Early Tennessee Williams Play to Premiere in Provincetown

The First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival will premiere an early work of playwright Tennessee Williams': a play called The Parade or Approaching the End of a Summer. The afternoon performance will take place at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 1, 2006 at The Art House Theater (214 Commercial Street).

"The play is autobiographical and depicts the author as openly and comfortably gay, something Williams chose not to express in his stage works until thirty-five years later in his life," according to press notes. The Parade will be performed by Shakespeare on the Cape (SOTC), the company from Minneapolis that has been performing Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It throughout the Cape this season. The Parade will be directed by SOTC's co-artistic director Eric Holm along with Jef Hall-Flavin.

Though Williams changes the names in his play, the characters are based on his life and his loves. The play features Ben Griessmeyer as Don (Williams himself) and Elliot Eustis, co-artistic director of Shakespeare on the Cape, who plays Dick, the love of his life (a role based on the muscle-bound dancer who called himself Kip Kiernan). The most flamboyant character, Miriam, is based on a New Yorker named Ethel Elkovsky who was in love with Williams in Provincetown, to be played by Vanessa Caye Wasche.

"Written in 1940, during Williams first time in Provincetown, The Parade dramatizes Williams' season of self-discovery and true love. The play is classically simple: the action takes place in one place, in real time. In The Parade, Williams creates a portrait of himself as a young writer ambivalently hopeful and terrified about the future."

"The original work was hand-written in Williams' journal and was lost from 1940 until 1962 when Andreas Brown, now owner of Manhattan's legendary Gotham Book Mart, was a young man working for Audrey Wood (Williams' agent), tracking down the playwright's earlier work. Brown went to see Joe Hazan, who had been Williams' friend and confidante in Provincetown. When the affair with Kip ended badly, Williams tore out the pages from his notebook and abandoned his script. Hazan gave the pages, which he had rescued twenty years before, to Brown. Brown typed them up and showed them to Williams, who tinkered with them enough to complete the play. For unknown reasons Williams didn't pursue a production."

The production by Shakespeare on the Cape will be obedient to Williams' stage directions.

Jeff Hall-Flavin, co-director of The Parade or Approaching the End of Summer, was the assistant director on Michael Kahn's premiere of 5 by Tenn at the Kennedy Center in Washington. D.C. He works also at The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and at The Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington (D.C.)

The First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, September 28 - October 1, 2006, celebrates the life and work of one of America's foremost literary figures, Tennessee Williams, and his relatively unknown deep connection to Provincetown. The four-day Festival features Williams' work in various genres including film, dance, poetry, photography, music and plays.
 
Tickets are $35 each and may be purchased by calling 508-487-5921 or by logging on to www.twptown.org/tickets.htm. For more information about the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, including a full schedule of events, log on to: www.twptown.org

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