 2008 Season will be:
GREEN EYES, Tennessee Williams' erotic play, in its world premiere, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. A young couple in a hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter wake up from their honeymoon. Paired with Williams early “Adam and Eve on a Ferry”. Jaimi Page plays the young bride of Green Eyes and also the repressed woman in Ferry seeking the advice of D.H. Lawrence, played by Robertson Dean.
TOUR OF THE TOWN is a guided tour through Provincetown visiting important sites where Tennessee Williams lived, worked and visited during the 1940’s. The 2-hour bus tour (with walking stops) begins at the Crown and Anchor and winds its way through the town with noted Williams actor Jeremy Lawrence along for the ride giving live commentary and poetry readings.
CAMINO REAL as street theater returns. Williams' phantasmagoria from Brooklyn on Foot was a hit last year at the Aquarium Mall. Directed by Sarah Michelson, a troupe of five actors, aided by a musician and a garbage can, embodies such legendary personalities as Jacques Casanova, Lord Byron, Camille and Don Quixote, as well as over forty other roles walking the tightrope between fate and free will. We're making plans for this year's Camino Real to be held around the swimming pool of the Crown and Anchor.
THE DOG ENCHANTED BY THE DIVINE VIEW is Tennessee Williams' first version of The Rose Tattoo. A juicy Sicilian widow on a date with a truck driver will feature Nancy Cassaro, the original "Tina" from "Tony N' Tina's Wedding," paired with Larry Coen, winner of last year's Charles Eliot Norton Award (for six different character roles). Dog is directed by Festival curator David Kaplan and will be shown with the Academy Award-winning 1955 film of The Rose Tattoo.
YOUNG LOVE is the name for this year’s annual collection of new short plays, written on a theme from Williams. Featuring plays with at least one high-school aged character, the 2008 theme centers on Love. Produced by New Provincetown Players, 2008 playwrights will include Cape Cod playwright Meryl Cohn, among others.
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA comes to Provincetown from Oporto, Portugal’s Teatro do Bolhão. Directed by João Paulo Costa and performed in Portuguese with English translation, the play focuses on a priest who has lost his faith, concluding with one of Williams’ most powerful affirmations of faith and the possibilities of love.
RANCHO PANCHO is a new play written by former Los Angeles Times journalist Gregg Barrios about Williams and his Mexican partner Pancho Rodriguez. The other characters are Carson McCullers (with whom Williams and Pancho shared a summer home in Nantucket) and pioneer stage director Margo Jones (who was in Ptown for Brando’s Streetcar audition. Rancho Pancho is the inaugural production of the Classic Theatre of San Antonio from Texas. Directed by Diane Malone.
Performed on Fisherman’s Wharf
LORITA ! (HAPPY AUGUST THE TENTH) from Chicago’s DanceLoop Theater, a danced adaptation of a short story by TW. Two mannish business-women live together through a sweltering New York August with a parrot named Lorita. Choreographed by DanceLoop Chicago’s Paula Frasz, her company will perform the dance floor of the Paramount Room at the Crown and Anchor.
OLYMPIA DUKAKIS, Academy Award Winner for Moonstruck, will appear in Provincetown in a program that will reveal the depth of her relationship with Williams' words Olympia has been performing roles written by Williams since she played Stella in Streetcar during her first professional work -- summer stock in Maine. She's played Maxine in Night of the Iguana at Williamstown; Serafina in The Rose Tattoo (three times over the course of almost 30 years); The Glass Menagerie's Amanda at Trinity Rep; and Flora Goforth in Milk Train in Hartford this season and in Williamstown in 1996
THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE is Tennessee Williams' rarely staged 1951 re-thinking of the story of Alma Winemiller from Summer and Smoke.
In his review this May in the New York Times, Christopher Isherwood noted that Mary Bacon's performance as Alma Winemiller in The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) production "rivals anything I saw this season for complexity, delicacy and lucid truth."
The New Yorker wrote "Mary Bacon, who, along with the other topnotch performers in the cast, might as well be teaching a master class on Williams." Under the direction of Jenn Thompson the production arrives with Ms. Bacon and Todd Gearheart as John Buchanan, the handsome young doctor next door for whom Alma's frightened soul sings.
Love scenes from Eccentricities of a Nightingale will be directed by Jenn Thomson.
SUMMER AND SMOKE is an opera based on the play by Tennessee Williams with music by Lee Hoiby, libretto by Lanford Wilson. The New England Conservatory of Music will present a concert version of LOVE SONGS FROM SUMMER AND SMOKE directed by Mark Astafan .
The opportunity to see Eccentricities and Summer and Smoke together--two variations on a theme by Williams--is a defining experience of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.
More scheduling information will be posted as it becomes available. |
