By Tennessee Williams

August 7-17th, 2025  (Thursday to Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 3pm)

The Grandel Theater

Friday, August 8th at 5:30pm

Courtyard at The Grandel

Always a huge and humorous event, Festival goers will shout Stella’s name. The loudest and most compelling is voted by a jury of random and less than expert volunteers who will declare the winner. This is event is free.

Curated by Tom Mitchell

Saturday, August 9th

The Grandel Theater

9:00am        Tennessee in St. Louis/Tennessee in New Orleans: Between 1938 and 1940 Tennessee Williams made a transition from St. Louis to New Orleans. Experts discuss the influence of New Orleans on the work of Tennessee Williams, especially A Streetcar Named Desire.

10:00am Ten Years of Tennessee: A Conversation with Carrie Houk, Tom Mitchell, and Mark Charney: Initiated as an act of love for St. Louis’s great playwright, the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis has a decade of accomplishments. Founder and Executive Artistic Director, Carrie Houk, talks about the festival’s beginnings, challenges, and accomplishments.

11:00am      Streetcar Adapted for Opera, Film, and Stage: Tennessee Williams’s great play has inspired adaptations in film, onstage, and in the opera. We will learn about Andre Previn’s operatic adaptation, Novid Parsi’s dramatic retelling within an Iranian immigrant family, and the influence of Streetcar in Pedro Aldomovar’s film, “All About My Mother.”

Led by Tom Mitchell

Sunday, August 10th at 9am

The Link Auditorium

The Williams family first settled in the Central West End and the neighborhood became important to Tennessee’s work. Beginning and ending at The Link Auditorium, this walking tour will visit neighborhood sites that relate to his life and writing. Along the way, we will hear Williams’s own words describing familiar locations. The tour will end with a READING of “God in the Free Ward,” a newly published story written in 1934 about Anna Wilkins, hospitalized with a puzzling illness, that reveals Tennessee Williams’s feelings for his sister Rose before her confinement in a mental hospital.

Sunday, August 10th at 7pm

The Grandel Theater

Curated by Thomas Keith and featuring Tennessee Williams Festival Company members, special guests from Opera Theatre of St Louis and friends of the Festival.

Playwriting Initiative
Finalists Readings

Saturday, November 22
10am-4pm
The Link Auditorium
4504 Westminster Pl, St. Louis, MO 63108

Each play reading will be followed by a brief talkback/Q&A.

10-11am
Tim Ocel
Leaning One Against the Other

11am-12pm
Henry I. Schvey
Tennessee Kissed Me

12-1pm
Lunch Break

1-2pm
K Michael Hester
I Love You Daddy

2-3pm
Courtney Bailey
Tennessee Williams holds a Seance with Patience Worth, a St. Louis ghost who is actually British and probably fake

3-4pm
Rita Winters
Mother Mary Comes To Me

Proudly presented with thanks to the Trio Foundation of St. Louis.