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
2006 CAST
Don | Ben (Griessmeyer) Berry
Dick | Elliot Eustis
Miriam | Vanessa Wasche
Wanda | Megan Bartle
Postman | David Landon
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
2015 CAST
Don | Ben Berry
Dick | Nash Hightower
Miriam | Ruby Wolf
Wanda | Bronwyn Whittle
Postman | Ian Leahy
PHOTO GALLERY
[Josh Andrus]
The Parade (2015) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. Peregrine Theatre Ensemble at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Photo by Josh Andrus.
The Parade (2015) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. Peregrine Theatre Ensemble at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Photo by Josh Andrus.
The Parade (2015) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. Peregrine Theatre Ensemble at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Photo by Josh Andrus.
The Parade (2015) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. Peregrine Theatre Ensemble at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Photo by 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.
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.”
Randy Gener