AN UNCONVENTIONAL EVENING WITH TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Announced at KCPublic Theatre

Kansas City Public Theatre (KCPublic) presents "First Mondays at the Arts Bar." May 7th at the Uptown Arts Bar. This event is free to the public.

Every first Monday of the month, KCPublic presents staged readings and small-scale productions of plays by area playwrights and other work which reflects the unique history and concerns of the Kansas City community.

May's First Monday: An Unconventional Evening of Tennessee Williams will feature: Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen and The Strangest Kind of Romance. Directed by Elizabeth Bettendorf Bowman and Nathan Bowman. This evening incorporates Brechtian and Japanese Noh Theatre traditions in harmony with two of Tennessee Williams' more experimental one acts.

Famous Missourian, Tennessee Williams, explores passion with daring honesty, and forged a poetic theatre of raw psychological insight that shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. The autobiographical The Glass Menagerie brought what Mr. Williams called "the catastrophe of success," a success capped by A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most influential works of modern American literature. An extraordinary series of masterpieces followed, including Vieux Carre, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, and the classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Talk to Me Like The Rain and Let Me Listen: Two unnamed characters, Man and Woman, live in a crumbling flat. He is a drunk, and she is purposefully wasting away-but between them there is an intimacy of desperation.

The Strangest Kind of Romance: The proprietress of a Midwest boarding house is giving a tour to a potential tenant who hopes to get a job in the nearby factory. All of the men who have lived there have signed their names on the wall-and one of them left his cat behind. After moving in, the man develops a sort of relationship with the landlady, but his real love is for the cat.

Talk To Me like the Rain-Cassidy Ragland (Woman) Sean McSweyn (Man) The Strangest Kind of Romance-Nathan Bowman (The Little Man) Lusie Cuskey (The Landlady) Patrick Simpson (The Old Man) Derek Trautwein (The Boxer)

May 7, 2018, 7pm. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway, Kansas City, Missouri 64111. All KCPublic events are FREE and open to the public. Kansas City Public Theatre (KCPublic) presents "First Mondays at the Arts Bar." May 7th at the Uptown Arts Bar. This event is free to the public.