Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival pays homage to sci-fi and fantasy work

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival is back for its 18th year, celebrating the life and works of the famed playwright, screenwriter and author through his science fiction and fantasy works.

While titles like “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” might spring to mind when you hear the name Tennesse Williams, Williams’ work covered many genres. In fact, as a young man — then still referred to by his birth name Thomas Lanier — Williams submitted numerous sci-fi and fantasy stories to Weird Tales Magazine, which famously featured the early works of writers like H.P Lovecraft, according to an essay written by festival curator David Kaplan.

"Four years ago I was doing research (on) something else and I read an article that Williams wrote in the New York Times in 1958 that said 'Key to his work was a short story he wrote when he was 16 that appeared in Weird (Tales) Magazine in 1928,'" Kaplan said in an interview with the Times. "And I thought, 'That's an odd thing to say.' So I bothered to read the Weird (Tales) Magazine story he wrote and he wasn't kidding."

Kaplan wanted to bring attention to the keystone of Williams' later works while highlighting the connection between its themes and the modern day.

"One of the things that interested him in science fiction and fantasy was this sense of a sliding reality and I think that's what we live in right now," Kaplan said.

"The science fiction and fantasy stuff which he began writing as a teenager didn't go away during his 18-year sojourn into respectability," he continued. "It went under the surface of the plays that we're familiar with. It's responsible for the shape of those plays without the audience being aware of it."

What to expect at this year's Provincetown Tennessee Williams' Theater Festival

The festival will take place from Sept. 21 through Sept. 24, featuring eight performances — “Sci-Fi Hotel Plays,” “The Men from the Polar Star,” “The Eye That Saw Death,” “A Weird Anthology,” “Killer Queens,” “A Recluse and His Guest,” “Stairs to See the Roof,” “The Knightly Quest” — at various locations across Provincetown.

"There's too much theater criticism that's been applied to Tennessee Williams which has to do with decoding the psychology of his family, his sister or himself or dealing with his identity as an alcoholic, as a gay man or as anything," Kaplan said. "The plays are poems and what I'm hoping comes out of this year for the audience, as well as for the participating artists, is that we look at Williams as a much clearer playwright. We read the plays and we attend the plays not looking at them as symptoms of sociology, of family structure, but as poetic statements."

The festival begins with the premiere of “A Recluse and His Guest” at the Crown and Anchor at 12 p.m. on Sept. 21. “A Recluse and His Guest,” directed by puppeteer Pandora Gastelum, is the story of a “mysterious woman wrapped in leather” who finds a place to stay with the town recluse. She becomes his caretaker and maybe something more too.

After directing a "Peaceful Kingdom" at last year's festival, Kaplan knew Gastelum was the only person for the job.

"...It really was beautiful, moving, funny and grotesque and it would not have been that way had there been real people," Kaplan said. "So when I looked at the play, a 'Recluse and his Guest,' I immediately thought 'Pandora will do a great job of this. What's grotesque about it, she will maintain and what's moving about it, she will make clear.'"

Of the eight performances, two — “A Weird Anthology” and “Killer Queens” — are adaptations of Williams’ early works for “Weird Tales."

"Weird is really the beginning of the concept for him because the pulp science fiction magazines made a big thing of saying 'No ghosts, no witches, no unicorns, except if they were on a foreign planet, but no ghosts no witches, no folklore,'" Kaplan said. "...That's where his idea of science fiction comes from...For him when he's thinking of science fiction, he's not thinking of Star Wars. He's thinking of Weird Magazine."

The festival ends with a performance of “The Men from the Polar Star” at 5 p.m. at the Harbor Hotel.

"That's a really interesting one about a widow in New Orleans who has a child after having a good time with a spaceship crew," Kaplan said. "I knew that Tom (Mitchell) had been working on this for four or five years and I said he had he had done such a nice job with 'Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor' for us. I said, 'Would you be interested? Do you have enough time to bring this to PTown?' And he said 'I've been waiting for someone to ask me. Yes.'"

Outside of performances, the festival will be hosting two talks, Williams 101 for "William's widows," as Kaplan calls them, or the people who are plus ones to the festival and have no idea who Tennesse Williams is, and Williams 201, for the graduates of 101 who want to know what this year's theme is all about. There will also be an opening party on Sept. 21 at 9 p.m. at Boatslip Resort and Beach Club and a closing party on Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. at the Shipwreck Lounge.

Tickets are on sale and are $45 per show. Festival passes are also available, starting at $105 for a Friday, Saturday or Sunday day pass, $225 for a flex pass and “Carte Blanche” VIP passes for $300 and $500, made out as tax-deductible donations to the festival.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Tennessee Williams Theater Festival looks at his science fiction work