August 8th-18th, 2024

Directed by Michael Wilson
August 8-18, 2024
Grandel Theatre, Grand Center (3610 Grandel Square, St. Louis, MO 63103)

7:00 pm Thursday-Saturday, 3:00 pm Sunday.

A gut-wrenching display of toxic familial tensions and ladened southern gothic power structures, this piece will serve as the centerpiece of our jaw-dropping 9th Annual Festival. This Pulitzer Prize winning drama follows the story of the Pollitts, a wealthy southern family whose history of greed and deception looms overhead as the imminent death of the family’s patriarch approaches. Siblings and spouses go head to head to secure the Pollitt fortune, weaving an overwhelming web of mistruths.

Parking: Guest parking is available at the Fox Garage for $5 (3637 Washington Ave, St. Louis, MO 63108). Please, tell the attendant you are with the Tennessee Williams Festival to receive discount.

Tickets on sale now!

Directed by Brian Hohlfield
August 10-18, 2024
Curtain Call Lounge, Grand Center

1:00pm and 4:00pm Saturday and Sunday

Almost 100 years ago, what we now call Grand Center in St. Louis was the place to go for entertainment. Vaudeville was struggling but still popular, double-features (with live acts in between) played all day at the Fox and Missouri theaters, music poured from dance halls and clubs, and the hotels were packed with the touring casts of last year’s Broadway’s hits.

Young Tom Williams soaked it all up.

In celebration of the history and the continuing charm of Grand Center, the Tennessee Williams Festival of St. Louis will present “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” a program of three one-act plays with music, at the Curtain Call Lounge at the Fox, just steps from the bustling streets and locations where much of the action takes place.

Like the rest of the theatre-going public, Tom was intrigued by what went on backstage, a world he would soon become familiar with, and imagined what the lives of the nomadic show-folk must be like. He brings them to life with affection and bemusement in the one-acts “In Our Profession,” “The Magic Tower,” and “The Fat Man’s Wife,” all set in the 1930s and portraying the ups and downs of a career in show-biz. In these early plays, Williams, still finding his voice, is clearly influenced by the plots and styles of the movies he would have seen on this very street, bringing the experience full circle.

The theatrical but intimate setting of the Curtain Call is perfect for a program about show-biz.

Like a “mini-jukebox musical,” “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” features songs from the period to evoke the era of Vaudeville and the type of entertainment Tom would have encountered in his Grand Avenue outings long long ago..

Parking: Guests attending this event can park for FREE at the the Fox Club Parking Lot. Inform the attendant you are a guest of the Tennessee Williams Festival at the Curtain Lounge.

Presented by resident scholar Tom Mitchell
August 10, 2024
Grandel Theatre, Grand Center (3610 Grandel Square, St. Louis, MO 63103)

Secrets of Tennessee’s Stage Directions at 9:00am

In the scripts for his plays, Tennessee Williams always communicated details about the settings and characters. Although the audience doesn’t read the stage directions, they see the result. This panel will look at what he says about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Magic Tower.

The Wicked Stage: 1930s Theatre and Performances in St Louis at 10:00am

As a young man in St. Louis, Tennessee (then Tom) Williams was drawn to the theatre and to the movies. Grand Avenue at that time was illuminated by movie marquees and enlivened by the people who once lived in the neighborhood. This discussion will provide an overview of the influential entertainments of St. Louis back in the years when Tennessee was still Tom.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”: Revision upon Revision at 11:00am

Tennessee Williams disagreed with stage director Elia Kazan about the ending of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” as it was being prepared for its original Broadway production. In the end, the compromise: Kazan called the shots on how the play ended onstage, but Tennessee published his desired ending. The movie version of the play suffered yet even more revisions as the sexual content of the play was tamed for a general audience. This discussion will explore the revisions as well as the impact of such revision on the audience.

Reading of “Stella for Star” an adaptation of the first award-winning story by the young Tom Williams at noon

Adapted by Joi Hoffsommer and Christine Sevec-Johnson, performed with scripts in hand. “Stella for Star” is a short story about the woman Jonathan Swift named “Stella.” Swift was the 18th century English satirist who wrote Gulliver’s Travels and influenced politics in his time. Stella haunted his thoughts and memories. Williams’s story received first place from the St. Louis Writers’ Guild, a prize awarded by Josephine Johnson: another significant woman. At the time of Williams’s award, Johnson, from Kirksville and a student at Washington University, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – the youngest recipient in the prize’s history.

A discussion will be led by Bess Rowen with performers Joi Hoffsommer, Christine Sevec-Johnson, and J.W. Morrissette. Also joined by Brad R. Cook and Jessica Mathews of the St. Louis Writers Guild.

Parking: Guest parking is available at the Fox Garage for $5 (3637 Washington Ave, St. Louis, MO 63108). Please, tell the attendant you are with the Tennessee Williams Festival to receive discount.

Walking Tour of the Grand Avenue Theatre District

Sunday, August 11 at 10:00am
Meeting place: Front of Grandel Theatre

The St. Louis City arts area now known for the Grandel Theatre, the Fabulous Fox Theatre, and Powell Hall, in the 1920s and 30s was home to an even more vibrant theatre and movie scene. The district was also the center of radical young artists. This walking tour will view the neighborhood through the eyes of the young man who was beginning to imagine himself as  Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee Williams Festival OPEN MIC

Sunday, August 11 at 7:00pm
Curtain Call Lounge, Grand Center

The Tennessee Williams Festival presents a very open mic night…

Bring your talent and be ready to celebrate the first week of the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. Read a poem, act a scene, play an instrument, or sing a song. Tom Clear will be at the piano, so if you plan to sing bring sheet music or a chart in your own key. Or accompany yourself on the instrument of your choice, Or you can just relax, have a drink, and enjoy the entertainment.

Bob Harvey and Chuck Lavazzi are your cheerful co-hosts. No admission or cover, but there is always a tip jar! All proceeds go to the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis

Parking: Guests attending this event can park for FREE at the the Fox Club Parking Lot. Inform the attendant you are a guest of the Tennessee Williams Festival at the Curtain Lounge.

Parties, gatherings, drink specials, and more!

Traveling for the Festival?

Stay with our partners at the The Royal Sonesta Chase Park Plaza at the discounted rate of $169 for standard kings and $209 for one bedroom suites. Use the link below to take advantage of this special offer!

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

Director’s Note

Following His Kind 

"Invitations have been issued by The Mummers of St Louis for a reception late Saturday evening, Dec 4 1937 to meet Thomas Lanier Williams, author of Fugitive Kind which will be presented that evening at the Wednesday Club...

The news item from a local St Louis paper went on to say that "Fugitive Kind is the second play of the St Louisan -- son of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Williams -- to be given its premiere by The Mummers."  

Almost twenty years after he had stepped off the train a frightened young boy of 7 at Union Station, and just over two years before he would first sign his name to a play as Tennessee Williams, Thomas L. Williams was recognized by the hometown he'd inherited  after his father's promotion to the World's Largest Shoe Company had compelled his family's exodus from rural Mississippi, as "a playwright to watch" and "a poet of exceptional merit."  

During the two decades Williams lived in St Louis -- the longest he ever lived in any place during his 71 years of living --  Williams was shuttled with his sister Rose (and later also his brother Dakin) from one address to one more desirable, usually further West within a higher zip code.  The Williams' string of homes began with a boardinghouse on Lindell Boulevard, followed by the dark upstairs (Glass Menagerie) apartment at 4633 Westminster Place, then to a larger downstairs apartment at 5 Taylor Street at the corner of Laclede, followed by a smaller top floor apartment of a two-family at 5938 Cates Street (where Tom's mother Edwina gave him a secondhand typewriter at age 12), then to an over-crowded University City apartment at 6554 Enright Avenue, and finally to a handsome two-story house at 6634 Pershing Avenue.  

Though the location of his family's home changed on average every three years, its dark tenor remained the same, defined by the painful sorrow of his parents' bitter recriminations.  Tom's sister Rose survived the sad and sometimes violent nature of their home life by withdrawing further and further from reality, while Tom endured by writing constantly, often feverishly poems, short stories and plays.  After failing ROTC his junior year at the University of Missouri  in Columbus, Tom was not allowed to return for a senior year and graduate but instead was gifted by his father a job at International Shoe Co where he dusted shoes, typed out factory orders and hauled around packing cases of sample shoes.  As Lyle Leverich writes in his richly detailed biography TOM: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, Tom was now confined to the same prison (International Shoe Co) as was his father C.C. Williams, who was now also his jailer.  

His "sentence of hard labor" -- as Tennessee referred to his three years working alongside his father at International Shoe in his 1960 autobiographical essay The Man in the Overstuffed Chair --  came to an abrupt end not when he was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox as Tom reveals at the end of The Glass Menagerie) but after being admitted to Saint Luke's Episcopal Hospital convinced that he was having a heart attack.  Within two years, Tom was enrolled in the famed Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was enacted -- because of his southern accent -- to play the role of a black chairman of a church convention in a play written by Thomas Pawley, his one black classmate.  Pawley described the town of Iowa City and the University as segregated: "I could not eat in the restaurants or the Student Union or stay in the dormitory."  But Tom, he said, was always cordial to me.  "I was genuinely surprised at his apparent sympathy for" Black Americans (sic).

Misfits, strange-fragile, brutalized, marginalized, people are the heroes of Tennessee Williams' plays, from Miss Alma to Blanche to Brick, Maggie & Big Daddy.  As Harry Alexander Kinney writes in his 1983 dissertation, "Through his own profound compassion, Tennessee Williams was able to lead audiences little by little, to tolerate his 'fugitive kind'.  (also) He left behind an unforgettable lesson-- the misfit hardest to accept is one's self."  

At the end of Orpheus Descending, Carol Cutrere clutches the snakeskin jacket of the protagonist Val Xavier who has just been visicously killed by a mob of townspeople.  Her speech ends the searing tragedy about Lady Torrance, whose 'wop' father was burned alive in his Mississppi winegarden because he had dared serve alcohol to blacks:  "Wild things leave skins behind them. They leave clean skins and teeth and white bones. And these are tokens, passed from one to another. So that the fugitive kind can follow their kind."

What a thrill it has been these last several weeks to walk the same streets Tennessee walked in St Louis over 100 years ago.  Following him, as he follows his kind.

Michael Wilson

August 01 2024

Michael Wilson (Director) returns to TWSTL where he directed Bryan Batt in Dear Mr Williams during Festival 4. Considered one of the foremost interpreters of Tennessee Williams, Wilson has directed many of his major plays as well as several premieres, including Williams' musical Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws (with music by Michael Friedman) and his last play, The One Exception with Amanda Plummer. Off-Broadway, he directed the New York premiere of The Red Devil Battery Sign with Elizabeth Ashley; ; the acclaimed Roundabout revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore with Olympia Dukakis; and the Acting Company's premiere one acts by Marcus Gardley, Rebecca Gilman, David Grimm, John Guare, and Beth Henley all drawn from Williams' short stories collectively entitled Desire.  During his 13-year tenure as Artistic Director of Hartford Stage he created the Tennessee Williams Marathon, the first multi-year exploration of the playwright's expansive canon, directing lauded revivals of Camino Real with Betty Buckley, Novella Nelson & Rip Torn;  Summer and Smoke (which subsequently toured to Papermill Playhouse) with Ms. Plummer and Marc Kudisch; The Glass Menagerie (which subsequently toured to Houston's Alley Theatre & Harvard's A.R.T.) with Ms. Ashley, Anne Dudek and Andrew McCarthy; The Gnadiges Fraulein with Ms Ashley & Ms Plummer; and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ms Ashley & Biff McGuire.  He directed the Alley's revival of Orpheus Descending with Gordana Rashovich.  Most recently, he directed the A.R.T. revival of The Night of the Iguana with Ms Plummer, Dana Delaney, Bill Heck, and James Earl Jones.  A Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Princess Grace Statue Award winner and a Morehead Scholar graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of Dramatic Art, Wilson will direct Death of Salesman in February 2025 for PlayMakers Repertory Company.