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THE PARADE

OR, APPROACHING THE END OF A SUMMER
[By Tennessee Williams]
PROVINCETOWN TW THEATER FESTIVAL

World Premiere

produced by Shakespeare on the Cape

2006, 2015

This play changed my life. I feel privileged to have opened the first Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in 2006 with this bittersweet, openly gay, autobiographical play that traces Williams' first love and heartbreak on the Provincetown dunes in 1940.

 

The revival of The Parade in 2015 was also a significant moment for both me and the Tennessee Williams Festival. Not only did it mark a decade of Festival growth -- from a crazy idea into an international event -- but the production was brought outside, to a quiet beach with the dunescape and lighthouse visible in the distance. Nowhere else could this meta-theatrical moment have happened other than Provincetown, where the play takes place.

 

The remarkable Ben Berry, who originated the role, reprised his heartaching performance with an accomplished cast including the magnetic Ruby Wolf. This play changed my understanding of Tennessee Williams forever.

2006 TEAM

Costumes | Clare Brauch

Lighting | Megan Tracy Leddy

Sound  | Katharine Horowitz

Production | Tessa K. Bry, Raphael Richter

Direction | Jef Hall-Flavin, Eric Powell Holm

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2006 CAST

Don | Ben (Griessmeyer) Berry

Dick | Elliot Eustis

Miriam | Vanessa Wasche

Wanda | Megan Bartle

Postman | David Landon

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2015 TEAM

Scenery | Christopher Heilman

Costumes | Carol Sherry

Sound  | Katharine Horowitz

Production | Tessa Bry Taylor, Jake Ford

Direction | Jef Hall-Flavin

Producer | Peregrine Theatre Ensemble

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2015 CAST

Don | Ben Berry

Dick | Nash Hightower

Miriam | Ruby Wolf

Wanda | Bronwyn Whittle

Postman | Ian Leahy

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PHOTO GALLERY

[Josh Andrus]

WHAT PEOPLE SAID

[BOSTON GLOBE]

Thanks in substantial part to the annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival ...a spate of unseen or seldom-seen plays have pushed their way into view, giving us a fuller sense of his entire body of work and suggesting the need for a reappraisal of a writer we thought we knew.

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Don Aucoin

[AMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE]

Affectionately staged by Shakespeare on the Cape, The Parade made headlines last year, because its existence exposed the lie of conventional wisdom, especially among Williams’s politically correct detractors and gay-liberation activists, which argued that he was an innately tragic and self-loathing gay dramatist—that his homosexual characters are cloaked in heterosexual disguise, their humanity distorted. …The Parade is an autobiographical document from what he called that “pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing up,” a chronicle of how he had finally come “thoroughly out of the closet.”

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Randy Gener

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