“The Parade” in THE JEWISH ADVOCATE

The playwright and his onstage persona

By Jules Becker – Monday September 17 2007

    Thanks to re-discovered and newly staged plays, the stature of Tennessee Williams as a playwright and a human being continues to rise.
Just a few seasons ago, Broadway and Boston premieres of his compelling 1938 prison drama “Not About Nightingales” provided striking insight into themes to be developed fully in such masterworks as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (parts of which were written during Williams’ time on Cape Cod).
The dramatist’s prescient 1937 social protest play “Candles to the Sun,” now in consideration for staging, centers on coal miners, a subject as familiar as the latest headlines. Now “The Parade” or “Approaching the End of Summer,” an affecting autobiographical 1940 work revised in 1962 and returning to the Provincetown Theater after a world premiere there last fall, reveals not only Williams’ candor about being gay but also his singular relationship with a Jewish New Yorker named Ethel Elkovsky.
Williams must have been very fond of Elkovsky, for Miriam, the character based on her, is clearly the most vivid and fully developed in “The Parade.” Under no illusions about the sexual orientation of Don, the playwright’s alter ego, yet very much in love with him, Miriam champions his mind and future as a writer (as Elkovsky did with Williams), yet never wallows in sentimentality. In fact, with the wit and wisdom of an Oscar Levant, she confronts reality with humor and understanding. Eventually, Miriam predicts, she will marry “a nice Jewish boy” who observes the laws of “kosher cuisine” complete with bagels and lox.
Miriam even suspects that her future husband will avoid the writings of German authors such as Rilke, whose poetry she fondly recalls reading with Don. She invokes Jewish principles of helping children and safeguarding posterity.
For his part, Don displays remarkable tenderness and caring with Miriam. Moving beyond simple warmth and deep friendship in the Provincetown-set play, he goes as far as caressing her and expressing the wish that he could love her as romantically as a straight man would. Arrestingly, Don details the kind of erotic arousal that would fulfill Miriam’s desire and stunningly describes man and woman as two converging rivers. Still, the 29-year-old playwright knows that his heart lies with 22-year-old Dick, patterned on the real-life Canadian dancer Kip Kiernan with whom Williams shared a brief affair until the arrival of Dick’s girlfriend, Wanda. Although Dick speaks of being straight, Miriam contends otherwise and counsels him to be kind to Don. (Here, too, the characters’ actions and relationships resemble the actual ones).
Company artistic director Eric Powell Holm, who co-directed the world premiere last year, sharply paces the banter between Miriam and Don, and smartly balances these faster stretches with slower moments of tenderness between the close friends. Ben Griessmeyer captures all of Don’s frustration with spurning Dick and his sensitivity with Miriam. Whitney Hudson, as Miriam, has just the right mixture of unaffected sophistication and emotional expansiveness.
    Elliot Eustis catches Dick’s unattractive self-absorption as well as his unbounded confidence. Williams felt that Kiernan resembled the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Eustis makes them properly humorous as much as well-executed. Elizabeth Stahlmann is fittingly fastidious as Wanda, and Bob Seaver tired as an older Postman.
Is the brief play (about an hour) a surprise treasure? While it has winning quips and exchanges and Williams’ trademark metaphors and poetry-vivid images of elephants and the symbolic title procession, among them, “The Parade” lacks the haunting cumulative force of fellow memory play “Menagerie.” Even so, this relatively minor but heartfelt effort works as an evocation of Williams’ own struggle to balance full physical love and the heights of artistic self-realization.
Most importantly of all, it offers up radiant Miriam, a proudly Jewish character as feisty and warm as earthy innkeeper Maxine in the playwright’s last great work, the 1961 “The Night of the Iguana.” For these pleasures alone, the New Provincetown Players’ richly moving “The Parade” brings a timely end to summer.

Note: The second annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival runs Sept. 26-30 at the Provincetown Theatre. For a full schedule of events, go to http://www.twptown.org.