Wednesday, September 09, 2015

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival



There are only two writers whose timeless souls I worship as I do Jesus, the Buddha, the fierce Polynesian Volcano Goddess Pele and the Warrior Goddess Kali whose many arms slay and display simultaneously a demon's head. This is simply because these two playwrights charge forward through rainbow ribboned quantum portals dragging audiences along a ride like a baptism. These writer-Gods driving chariots of fire across an apocalyptic sun-flaring burning sky of righteous indignation. The landscape covered in resurrected sympathies ripe with emotion. Our scabs come undone as we grokk the gaping wounds of the characters before us. Our collective sweat pools, knee jerk laughs free us, our subconscious journeys underneath the stories like river snakes or goffers, while our etheric blood coagulates. We breathe in and sign out the landscape of human predicaments, pain, love, and lust. We stop off at Humiliation and are dumped in peels of laughter, and baptized in clarity that is unique to these two playwrights.

Tomorrow at 9am EDT streaming at womr.org, airing at 92.1 WOMR-fm in Ptown and 91.3 WFMR-fm in Orleans. In the am I will be speaking with Jef Hall-Flavin, the Executive Director for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, where he directed Eugene O’Neill’s Diff'rent, as well as three world-premiere Tennessee Williams one-act plays, The Parade (2006), Green Eyes (2008), and The Enemy: Time (2009), among many other plays.

Hall-Flavin's recent directing projects include The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire both of which he staged in New Zealand; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Park Square Theatre in his home town of St. Paul, Minnesota.

As Associate Director of The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., he assisted Michael Kahn and Bill Alexander on several productions, directed As You Like It in a co-production with the Kennedy Center, and restaged Mark Lamos’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Shakespeare Free-For-All, as well as the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.

No comments:

Post a Comment