Thinking Theater NYC

Tiger Tail Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Geoffrey Horne Presented by Shakespeare Downtown at Castle Clinton Battery Park, Manhattan, NYC June 12-22, 2025 Billie Andersson. Photo by Amy Goossens. One might associate Tennessee Williams, whose work is full of characters who are trapped–often in inadequate domestic spaces, relationships, or both–with claustrophobic enclosure rather than the openness, even expansiveness, of outdoor theater. However, in bringing Williams's rarely performed Tiger Tail to Battery Park's Castle Clinton, Shakespeare Downtown demonstrates that the work loses none of its sweaty intensity in the move to the open air. The forerunners of Tiger Tail are a pair of Williams one-acts, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and The Long Stay Cut Short (1946), which provided the basis for the Williams-penned and Elia Kazan-directed film Baby Doll (1956), which itself Williams later adapted into Tiger Tail , published in 1978. This textual history introduce...

Outraged Hearts: The Pretty Trap and Interior: Panic Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jaclyn Bethany Presented by The Fire Weeds in association with Houghton Hall , BKE Productions, and FutureHome at Houghton Hall Arts Community 22 E 30th Street, Manhattan, NYC May 15-30, 2025 L to R:  Chris Ghaffari, Jaclyn Bethany, Jacob Storms, Megan Metrikin. Photo by Joey D'Amore. Tennessee Williams's (1911-1983) The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) have long since secured a central place in the pantheon of 20th-century American theater. Their single-act precursors, however, The Pretty Trap (1944?) and Interior: Panic (1945-46), remain far less widely known and produced. Under the title Outraged Hearts, New Orleans-based theater company The Fire Weeds, founded by Jaclyn Bethany and Lin Gathright and "dedicated to innovative storytelling through a female-driven lens," fruitfully juxtaposes these underseen one-acts in a theatrical double bil...

The Notebook of Trigorin Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn. NYC March 28-April 27, 2025 The Notebook of Trigorin . Photo courtesy of The PR Social As a twentieth-century American adaptation of a late nineteenth-century Russian play, Tennessee Williams's The Notebook of Trigorin already bridges places and times at significant removes from one another, and Irondale's new production enthralls while adding a few new lanes to that bridge. Williams's "free adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull ," as the play identifies itself, represented the achievement near the end of his life of, to borrow Allean Hale's phrasing, a "lifelong dream to interpret" this particular work by the Russian writer, of whom Williams had been an ardent fan since his early twenties. Hale's introduction to the 1997 New Directions edition of The Notebook o...

After critically acclaimed engagements Off-Broadway (you can read our review of the show's winters/spring 2023 run at AMT here .) and at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, Jacob Storms’s  Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams will return to New York for a limited engagement. This solo play written and performed by Jacob Storms and originally directed for the stage by Alan Cumming will run January 19 - February 2 at The Laurie Beechman Theatre. What led Tennessee Williams to become the most groundbreaking and unique playwright of the twentieth century? Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams explores the formative six-year period from 1939-1945 in which an unknown writer named Tom metamorphosizes into the acclaimed playwright known as Tennessee. The solo play brings these unknown years center stage as the audience becomes friend and confidant to young Williams as he experiences the unexpected highs and devastating lows of his early career, wherein his most iconic charac...

American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...

Jacob Storms. Photo courtesy of Spin Cycle  The newly renovated AMT Theater in midtown will host a special LGBTQIA+ Pride return engagement of the Off-Broadway Premiere of Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams , a solo play written and performed by Jacob Storms and originally directed for the stage by Alan Cumming. It will run June 2 – 23 before heading to Edinburgh this summer and Rochester, NY in September. You can read our review of the show's previous run at AMT here . What led Tennessee Williams to become the most groundbreaking and unique playwright of the twentieth century?  Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams  explores the formative six-year period from 1939-1945 in which an unknown writer named Tom metamorphosizes into the acclaimed playwright known as Tennessee. The solo play brings these unknown years center stage as the audience becomes friend and confidant to young Williams as he experiences the unexpected highs and devastating lows o...

Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams Written and performed by Jacob Storms Directed by Alan Cumming Presented at AMT Theater 354 West 45th St., Manhattan, NYC February 19-April 2, 2023 Jacob Storms. Photo by Max Ruby The first thing that Jacob Storms does as the title character in his solo show Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams is to pour himself a drink, a gesture that points both to what would increasingly become a coping mechanism over the course of the playwright's lifetime and to the intimate relation to Williams in which the show positions the spectators. Storms, directed by the illustrious Alan Cumming, himself no stranger to solo theater, delivers his performance as though to an audience of confidantes, even as the show skips deftly forward through time. Anchored by no more than a couple of chairs and a table, Storms enthrallingly whisks the audience from coast to coast and year to year, from Williams having recently submitted work to a playwriti...

Beginning tonight (July 22), Et Alia Theater , in special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, presents Stella, Come Home , a devised movement piece based on Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire . Stella, Come Home is a dance-theater piece that translates the iconic  Streetcar  into movement and dance through the bodies  of Et Alia Theater Company's international women. The production explores what it means to perform this pinnacle of U.S. theater as immigrant women in New York City, one of the most heterogeneous cities in the world. Just as a reality-stricken Blanche longs for a return to her imagined Belle Reve, the performers are outsiders going through the painful struggle of letting go of their past, while the promised land of NYC forces them to face their truth: culturally diverse women still have to fight to claim their space. Stella, Come Home  is directed and choreographed by SarAika Movement Collect...

The Glass Menagerie Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Austin Pendleton and Peter Bloch Presented by Ruth Stage at the wild project 195 E. 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC October 3-20, 2019 Spencer Scott and Alexandra Rose. Photo courtesy of Alana Silber Although Tennessee Williams's heavily autobiographical The Glass Menagerie is set in St. Louis, its concern with memory, the past, and inherited familial dysfunction arguably align with the Southern Gothic tradition. In a new production of Williams's story of a fractured family of Southern transplants, directors Austin Pendleton and Peter Bloch highlight such generic affinities by lending the play a tinge of the Gothic, rendering, for example, the Wingfield family's lodgings in a manner that evokes genteel decay and including the occasional spooky-sounding musical cue. In conjunction with fine performances by the cast, these decisions highlight the various ways that the Wingfield family members are haunted ...

A Streetcar Named Desire Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Kevin Hourigan Presented by The Coven and  Precariat Productions in association with Wolfpack Theatrics at Mister Rogers 231 Rogers Ave, Brooklyn, NYC May 7-25, 2019 Max Carpenter, Isabel Ellison, and Russell Peck. Photo credit: Rosie Soko Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire needs little introduction. The 1947 play won a Pulitzer Prize, the 1951 film adaptation, with some of the play’s sharpest edges sanded off, received critical acclaim, and, of course, a Simpsons parody bestowed upon it one of our society’s more widely recognized imprimaturs of cultural importance. It continues to be widely read, taught, and produced; and a new production under the direction by Kevin Hourigan represents a new chapter in the play’s storied history. For the first time, a U.S. production of Streetcar has been licensed to allow a genderqueer/trans actor to play tragically distressed Southern belle Blanc...