Tennessee Williams Festival draws many theatrical stars
April 02, 2008

The effortlessly elegant actress Marian Seldes, with her beautifully modulated speaking voice and classic, timeless beauty, was the main attraction at the 22nd annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, dazzling audiences at two events on separate days.

Seldes mesmerized the audience at Thursday's festival opening-night gala with her performance in a little-known, 1980 Williams' one-act, "Steps Must Be Gentle." She played poet Hart Crane's severe mother, Grace, "protecting" her son's reputation after his suicide at sea, with Jeremy Lawrence as the sarcastic Crane, still baiting each other, even in death.

She then beguiled the audience in a brief, pungent interview with Rex Reed, in which she described Williams at rehearsals for "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" as "one day like a little kid, the next day the great playwright, but always laughing."

Tallulah Bankhead starred, in her last stage role, and Seldes said that after the play's five-performance run, Williams suggested that Seldes and her friend Anne Meacham take "Milk Train" and "rewrite it any way you want."

Airily announcing that "80 is the new 40, you know," Seldes the seductive story-teller made another appearance Friday in a free-wheeling conversation with playwright Terrence McNally. She starred in McNally's two most recent plays: "Dedication, or The Stuff of Dreams" (which he dedicated to her); and "Deuce," in which she co-starred with Angela Lansbury.

"There is only one Marian," McNally said. "And she and Angie were like two kids who couldn't wait to go on stage every night."

"If Angela Lansbury were running for president, I'd vote for her," Seldes said.

Very serious about an acting career very young, Seldes said, "I thought I'd just do Greek plays. It never occurred to me that people wouldn't want to see them. "

The best performance she ever saw, she said, was Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."

"It was magical," she said, "as if she had just thought of the words she was speaking. She was so fantastically real."

The last time she saw Williams was on the street, "and he was wearing a raccoon coat, and his 'Memoirs' had just come out, and he said, 'Marian, I've sold my soul to Doubleday!'¤"

Seldes serves two masters in the theater: "The playwright and the audience. If you think critics are scary, God help you if you fail the writer. I'm in love with writers."

To which McNally responded, "And they're in love with you."

Audiences, she said, "complete the family that is theater."

McNally was also part of a conversation on Sunday with Gregory Mosher, who in 1982 directed Williams' last full-length play at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, "A House Not Meant to Stand," which has just been published by New Directions.

Skillfully guided by David Hoover, director of the performance program of the University of New Orleans' department of film, theater and communications, the trio covered subjects such as a national theater (they don't think America will ever have one), homosexuality onstage (McNally said, "I outed myself in my first play") and the development of plays through readings and workshops, a process both agreed can go on too long.

"If 'The Three Sisters' was work-shopped, it would have ended up as 'The Two Sisters,'" Mosher said.

Mosher added that he wished Williams had lived to see the renewed interest in his work, the way Edward Albee has.

"Do you realize that New York has yet to see 'A House Not Meant to Stand'?" Mosher asked. The play has only been staged in Chicago, Miami and New Orleans.

McNally, 69, who is from Corpus Christi, Texas ("Corpus Christi" is the title of his most controversial play), said he got his early ideas of theater from "All About Eve."

"I thought that's what it was all about, fighting and getting your way," McNally said.

Instead, he found agreeable collaborators: directors, actors and composer-lyricists such as Kander & Ebb and Ahrens & Flaherty when he began to write librettos for musicals.

"Theater," Mosher said, "is a funny word. It refers to a building. It refers to an idea. It's the way a culture understands itself. Writers help us understand who we are. By nature they are outsiders and their attitude is, "I have a story to tell and by God, you're going to listen!'

"Producers must step up and make the voices of young playwrights heard."

Other Festival highlights (and there were many)...
The theater stagings at this year's Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival get one word: "Bravo!" Almost every performance boasted full, appreciative houses and the quality of the work was unusually high.

Jeremy Lawrence's "Everyone Expects Me to Write Another Streetcar" has become a major performance. Lawrence inhabits the role of the aging playwright wittily and wondrously. He is wildly funny, authentically moving, and his rapport with the audience is a marvel.

"A Witch and a Bitch" consisted of a performance-reading of the scenes between Flora Goforth and her "friend" the Witch of Capri, two rich, ailing harpies waiting for the other to croak. Excerpted from a successful Los Angeles production of "Milk Train," it featured the exotic, larger-than-life Karen Kondazian as Goforth, laying on a thick Georgian accent and exhibiting remarkable pectoral control, and Travis Michael Holder as the cross-dressed Witch of Capri, a sly, malicious performance. Handsome local actor Marshall Harris was a physically impressive Angel of Death, adequate and sometimes more than that in his dialogue.

"Camino Real," performed by the Brooklyn on Foot Street Theater onstage at Le Petit, featured six young, committed actors from Ohio University playing the more than 40 roles of Williams' problematic, highly symbolic play, a war of pitiless brutality against poetic romance.

If you didn't know the play, you would be at a complete loss as to what was happening onstage; it lost a third of its audience at intermission. But this was invigorating, imaginative work, with Joshua Striker-Roberts a heroically innocent Kilroy among other roles; bearded Jordan K. Kamp a truly evil Gutman; and a parade of seedy, corrupt types. Laura Montes played most of the female roles and was exceptional as Marguerite Gautier and the bawdy Gypsy. David Bunch's ascetic look was perfect for Don Quixote, a fatigued Casanova, and the cruisey Baron.

Also appearing: versatile, appealing Adam Perabo and Fayna Sanchez providing the colorfully bizarre music. Sarah V. Michaelson devised the complex staging.

A Conversation with Wright King" showed a video clip of the 27-year-old King looking 17 as the "young, young" newspaper collector in Elia Kazan's 1951 film of "A Streetcar Named Desire" opposite Vivien Leigh. Onstage, the 85-year-old Wright today -- still remarkably vigorous -- told of his passion for the theater and little-known, even juicy backstage stories of "Streetcar" on the road, on Broadway and in Hollywood.

The new "Tennessee's Got Talent!" competition was a huge, unqualified success, packing Le Petit's orchestra and balcony, as 10 acting duos competed "American Idol"-style in Williams scenes. The judges were Rex Reed, who described himself as "The Simon Cowell of 'The Gong Show'¤"; Stephanie Zimbalist, who gave practical acting advice; and playwright Terrence McNally, who seemed uncomfortable judging actors, although he had some valid observations about basics such as projection.

The winners were Sean Glazebrook and James Bartelle of the NOLA Project, as Don Quixote and Sancho from "Camino Real," giving their scene a rollicking physicality.

Also of note: Zimbalist's transformation into the teenage Willie of "This Property Is Condemned," accomplished through the alchemy of acting talent and consummate costuming; Reed's effective reading of everyone's favorite Williams poem, "Life Story"; and Reed's enlivening presence throughout the festival. "This was one of the best attended festivals in terms of theater we've had in years," festival associate Karissa Kary said.

A Williams Fest's literary wrap-up and look ahead
April 02, 2008

By Susan Larson
Book editor

"In memory, everything seems to happen to music," Tennessee Williams said, and at the festival in his honor last weekend, music was certainly in the air.

This year, featured songwriters were an inspired addition to the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Tift Merritt, in her master class, showed students how easy it would be to draw song lyrics from her inspiration, Eudora Welty. And the panel featuring Merritt, Jim McCormick and Paul Sanchez (wonderfully moderated by Loyola University history professor Mark Fernandez, also a musician) was a great example of artistic mutual respect. Spencer Bohren, Tom Sancton and Michael White entertained as well as a second panel of songwriters, which featured Sanchez, Fernandez, Rich Look and Sonia Tetlow.

"Music is a language, and you speak it now," Merritt said. The conversation was a delight. Merritt also taught a class at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in conjunction with the festival.

The muse of history sparked several events. At a panel on historical fiction, novelist Barbara Hambly cautioned writers to avoid anachronisms, lest they receive snippy little e-mails from readers with the facts. "That would be me," said Michael Ross, a Loyola professor of history (who charmed Valerie Martin by telling her that he teaches her novel "Property" in his history classes).

The muse of memoir lured a large audience, with a panel moderated by novelist (and "failed memoirist," she claimed) Bev Marshall. Kevin Sessums, author of the festival's bestseller, "Mississippi Sissy" (how perfect is that?), got a huge laugh when he described taking revenge on a homophobic bookstore owner who attempted to ban his book. "A lot of people can't put the words homosexual and dignity and love in the same sentence," Sessums said. With his media contacts, Sessums turned it into a great news story -- "Banned in Tupelo!"

"My line about Mississippi," Sessums said, "is that we can't read, but we sure as hell can write."

Some writers were new to New Orleans. Best-selling author Claire Cook ("Must Love Dogs") wowed her audience with an energetic master class and fell in love with the city. This was her first visit, but don't worry, readers: She'll be back on tour in June. (As a special treat, there were free advance copies of her new book, "Summer Blowout," for fest-goers.)

Jamaican novelist Marlon James said, "Man, I could really write a book here. There goes the Berlin novel." His panel, "At the Gates of the Tropics: New Orleans as a Caribbean City," offered new and provocative ways to think about the city. Ned Sublette, reminding fest-goers that New Orleans isn't even on the Caribbean, suggested that we're the northernmost city in the "Saints and Festivals Belt."

A panel on married writers was predictably hilarious. Lee Smith described the fascination that her husband, Hal Crowther, has with the women of the Weather Channel. The best story came from Joseph and Amanda Boyden (an aerialist and contortionist), who described doing a hand-balancing act at the This is Not a Reading Reading Series in Toronto, then seeing their picture in the Globe and Mail with the caption, "Margaret Atwood can't do that!"

California poet laureate Al Young, in a conversation with Times-Picayune editorial columnist Jarvis DeBerry, memorably remarked, "When times get dark enough -- and we're in very dark times now, though you wouldn't know it from Fox News or CNN -- poetry emerges."

In one of the most moving moments of the weekend, director Gregory Mosher, who knew Williams near the end of his life, said, "I remember Tennessee Williams every day of my life. There is literally not a day that I do not think about him."

He recalled a trip to New Orleans to work with Williams for four days in 1981, and described walking into one of the playwright's favorite haunts: "First there's a burble, then a stunned silence. It's Tennessee Williams. Galatoire's falls silent -- especially when he's wearing a fur coat in April!"

The real scene stealers were Terrence McNally and Marian Seldes, whose conversation was a study in long friendship and a grand performance indeed. Seldes recalled her first visit to New Orleans with a touring company of "Medea."

"If you've toured almost every other great American city, and then you come here, this is the one you remember," Seldes said.

And even if you've been to more than 20 Tennessee Williams festivals, as I have, this may be the one to remember.