Playwright Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi, died in New York and lived all over the world in between.
But it was his family’s move to the Central West End in St. Louis when Williams was 7 that set the stage for a career that earned him two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Williams lived in St. Louis for more than 20 years — longer than anywhere else — and busily wrote short stories and plays that he submitted for contests or publication, often with disappointing results.
This month, the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis marks 10 years of highlighting the writer’s connection to St. Louis and his work, including lesser-known plays he wrote in the city while still developing his voice. The festival’s centerpiece production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” begins performances Thursday.
“Although the mythology is that Williams had a bad relationship with St. Louis. I don't think that's completely true or fair,” said Tom Mitchell, the festival’s in-house scholar and professor emeritus of theater at the University of Illinois. “He had friends in St. Louis and he has some wonderful writing that's centered in St. Louis. It's wonderful to see that aspect of who he was.”
Earlier this year, Mitchell edited a collection of previously unpublished short stories that Williams wrote while living in St. Louis. Most are set in the city or elsewhere in Missouri. Mitchell will lead a walking tour of Central West End sites related to Williams on Sunday morning.
If Williams felt less than personally fulfilled in his years in St. Louis, he turned his angst into literary and commercial gold. Williams based his 1944 breakthrough “The Glass Menagerie” in part on his experiences living in St. Louis, with an overbearing mother and troubled sister and a job at International Shoe Co., where his father worked.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Carrie Houk, the founder of Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis and its executive artistic director, about Williams’ legacy in St. Louis and the growth of the festival.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jeremy Goodwin: Like T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams is a writer who spent key years as a young man in St. Louis but became more associated with other places. People think of New Orleans, where “Streetcar” is set and where he lived later, or the Deep South. Are people surprised when they learn about the importance of St. Louis to Williams’ life and work?
Carrie Houk: I think what most St. Louisans thought for years was that he hated St. Louis, that everyone dismissed him. But it was that he didn't like his circumstances in this city.
His family life was fraught. He had to work in an administrative job when he had the soul of an artist. So it wasn't really about our beautiful city, it was about his circumstances. And if you look at his work, you'll see that he salutes St. Louis in so many of his writings. I mean, he never forgot us, and the influence is there throughout.
Goodwin: In addition to performances, what other events do you produce to put the work in context?
Houk: We're up to an 11-day festival. On our first Saturday, we have almost a full day of scholarly events. Tom Mitchell is our scholar, and he's well known in the Williams world. The panels have really caught on. They weren't our best-attended events in the beginning, but now they're really very well-attended.
We have a Williams tribute that we do every year, traditionally on the first Sunday of the festival. I've included this year in the tribute readings actors who have been with us since Day 1, or along the way. They've all performed in our festival over the 10 years, and they do a selection of monologues, letters, pieces from short stories, pieces from essays.
Goodwin: Who is the audience for the festival and where do they come from?
Houk: Our audience is mostly from St. Louis, but in recent years we're becoming a destination festival. And what I love about what we've developed over our 10 years with our community is that because we don't always perform in a theater — because we do a lot of outreach to bring other people in, because we do site-specific work, which draws people who don't necessarily go to the box office and buy a ticket — we've really expanded [the audience].
When we did “The Glass Menagerie” during the pandemic, we performed outside at the building where the Williams family lived when they moved to St. Louis.
Goodwin: And of course some of that play takes place in the apartment where the character Tom is living.
Houk: Yes, in this very building. So when Tom is on that fire escape, it was almost surrealistic to imagine that it was really happening as it did.
And what I loved about that year was that we had people just come from down the street or around the corner. It was very heartwarming to see different generations and different segments of our city being exposed to really terrific theater.
One year we brought the National Theater of Ghana to perform an early version of “Camino Real” called “10 Blocks on the Camino Real” in different neighborhoods in St. Louis. They went to Soulard Market, to north St Louis, to different college campuses. We were all over the place.
I hope to continue to do work like that. We hope to do something site-specific just as a little holiday offering before the end of this calendar year. Most likely. My wheels are turning.
