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11th
Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival Celebrates Food, Art, Religion,
Music, and Performance
This year's Mississippi
Delta Tennessee Williams Festival, held in Clarksdale,
October 9-11, 2003, stretched out in an entirely
new direction when Randall Andrews (a celebrity
chef introduced frequently on culinary television
shows as "Chef to the Stars") and Carl
Pitts (an accomplished chef and veteran social
studies and history instructor at Coahoma Community
College) teamed up to celebrate the ethnic foods
of the Mississippi Delta and focus on recipes
for Southern food and drink mentioned in Tennessee
Williams’s plays: Big Daddy’s hot buttered
biscuits and hoppin’ john; Aunt Rose’s
greens, pot liquor, and Eggs Birmingham; Baby
Doll’s and Amanda’s lemonade; and Maxine’s
rum-cocos. The food preparation demonstrations
and festival feasting delighted a community crowd
of over 200 who overflowed the confines of Clarksdale
Station.
This years special event was the dedication of
St. George’s Episcopal Church’s former
rectory as a National Literary Landmark. Tennessee
Williams’s beloved grandfather, the Reverend
Walter Dakin, was rector there from 1915-1933;
and Tennessee and Rose Williams spent significant
amounts of time living there during their youth.
Kenneth Holditch officiated by explaining the
significance of the rectory to the world of Tennessee
Williams--and now all of us.
Kenneth Holditch’s opening address on “Tennessee’s
Delta: Cotton, Rising Tides, and Blues” set
the stage opulently for the grand show that was
to follow. The scholarly part of the Festival
focused on Williams’s short plays 27 Wagons
Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper
as well as his screenplay Baby Doll, which was
shown as part of the program. Scholars Robert
Canon, Erma Duricko, Kenneth Holditch, Jay Jensen,
Colby Kullman, William Spencer, and Ralph Voss
commented on the two one-act plays that were
put together to make the screenplay.
Later, Vernon Chadwick presented “Tiger
Tail: The Exorcism of Farce”; Ruth Moon
Kempher, on “Baby Blue Ribbons and Roses,” a
study of womanly images in selected Williams
plays and paintings; and Travis Montgomery, on “Leaving
Laurel: Migration and the Failure of Geographic
Cure in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar
Named Desire.”
Porch plays are an innovation
of the Williams Festival that make it unique.
This year Janna Montgomery performed monologues
of Williams’s heroines while Coahoma County
High School students acted in a scene from Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof on two of the porches of the
old homes in the historic area of Clarksdale
near St. George’s Episcopal Church and rectory.
With the festival from the beginning, Erma Duricko
(who has directed off and off-off Broadway and
at theatres across the country) once again brought
actors from her Blue Roses Productions, Inc.,
to perform at the Williams Festival. At Uncle
Henry’s Place (the real site of the playwright’s
Moon Lake Casino), Duricko herself performed
Blanche Dubois’s monologue about the death
of her 17-year-old husband, Allan Gray, as he
ran out of Moon Lake Casino to shoot himself;
and actors Jimmy Ireland and Marissa Duricko
recreated the roles of Dr. John Buchanan and
Alma Winemiller from Summer and Smoke as they
spend part of an evening at Moon Lake Casino,
then run by Papa Gonzales.
Special guest, JoAnn C. McDowell, president of Prince William Sound Community
College in Valdez, Alaska, and founder and director of Alaska’s Last Frontier
Theatre Festival spoke about her prestigious festival as well as about Kansas’s
William Inge Theatre Festival (with which she was connected for over a decade).
Along with the Williams Festival, all three programs, among the best in the nation,
are supported by outstanding community colleges: Prince William Sound Community
College, Independence Community College, and Coahoma Community College.
A highlight of the Williams Festival since its early days has been the student
acting competition, with over $ 2,500 in cash prizes going to the drama departments
of the winning actors’ schools. This year top honors in monologue, scene,
costume, and “Stella!” shouting went to Oak Grove High School of Hattiesburg,
APAC of Jackson, Coahoma County High School of Clarksdale, and Rankin High School
of Jackson.
Once again, food and music added just the right spice to the Williams program.
The opening Thursday night feast at Uncle Henry’s Place on Moon Lake, the
Friday night dinner at Belle Clark with music by guitarists John Ruskey and Tater
Foster playing blues ballads by Tennessee Williams, and the Saturday night banquet
at Clarksdale Station on Blues Alley with musical entertainment by the Wesley
Jefferson Band brought each day’s activities to a close with a truly “Most
Satisfactory Supper.”
Colby H. Kullman |
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