GOOD LOCAL WRITE-UP ON THE SHOW I'M IN

From the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Swine Palace gets rare opportunity to present
unique show, Tennessee Williams in Quarter Time

The show, written and directed by John Dennis, will play Feb. 1-18 at the Reilly Theatre on the LSU campus. It will incorporate performances of excerpts from about a dozen plays.

“It was one thing to have the idea, and quite another to get permission,” laughed Tick. “The agent said ‘absolutely no. You’ve got to produce a full-length play or nothing.’

“I called the literary agent in New York and was turned down. The Tennessee Williams estate is controlled by a British literary agent. I called the literary agent in London and he said no way.

“That’s when I wrote that long letter.”

The letter turned the trick and gave LSU the go-ahead to stage a once-in-a-lifetime production.

“I described the devastation of the hurricanes and wrote about how important New Orleans was to Williams, and how important it is to do everything we can to bring the city back,” Tick said.

“I reminded them about all the regional theater companies that closed after 9-11, and I went through all we suffered during Katrina and how it was to go through Katrina and told them we needed to do everything we could to preserve New Orleans. They wrote back and gave us permission to do the show.”

Click here for the rest.

And I'm having a lot of fun with this. On the other hand, I fear that I'm starting to be typecast: I'm playing a gay crossdresser for the second show in a row. Ah well. It takes a real man to wear a dress, and it's a fabulous role. The director, John Dennis, head of LSU's MFA acting program, is giving me a new love for Williams. Like Chekhov before him, Tennessee Williams has gotten a bad rap for being boring and/or melodramatic; the reality is that much of his writing was meant to be funny--Blanche from Streetcar, for instance, made Williams giggle numerous times while he was writing the play. The scene I'm in, from the little known Kingdom of Earth, is hysterically funny; I'm having to bite my lip to keep from laughing during rehearsals.

At any rate, if you're in the Red Stick during February, try to check it out.


(Advocate staff photo by KERRY MALONEY) From left, Shawn Halliday, Andrea Frankle and Anna Richardson perform a key moment in Quarter Time.

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