The plays of Tennessee Williams are usually set in the steamy, hot American South. Laurie Sansom is a theater director from chilly, gray Britain. But he’s come to love the works of one of America’s greatest playwrights. And because Key West is where Tennessee Williams lived for decades, that’s where Sansom came to work on a new project.
Sansom came to Key West as an artist-in-residence at The Studios of Key West. WLRN's Southernmost Bureau is housed at The Studios.
Sansom sat down with WLRN's Nancy Klingener to talk about Tennessee Williams. Here is part of their conversation.
Do you remember the first time you read or saw a Tennessee Williams play?
I have no idea, actually. I’m very aware of the impact that the "Streetcar Named Desire" film had on me. And a production of "Glass Menagerie" – the first time I saw "Glass Menagerie" was at the Donmar Warehouse. A friend had directed it.
What was your impression when you saw "Streetcar" in the movie production and your friend’s production of "Glass Menagerie?"
I think, for me, what he’s the master at is creating characters who are creating a fantasy version of themselves that they present to the world to survive something. And some of the characters are very aware of the gap between who they are and who they’re presenting. And some of them become increasingly unaware that there’s a gap. And they’re the ones that go mad.
Tell us about your project here in Key West.
There’s this host of other plays and a lot of them are short one-act plays that most people are just not aware of. He was incredibly prolific. And some of those plays, I think, contain some of his most powerful, funny, poetic, painful writing. An approximate estimate is that there’s about 80 of these short plays. So I needed some time where I could just sit down and go, ‘Right,’ and try to get a sense of what world is created when you just look at what I kind of think of as dramatic poems.
At the moment, what I’m trying to conceive is, what would a theater project look like where the audience are finding a journey through many of the short plays?
Has being in Key West changed your understanding of Williams?
Key West was the only place really from the early ‘40s that he would have called his home. And it as where he wrote some of this great plays like “The Rose Tattoo.” You can feel that he is writing in his plays about the odd, the dispossessed, the on-the-margins, the crooked, the queer. And clearly Key West at the time and still to a certain extent now I guess is such an inclusive place. It’s clearly a place where right at the end of the line, where people come to to hang out, get lost, find themselves. And actually that is so intrinsic in his work. That’s really helpful, to be made aware of that.
Has anything surprised you about Key West, Tennessee Williams-related or not?
Sometimes we think of him as a depressive, alcoholic, rather dark writer. And he can be. But actually the joy he finds in even those people is what actually draws us, I think, to his work. People are survivors and they find all kinds of tactics both ludicrous, funny and pitiful to survive the world. And somehow, he felt most comfortable imagining those people here in Key West with the sun shining. It kind of makes me go, yeah. He loved life, even whilst he struggled with it.
