‘T’ for Texas, ‘T’ for Tennessee
Spring Storm may not be the last world premiere we see from Tennessee Williams. You may recall that in 1999 that early work by the late playwright, written before his breakthrough with The Glass Menagerie, served as the much-ballyhooed debut of the Actors Repertory of Texas (a company we’ve heard relatively little from since). It was discovered in the massive Williams archive in UT’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the same place where Vanessa Redgrave found Not About Nightingales, another pre-Menagerie drama that she took to Houston’s Alley Theatre and turned into a Broadway and West End hit. As most of what Williams penned prior to Menagerie never made it onto a stage, the Texas productions of Nightingales and Spring Storm could legitimately be called world premieres. The Austin Storm caused little more than a rumble, but at the same time, the play was being produced in the Bay Area by the Marin Theatre Company (which also lays claim to the world premiere title), and there it did quite well — well enough that Lee Sankowich, the company’s artistic director, wants to stage another unseen Williams work. He has obtained the blessing of Peggy Fox, who publishes Williams’ work through New Directions Publishing, New York, and Tom Erhardt, the London agent for all of Williams’ plays, who say he can have his pick of any of Tennessee’s plays or screenplays that have not been produced and can edit them as he sees fit. With that in mind, Sankowich paid a visit to Austin in late June and spent a couple of days in the HRC poring over the playwright’s archives. Did he find some as yet unknown gem, a drama to stand alongside Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire? No, and Sankowich will tell you flat out that he doesn’t expect to. He allows that there’s not much of the writer’s work that has never been done and what hasn’t been done isn’t of the caliber of his masterpieces. Still, says the director, “it doesn’t need to be any of those classics that he wrote as long as it works on stage.” He’ll be happy to find something that works as well as Spring Storm, with interesting studies in character or writing that foreshadows the greatness in Williams’ later work. Sankowich describes his first foray into the Ransom Center as “overwhelming” but “very productive.” He found a title or two that he didn’t know about, which may yield something promising, and just reading other things Williams had written — letters, journals, term papers in which he talked about the need for a playwright to be “heavy-handed” — taught him a lot about the man Tennessee Williams, “and that was as valuable as reading about his work.” Sankowich will mount whatever he finds in March of next year as a co-production of Marin Theatre Company and Center REPertory Company, another Northern California theatre company for which Sankowich is artistic director.
This article appears in July 12 • 2002.