Clarksdale Ready for the 16th Tennessee Williams Festival

Radio and production crews from England will join actors, scholars, and theater professionals in Clarksdale on September 26–27 for the 16th annual festival honoring playwright Tennessee Williams. The British Broadcasting Corporation will feature the festival as a BBC Radio 2 documentary with actor Morgan Freeman as narrator, and White Crow productions from the United Kingdom will film the event for a documentary slated for airing on public television.

The focus of the event will be on Williams’s Delta plays and the region’s ties and cultural heritage that influenced his writings, including Orpheus Descending, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Presentations on Orpheus Descending and its blues musician hero, Valentine Xavier, will link literature with Clarksdale’s place as the birthplace of Mississippi Delta blues.

Among the actors and theater professionals booked to perform are Broadway stars Tammy Grimes and Joel Vig; director/actress Erma Duricko, who also will direct the student drama competition; Rhoda Justice-Malloy, chairman of Theatre Arts at the University of Mississippi; regional actors Jeff Glickman, of the Pensacola Little Theatre, and four from Theatre Oxford: Johnny McPhail, Ann Fisher- Wirth, Janna Montgomery, and Alice Walker. Porch plays will be presented in Clarksdale’s historic neighborhood where the playwright spent his childhood.

Williams authorities participating in the festival include W. Kenneth Holditch, who will deliver the keynote address; Margaret Bradham Thornton, looking at how Notebooks illuminated the creative process of Tennessee Williams and his Delta plays; and Milly Barranger, presenting “The Playwright, His Agent, and the Orpheus Plays.” Exploring the blues component will be Nick Moschovakis, author of “Tennessee Williams’s American Blues,” and Jim O’Neal, a founding editor of Living Blues magazine and an authority on Clarksdale’s blues history and current status. Acclaimed blues musician Charlie Musselwhite, a multiple Grammy nominee and winner of 18 Blues Music Awards, will perform at the Friday night reception at the Barr/Brewer Mansion.

Also scheduled in conjunction with the festival are workshops for teachers and for student actors and a drama competition, with prizes totaling $2,500 for the winners. The competition, hosted by Coahoma Community College, is open to high school students in Mississippi and 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 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.

The festival is free and open to the public thanks to grants from Coahoma Community College, the Isle of Capri Casino, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Rock River Foundation, and numerous businesses and individuals. Tax-deductible donations are welcome and may be sent to the Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival, 3240 Friars Point Rd. Clarksdale, MS 38614. Reservations are required only for food events.

Schedules will be posted soon on the festival’s Web page, www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams. Area room reservations may be booked at Best Western of Clarksdale: 662-627-9292; the Comfort Inn of Clarksdale: 662-627-5122; EconoLodge: 662-624-6633; the Isle of Capri Casino/Hotel in Lula, 1-800-THE-ISLE; and Uncle Henry’s Bed and Breakfast on Moon Lake: 662-337-2757.

PANNY FLAUTT MAYFIELD