Tennessee Williams Festival to Include Stamp Ceremony and Acting Competition

Clarksdale, the childhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams and the setting for many of his great Mississippi Delta plays, will host the unveiling of the U.S. Postal Service's new commemorative stamp in honor of the playwright. The stamp's first date of issue ceremony will coincide with Clarksdale's third annual Tennessee Williams Festival, October 12-14, 1995. This year, for the first time, the festival will include a drama competition for high school students in Mississippi, with prizes totaling $2,000 for the winners. Other new features are workshops for teachers and for student actors.

The stamp ceremony will take place on Friday, October 13, at 10:00 a.m. in Clarksdale's historic district. Speakers for the event will include postal officials and local dignitaries as well as theatrical producer Lyle Leverich, whom Williams chose as his biographer; Kenneth Holditch, research professor of English at the University of New Orleans and editor of the Tennessee Williams Literary Journal; and Richard Freeman Leavitt, author of the Pictorial World of Tennessee Williams. After the stamp ceremony, Leverich will be on hand to sign copies of Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, the first of a two-volume biography, to be released this fall after six years of legal entanglements.

As in the past, the festival program will include presentations by Williams authorities and friends, several performances, tours of the house and neighborhood where the playwright lived as a child, and a prayer service at St. George's Episcopal Church, where his grandfather, the Reverend Walter E. Dakin, served as rector for 16 years. The festival opens at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 12, with one act Williams plays performed by New Stage Theatre of Jackson and a critique/preview of the festival's centerpiece production, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by veteran Williams director Erma Duricko and Williams scholar Colby Kullman. Cat will be performed four times by Clarksdale Community Theatre, and other dramatic performances will feature winners of an acting competition to be inaugurated at this year's festival.

The Tennessee Williams Festival Acting Competition is open to all Mississippi high school students. The competition includes two acting categories, monologues and scenes. All material must be drawn from the plays of Tennessee Williams. Each monologue is to be two minutes or less, and each scene is to be between five and ten minutes and may involve any number of characters.

Cash prizes are $300 (first place) and $200 (second place) for monologues and $1,000 (first place) and $500 (second place) for scenes. Prize money will go to schools of the winners for use with drama activities or library books. Winning monologues and scenes will be performed for the festival audience.

The acting competition will take place at Coahoma Community College on Saturday, October 14. Two workshops are also scheduled for that day. Cindy Gold, formerly with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and now a theatre professor at the University of Mississippi, will offer an acting workshop for high school students. Colby Kullman, English professor at Ole Miss, will conduct a workshop on "Teaching Tennessee Williams" for high school teachers.

For further information, contact the Tennessee Williams Festival, P.O. Box 1565, Clarksdale, MS 38614-1565, or call the Chamber of Commerce in Clarksdale at 601-627-7337.

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