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Actor Morgan Freeman to Narrate BBC
Documentary of 2008 Mississippi Delta
Tennessee Williams Festival
The 16th annual hometown celebration of America’s great playwright Tennessee Wil-liams has been selected for a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Radio 2 doc-umentary narrated by Academy Award–winning ac-tor Morgan Freeman, and promises to be a greatly expanded showcase of the arts and the cultural heritage of the Mississippi Delta. Dates are September 26–27, 2008.
With an audience ranging from 13 to 17 million in the United Kingdom and via the Internet, the prestigious program will focus on the links between Tennessee Williams and Clarksdale, its influences on his works and today’s generation of young writers and actors. Legendary characters from his great Delta plays—Big Daddy, Brick, and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie; Blanche Dubois and Stella from A Streetcar Named Desire; and Val Xavier with his blues guitar and snake-skinned jacket from Orpheus Descending—will dominate live drama presentations and captivate audiences experiencing front porch plays and theater center stages.
“This festival is fantastic; we have always liked the idea of telling his [Williams] story, of giving people an understanding of how important and relevant his works remain today,” comments BBC producer Carmel Lonergan, who traveled to Clarksdale in mid-February to initiate arrangements. “He touches people,” she continued. “It’s powerful storytelling—more powerful than walking into a cathedral.”
The successful 2007 festival so attracted and impressed a corps of travel writers from Great Britain as well as visitors from London, including Paul and Susan Moser, that it reached the ears of BBC decisionmakers. In a letter, the Mosers praised the festival for “meeting interesting and knowledgeable people in such an informal setting. Being able to wander from porch to porch for performances was like nothing I had ever experienced and will certainly never forget. I was so impressed how the town encourages performances from their children, creating a love of the
theater and a pride in Williams.”
The 2008 festival will focus on Williams’s play Orpheus Descending, which had its premiere on Broadway in 1957. Dealing with the eternal struggles of good and evil, life and death, salvation and damnation, light and darkness, cleansing and corruption, this play was first called Battle of Angels. A story of loneliness, passion, betrayal, and revenge, it recreates the Orpheus and Eurydice legend and places it in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Just who is the itinerant outsider Val Xavier who enters the Torrence Mercantile Store of Two River County and sets the action of the play in motion with his overwhelming sexuality? Is he Val as “Stud for Hire,” “Snakeskin,” the “Fugitive Kind,” an erotic “Saint Valentine,” Orpheus, “Xavier/Savior,” or just a neophyte shaman? Various interpretations have been made in the play’s history on stage, on film, beginning with the 1959 screen adaptation under the title The Fugitive Kind, and in an opera version that had its world premiere in 1994 at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.
As in the past, the festival will include presentations by Williams authorities and friends, performances, screenings of Williams films, a session with papers by scholars, and tours of the house and neighborhood where the playwright lived as a child. Also scheduled in conjunction with the festival are workshops for teachers and student actors and a drama competition, with prizes totaling $2,500 for the winners.
The Tennessee Williams Festival Acting Competition, hosted by Coahoma Community College, is open to high school students in Mississippi. The competition includes two acting categories: monologues and scenes. All material must be drawn from the plays of Tennessee Williams. Each monologue is should 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 given for winning monologues and scenes, which will be performed for the festival audience. Prize money will go to schools of the winners for use with drama activities or library books related to theater and literature. Students, with their teacher-sponsors, will be given the opportunity to decide how the prize money will be spent.
Scholars are invited to submit papers for possible presentation at the festival. Papers on any topic related to Williams and his work are eligible for consideration. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes. Authors whose papers are selected for presentation will receive free lodging during the festival and access to all buffets and receptions. The deadline for submissions is August 30, 2008. To enter, send a completed paper (7–8 pages) or an abstract (250 words) to Colby H. Kullman, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677.
Supported by grants from Coahoma Community College and other groups, the festival is free and open to the public. For brochures and more information contact Coahoma Community College’s Public Relations Department at 662- 621-4157 and check the festival’s Web site at www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams for updates on the 2008 program and news and photographs from the 2007 festival.
