SKU: 978-1-60182-421-9 Tennessee Williams in Provincetown

Tennessee Williams in Provincetown is the story of Tennessee Williams’ four summer seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts – 1940, ‘41, ‘44 and ‘47. During that time he wrote plays, short stories, and jewel-like poems. In Provincetown Williams fell in love unguardedly for perhaps the only time in his life. He had his heart broken there, perhaps irreparably. The man he thought might replace his first lover tried to kill him there, or at least Williams thought so. Williams drank in Provincetown, he swam there, and he took conga lessons there. He was poor and then rich there; he was photographed naked and clothed there. He was unknown and then famous – and throughout it all Williams wrote every morning.

The list of plays Williams worked on in Provincetown include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, the beginnings of The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer, and an abandoned autobiographical play set in Provincetown — The Parade.

Tennessee Williams in Provincetown collects original interviews, journals, letters, photographs, accounts from previous biographies, newspapers from the period, and Williams’ own writing to establish how the time Williams spent in Provincetown shaped him for the rest of his life. The book identifies major themes in Williams’ work that derive from his experience in Provincetown, in particular the necessity of recollection given the short season of love. The book also connects Williams mature theatrical experiments to his early friendships with Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner and the German performance artist Valeska Gert.

Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, based on several years of extensive research and interviews, includes previously unpublished photographs, previously unpublished poetry, and anecdotes by those who were there.

About the Author

David Kaplan is an author and theater director who stages plays around the world with professional companies in indigenous languages and settings. He is a former Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the repository of Tennessee Williams’ literary estate. He has experience directing Williams’ repertory around the world.

In 2003 Mr. Kaplan staged Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Repertory Theater. Seasons past include directing the first Russian production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (the subject of a TASS documentary), a Sufi King Lear in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, performed in the Uzbek language and broadcast on Uzbek television; Genet’s The Maids in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, performed in Mongolian. In America he has staged his own adaptation of The Circus of Dr. Lao in Los Angeles, Tennessee Williams’ The Traveling Companion at WestBeth in New York, and Williams’ Frosted Glass Coffins in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

David Kaplan is also the author of Five Approaches to Acting (West Broadway Press, Spring 2001, Italian edition, Dino Audino Editore, Roma September 2003 ) and articles on such varied subjects as Eudora Welty and Andres Segovia, the history of Shakespeare productions in Central Asia, the American monologist Ruth Draper, the twenty-first century freaks of Coney Island USA. His translations of Chinese poetry from eighteenth century Japan will appear in the journal Alehouse early 2007.