Event

Vieux Carré

Tennessee Williams Vieux Carré is a memory play, written over the span of 40 years. The play tracks the journey of a young, gay writer searching for love and artistic inspiration in the people and the environment surrounding him. He finds himself in a dilapidated boarding house filled with beautiful dying souls, all tragically lonely and wonderfully weird. It is there that he discovers who he is and the power of empathy.

In this production Vieux Carré is not tied specifically to New Orleans, but is represented instead as a universal space in which an audience is free to attach their own personal place of growth to the Vieux Carré. I continue to be moved by an email from my costume designer, Junior Bergman, when she wrote shortly after the Orlando shooting: "Orlando is my Vieux Carré. It is my hope that our audience will write their own meaning based on the places that most affected who they are today. Because of this, we are stripping away period, stripping away New Orleans and setting the play in a contemporary worldon a mostly bare stage.

The goal is to simultaneously give our audience an experience of zoomed-in cinematic intimacy and larger-than-life instances of heightened theatricality. My hope is that despite the play's melancholic denouement, the audience will leave with a feeling of hope and possibility as the Writer sets off for a new lifea life in which he can be as weird and gay and as promiscuous and experimental as he wants. Is it obvious yet why this play feels so personal ?