antaean playwrights

an evening with the playwright
from the occasional writings and poems
of Tennessee Williams

Arranged and performed by Jeremy Lawrence

Talking Tennessee is mostly based on Where I Live, a collection of Williams' occasional writings: essays he wrote for magazines and newspapers before the openings of plays or during their run or for prefaces to published editions of the plays, and some other sources (including something he had written for a record jacket). I knew the piece of material I wanted to start with and the one I wanted to use at the piece's end. I laid out all the pieces of the puzzle in between and very quickly they fell together into the piece I am performing. The journey was not exactly chronological although I used that as an initial framework, but what happened as I was piecing the puzzle together was that the need to talk about the writing came to the fore. Williams could not survive without writing. My guess is that it was why he felt he was alive. And it was life "that he truly longed for." In writing, he gave life to characters from deep inside himself and let them take flight -- and live. This birth cry is perhaps the out cry of personal lyricism. His work in turn challenges us to escape from "the narrow cubicle of one's self " as Williams was able to do in writing.

This is "the bird I hope to capture" in the net of this piece. I cannot stop quoting Tennessee for I am "Talking Tennessee" here. In this piece, the words are all his. The passion for theatre, for the opportunity if gives the artist to create life, I think we share.

— Jeremy Lawrence

Life Story, Faint As Leaf Shadow, Covenant, We Have Not Long To Love, and extracts from Where I Live and Night of the Iguana presented through special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.