Tennessee Williams Festival
to Include 2nd Acting Competition

Clarksdale, the childhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams and the setting for many of his great Mississippi Delta plays, will host the fourth annual Tennessee Williams Festival, October 17-19, 1996. This year, for the second time, the festival will include a drama competition for high school students in Mississippi, with prizes totaling $2,000 for the winners. The festival will include workshops for teachers and for student actors.

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 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 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 19. 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 the University of Mississippi, 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.