The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, running September 21–24, will present The Hotel Plays, a new staging of scenes from Tennessee Williams and William Shakespeare by the Spectrum Theatre Ensemble of Providence, Rhode Island in association with Trinity Repertory Company.
The Hotel Plays combine the two iconic playwrights under one roof at the Gifford House Inn: Williams’ Mister Paradise and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, plus scenes set in inns from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Comedy of Errors.
In the “hotel play” format, first developed by the Festival in 2009, audiences move from room to room.
Among the cast of 14 are Leslie Fray, Jim O’Brien, and Jason M. Shipman. The show comes to the Festival from Providence, staged by Trinity Rep Artistic Leadership and Inclusion Fellow Clay B. Martin and Erin Cawley.
“Experimental theater has become a signature of what our Festival can bring to the world of Williams,” said Festival Executive Director Jef Hall-Flavin in a statement. “Since 2009, when we first began producing short plays by Tennessee Williams in hotel rooms, the beauty and power of site-specific stagings has caught on. In recent years, theatergoers have discovered the joy of seeing Williams plays performed in hotel rooms around the globe, from Boston to London to South Africa.”
In advance of their arrival in Provincetown, Spectrum Theatre Ensemble actors will present a scene from The Hotel Plays at Trinity Rep’s season opener event September 10; entry is free. From September 14-16, STE will perform The Hotel Plays in full at Providence’s historic Barnaby Castle as a fundraiser for the company as well as for the Victorian mansion. The production will arrive at the Gifford House in Provincetown September 21.
For more details, visit TWPtown.org.
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