Theatre in a unique setting in Tennessee Williams’ The Hotel
|||ACCLAIMED US playwright, Tennessee Williams, spent most of his life living in boarding houses and hotels, so no wonder he wrote so many one-act plays set in hotels.
Most of those plays are short though, so are seldom performed, but back in 2009 The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival started mounting them as site- specific works, in hotels around the picturesque New England town.
“He lived a lot of his life in hotel rooms, he died in a hotel room, even some of his most famous plays are set in hotels: Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana (and) The Day on Which a Man Dies, which we just did in Grahamstown. It’s a theme in his work.
“He really understood the dynamic of hotels as a transient space, a space between moving, a space between reality and dream, life and death. He used all those themes in the plays.
“They’re like a little haiku. All the themes of the big plays, but distilled,” explained Marcel Meyer, one half of the production team which will be mounting Williams’s hotel plays at the Vineyard Hotel next month.
Together with director Fred Abrahamse, Meyer approached the Vineyard Hotel because of its history as prolific diary writer, Lady Anne Barnard’s country cottage, plus it has played host to many illustrious authors, like Rudyard Kipling, since it was turned into a hotel in the 1890s.
“You don’t want too modern a hotel because the plays are set in the ’50s and ’70s, so you need a space that will give you that ambience without having to create a set in the rooms,’ said Meyer.
Only 40 audience members can be accommodated at one show and in between meal courses they will be led to two separate rooms where they will play voyeur to hotel scenes playing out in front of them.
Later in the evening, the audience switch and watch the other play, which makes for diverse dinner conversation because not everyone at the table will have experienced the same thing.
“People enjoy going to festivals and site- specific things, so we thought, let’s bring the plays here. It’s an experiential thing, plus people can stay over,” said Abrahamse.
“We’re sitting with a huge amount of problems in this country, but what is fantastic is that across gender, race and orientation, people have a hunger to have social intercourse, to see plays, to experience things,” said Abrahamse
“Even more so now than ever. The more you get caught up in social media, the more isolated you become, whereas the theatre is the one place where we come together and have communion with each other, especially in this setting where they are so close to the performers.
“Williams is a writer who fascinates audiences and we’ve built up a body of his work over the last few years so there’s an awareness about his writing. I think people are fascinated by the less well-known ones,” said Meyer.
Abrahamse sees the resurgence in fine dining and a growing interest in food festivals colliding happily with the interest people display towards theatre festivals: “It’s a combo of site-specific work, food, a cultural evening and also at the festivals people love afterwards the q&a and the talking,” said Abrahamse.
After these plays the audience will get a chance to meet the actors over coffee and liqueur in the hotel’s library.
Nicole Franco and Meyer are the despairing lovers in Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, which both play out like a despairing poem, and run in the one room.
In the other room, Melissa Haiden and Stephen Jubber are the dysfunctional bride and groom in Green Eyes, which was Williams’s response to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Though he wrote in 1970, it remained unpublished and unstaged until 2008.
The Hotel plays at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands on July 30, August 4, 5, 13, 19 and 20 at 7pm. The double bill includes a three-course meal paired with wine. To book: hotelplays@ vineyard.co.za. R650 per person.