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Reply to "Provincetown 2"

This article on Tennessee Williams' unseen plays being revived in Provincetown this Thursday...
Bobby I trust you are going and can fill us in!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/theater/24gene.html?r...eater&pagewanted=all


"...a premiere of a once-lost work, 'The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer,' provides more evidence that Williams wrote freely about his sexual desires. Completed when he was 29, the play details his own emotional crisis after being dumped (for a woman) by the first great male love of his life, a young Canadian draft dodger named Kip Kiernan. The play, staged by the Minneapolis company 'Shakespeare on the Cape,' will make its debut as part of a new Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown, Mass., where Williams wrote early drafts of the plays that made him famous: "The Glass Menagerie," "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Summer and Smoke" and "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale."

One reason Provincetown decided to stage a Tennessee Williams festival after all these years was to wrest the playwright out of the ghetto of Southern writers by focusing on his life in Cape Cod. "There is a lot of nonsense that says Williams was conflicted about his homosexuality in this period of his life," said David Kaplan, a theater director and founder of the four-day festival that begins Thursday. "That's not true." He added: "The tone of ˜Parade' is beautifully unequivocal. It is not whining. It is not apologetic. He demands his audience to take seriously gay people onstage."

Thomas Keith, an editor at New Directions, which publishes Williams's works, agrees. "Williams was writing about his own life in a less disguised way at a time when he probably didn't expect that he would show his work to his agent," Mr. Keith said. "It was a story that he wanted to tell, and he came back to it in the 1960's."

....Perhaps for the only time in his life Williams unguardedly fell in love. For less than six weeks that summer he and the 22-year-old Mr. Kiernan, whom the playwright thought resembled the Russian dancer Vasla Nijinsky, shared a two-story shack on Captain Jack's Wharf. As Williams writes in his "Memoirs'': "We slept together each night on the double bed up there, and so incontinent was my desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during the night for more love-making. You see, I had no sense in those days "” and nights "” of how passion can wear out even a passive partner."

One day Mr. Kiernan's girlfriend entered the picture. Mr. Kiernan told Williams that their affair was over. "I was in a state of shock," he wrote. Distraught, Williams packed his bags for Mexico. Mr. Kiernan later married but at 26 died of a brain tumor in a New York City hospital."
Last edited by S'tan
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