Photo by Jonathan Velasquez
The Tennessee Williams Festival will be performing four of the playright's one-acts as radio dramas.
Something Spoken — a radio presentation of one-act plays from the venerable Tennessee Williams — is set to return to St. Louis’ airways starting Saturday.
Now in its second iteration, Something Spoken began in 2020 as a solution to live-performance restrictions during the pandemic. That meant that Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis had to put its shows on hold, but Founding Executive Director Carrie Houk was determined to celebrate the playwright. She initiated the radio-play collaboration with Classic 107.3 FM.
The series of six one-acts was a hit, and due to its success, Houk decided to reprise the radio format for another edition of Something Spoken.
This year's program includes four of Williams’ lesser-known works. Each show will be broadcast at 3:30 p.m. starting with “The Magic Tower,” on Saturday, August 5. The one-act follows a bohemian couple as they take refuge from the dregs of tenement life in their love for one another.
On Saturday, August 12, is “Something Unspoken,” a one-act about a Southern debutante whose codependent relationship with her secretary reaches a tipping point during an election for the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. A play on the one-act’s title lends the radio series its name.
The third show, on August 19, is “Sunburst” — a one-act reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights — in which a famed actress delays her captors by entertaining them until daybreak.
Tennessee Williams.
Houk selects each play by assessing its “audibility” — or how well the script translates when all visual cues are removed for the radio performance.
From there, she draws upon her professional experience as a casting director and begins to fill each role. Each show brings in new voices, but many actors from 2020’s Something Spoken are returning for this year’s program, including Broadway star Ken Page who will host the series.
Rehearsals are typically held via Zoom, and oftentimes the cast does not convene in-person until it’s time to record. Once at the studio, the entire performance is usually recorded in just one take. Afterward, a team of editors and designers add in sound effects to signal the stage business and orient the listener.
Following each broadcast TWStL scholar-in-residence Tom Mitchell will provide commentary, often relating Williams’ plays back to his time spent in St. Louis.
When Williams was seven, his father relocated his family to St. Louis from Mississippi for a job at the International Shoe Company. Once here, Williams’ life entered a period of near-constant tumult: his parents' marriage grew resentful, his father’s alcoholism worsened, Williams’ abuse at the hands of his father increased, and his histrionic mother frequently moved the family across the city.
Williams was outspoken about his disdain for St. Louis — dubbing the city “St. Pollution” and its residents as “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1946 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Despite Williams’ vitriol, he sometimes alludes to St. Louis in his work. The International Shoe Company masquerades as the Continental Shirt Makers in Stairs to the Roof and his alma mater Soldan High School makes an appearance in The Glass Menagerie, Williams’ first critically acclaimed play.
“He really didn’t hate St. Louis, he hated his time here because of his family’s dysfunction” Houk says. “If you read [his work], in some ways, it’s a love letter to the city.”
Williams ultimately spent 20 years in St. Louis. He left in 1929 to study journalism at the University of Missouri, but returned to the city prior to graduation by force of his father.
Once back in St. Louis, Williams began working at the International Shoe Company. During these years, Williams began writing with an unprecedented fervor. In her published diary, Williams’ mother recounts her son’s ferocity:
“[Tennessee] would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.”
In 1936, Williams began attending Washington University. The following year, he wrote "Me, Vashya," an anti-war farce, as a class assignment. After the play only placed fourth in a student competition, Williams dropped out and left St. Louis entirely.
Later that year, Williams transferred to the University of Iowa — where he picked up the nickname “Tennessee” — and graduated with a B.A. in English two years later.
Shortly after graduating, Williams made for New York City, and Houk speculates that “he couldn’t wait to escape to a place where he could fit in more.” After an early life disrupted by an abusive father and social ostracisation — Williams was heavily teased for his effeminacy — it seems Williams found solace in New York’s creative sphere.
Houk organized St. Louis’ first Tennessee Williams Festival in 2016. This year’s festival, now in its eighth season, is scheduled for September and will showcase “Suddenly Last Summer,” a Southern gothic one-act written by Williams in 1957.
Through Something Spoken and the festival, Houk hopes to inspire St. Louis audiences through Williams’ work.
“He’s a huge proponent of kind behavior,” she says. “And I believe, now more than ever, that it’s very important for us to all examine [his work], because kindness is getting lost.”
For more information on Something Spoken visit twstl.org.
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
