Williams play helps South Africans reflect on who we were
HAILED as a powerful play with powerful message about how wrong racism is, the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth should take the Artscape theatre by storm later this month.
Williams is the most produced playwright in the world after William Shakespeare.
He established himself as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century with classic plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.
Sweet Bird of Youth was last staged in Cape Town in 1978. That production was notable for being the first production where actors of colour appeared alongside white actors on a then-segregated state theatre stage
Exactly 40 years later this new production plays on the very same stage in celebration of the “remarkable transformation our country has undergone in the past four decades”.
The production’s co-producer Marcel Meyer said: “It was brave to showcase the play back then because the play has strong political undertones and it deals with the horrors of racism, set in the deep south of America.
“Art helps us reflect and interrogate who we were and who we are and the reasons why we can never go back. Williams speaks like a true poet, he speaks about human heart.”
This production of Sweet Bird of Youth was commissioned by the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival to play in repertory with Abrahamse & Meyer’s six-person Hamlet.
The 2017 Tennessee Williams Festival was curated around the theme of pairing plays by Williams with those of Shakespeare.
The play opens in the same month Williams would have celebrated his 107th birthday.
Set in the small town of Saint Cloud, on the gulf coast of Mississippi, Sweet Bird of Youth tracks the fading dreams of hustler, Chance Wayne, a long-gone traveller returning home. Alongside Chance, former movie star Alexandra Del Lago (travelling incognito as Princess Kosmonopolis) faces her own uncertain future. The play contains some of Williams’ most evocative lyrical passages such as “I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding”. It is regarded as one of his finest dramas.
This production is directed and designed by award-winning Fred Abrahamse.
The cast includes Fiona Ramsay, Dean Balie and Matthew Baldwin.
Sweet Bird of Youth plays at the Artscape Theatre from 31 March-8 April and as part of this repertory season Abrahamse & Meyer’s Hamlet will open shortly after on April 11.
Tickets for both productions are available at Computicket.