March 11 – 27, 2010 at The Bushwick Starr
Target Margin Theater’s Unknown Williams Lab brought you Tennessee Williams like you’ve never seen him before, presenting new insight into one of America’s greatest and most prolific playwrights. We exposed the experiments from a career that spanned half a century and unearthed the works Tennessee Williams was not known for. Our Unknown Williams Lab aimed to surprise, scandalize, and titillate!
Featured performances:
This is the Peaceable Kingdom
Lead Artist: William Burke
A place of love without fear; or a nursing home riot.
The Case of the Crushed Petunias: “A Lyrical Fantasy”
Lead Artist: Sherrine Azab
This stylized and flamboyant piece serves as a timeless adulthood fable with subtle notes of Hitchcock and ‘The Twilight Zone” in flavor.
Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?
Lead Artist: Kate Foster
A haunting tale of unfulfilled dreams, parental pressure and personal inertia.
Escape
Lead Artist: Andrew Simon
Three members of a chain-gang can only sit and wonder as a fourth makes a run for his freedom.
The Municipal Abattoir
Lead Artist: Diana Konopka
On a city street somewhere, one man stops another to ask for directions. A short play about politics and punctuality.
The Day on Which a Man Dies
Lead Artist: Jake Hooker
Not a play about the death of a Great Painter: it is the death of a painting, of art, and of greatness.
The Purification
Lead Artist: Kathleen Kennedy Tobin
Williams’ only verse drama, a tale of passion, murder and blood atonement in territorial New Mexico, performed by puppets on a small stage.
Thank You, Kind Spirit
Lead Artist: Alisa Matlovsky
At the end of Chartres Street, in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans, Mother Duclos presides over a spiritualist service.
Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws
Lead Artist: Donya K. Washington
Ladies Who Lunch in a cafe that’s a refugee from a Toulouse Lautrec design with a James Dean-esque (gay) biker duo — what else could it be but a Williams play?
The Pronoun “I”
Lead Artist: Michael Levinton
A mad Queen of England, nearly nude narcissistic boy-beloveds, hot bedraggled revolutionaries, and a great gilded assertion of the first person singular.
Green Eyes
Lead Artist: Travis Chamberlain
The text of this compact erotic thriller becomes an outlet for one woman’s outrageous fantasy, testing the limits of sexual tolerance in a backhanded satire of heterosexual matrimony.
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde
Lead Artist: Shannon Sindelar
In this perverse and brutal work, comic horror plays out with some of Williams’ most outrageous characters.
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