Bennington cast animates Tennessee Williams' memoirs at festival

"At the stove of a little two story shack on this Warf built on stilts over the incoming, outgoing tides was the youth to whom I dedicated my first collection of short stories. He had his back to me, as I entered, since he was facing the stove, preparing clam chowder, New England style. He was wearing dungarees, skin-tight, and my good eye was hooked like a fish. He was too preoccupied by the chowder cooking to more than glance over his shoulder and say 'hello.' Kip was into modern dancing...."

Tennessee Williams fell in love in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Williams died in 1983, but that intense first love affair came to life again this past weekend in Road to Paradise, an original dance theater piece built around the writer's memoirs, letters, and poems. The cast--composed entirely of Bennington students, and directed by recent alumna Carson Efird '05--performed the piece as part of the first annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, September 28-30.

When Provincetown first announced its first annual Tennessee Williams Festival, those unfamiliar with the legendary writer's life might have wondered what the connection was. Because of his lifelong roots in Mississippi and Louisiana, the author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is most often associated with the South. But it was in Provincetown, where Williams spent several summers in the 1940s, that he began to write the play that became The Glass Menagerie--and had his brief affair with the man he considered his first love, dancer Kip Kiernan.

This time in Williams' life fascinates Carson Efird '05, who put together the script, directed the piece, and worked with the all-student cast to create the movement. Efird deliberately honed in on Williams' summers on Cape Cod and the reverberations of his affair with Kiernan. "It's a period that is often neglected," she says. "It's either thought of as not important because he was still a young struggling artist, or avoided because it references a time when he was openly gay. So I spent the year at home compiling a script of his poetry, letters, memoirs--a collection of writing that is reminiscent of his first summer in Provincetown. David Kaplan, the festival curator, had access to unpublished poetry that he shared with me, and helped me secure the rights to use. So that was really special.

"Bringing those words back to life has created this interesting perspective of the past and present merging into the future. We're playing with the theatrical devices Williams is known for--his memory plays, and for bringing his own life into his writing."

After the year-long process of crafting the script, the entire piece was created in five weeks. Efird and the six students in Road to Paradise came back to campus in late August, a week before the rest of the student body, for a weeklong intensive of working with the text, watching videos about the writer, and doing historical and cultural research in the library. Genevieve Belleveau '07, whose interest in experimental theater led her to audition for the piece, loved the way the process brought together the ideas and capabilities of all six cast members.

"Carson has this fabulous way of allowing us to create material collaboratively with her," Belleveau says. "She brings exercises that act as catalysts for generating movement. A lot of the script deals with Tennessee's first love, and she had us do a free-writing exercise where we wrote about moments in our lives that had to do with love and loss. We used those adjectives and adverbs to spark movement."

Eric Conroe '08, who is studying literature and drama at Bennington, sees that interplay of text and movement as one of the elements at the heart of the piece. "Physicalizing words is always powerful. Billing something as 'dance theater' gives you permission to move in any way. There's no limit to what you can do with your presence onstage." Conroe believes that creating Road to Paradise as dance theater instead of traditional theater allowed for a greater range of meaning than acting alone would have done.

As for the performance space: "We're performing 200 yards into Cape Cod Bay, on the end of a wharf," Efird says. "All the imagery in the text, the seagulls and the sound of the water, will be there. We'll be swallowed up by the environment he was so inspired by.

"It's funny, because in many ways, Provincetown was for Tennessee Williams what Bennington was for me. I come from the South, and I came up here to escape these certain social obligations--to find a place of complete artistic freedom where there were people who understood me. I think that's what P-town was for Tennessee, and in the long run it helped him appreciate his heritage even more."

Road to Paradise will be presented at Bennington College during Family and Alumni Weekend, this Saturday, October 7. Visitors are invited to come and see the hour-long performance at 1:00 pm or 2:30 pm in Greenwall Auditorium.

The cast includes Genevieve Belleveau '07, Eric Conroe '08, Jen Funk '08, Sophie Hinderberger '07, Dan Wilcox '08, and Max Wolkowitz '09. The director is Carson Efird '05 and the assistant director is Alex Rosenberg '07, with costumes by Bryony Thompson '07 and Kirian Langseth-Schmidt '07, and sound by Brian Schultis '08.

More:

• First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival
• Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival
• Biography of Tennessee Williams at PBS.com
• Dance at Bennington
• Theater at Bennington

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