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."
