Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
New York-based American Theatre Affiliated Writer Christopher Wallenberg flew out of New Orleans on a gray Sunday in early March—he'd spent an eye-opening week there getting to know the variegated post-Katrina theatre scene (see story)—and we flew into the city from Newark Airport two-and-a-half weeks later. Actors Lois Smith and Jeremy Lawrence were among a half-dozen folks on a Wednesday morning flight who were headed, as I was, to the 24th annual edition of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival; playwrights Edward Albee and John Patrick Shanley, two of the event's headliners, were expected later in the day. The weather had brightened considerably as spring neared, and the Gulf air was balmy as we headed to a Decatur Street restaurant to hear Smith and Lawrence read Williams's poetry (with consummate grace and wit) at the festival's opening reception. That night and for the next four days, the program, packed with panels, readings, master classes, food-tastings and performances, corralled its participants into the 80-plus square blocks of the French Quarter, the well-tended historic district that had proved more or less impervious to the storm that ravaged the city some four years and seven months earlier.
That locale, of course, couldn't have been more appropriate to the festival's theme: The Quarter was Williams's haunt, both in his youth and in his later years; he had owned properties there, written plays there, immortalized its decadence and allure in plays and poems and stories. When Shanley roused listeners to a standing ovation with a fervent tribute to Williams from the jewel-box stage of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré on Jackson Square ("This is the scene of his beautiful crime—he was a gorgeous, unstoppable beast!"), the older writer's spirit in the room seemed almost palpable. When Smith, who played Menagerie's Laura in her youth and originated the role of Carol Cutrere in Orpheus Descending, recalled the playwright's gentle admonitions in rehearsal, the courtliness of the district echoed in her account of his character.
But even as the festival proceeded, another New Orleans waited not so distant from the Quarter, out of the visitors' line of vision: a decimated, flood-swept city of gutted homes and weed-choked empty lots, of shuttered businesses and broken families, of ruined streets and abandoned neighborhoods. This New Orleans, stricken and economically bereft, may bear scant relation to the place that Williams drew his inspiration from, but, true to form, it too has been a catalyst to creative action for artists and performers, as Wallenberg's survey in these pages of the city's re-emergent theatre community verifies. There's a kind of peculiar optimism in the realization that this evanescent city, whose history of transformation dates to 1718, has played muse to Edgar Degas as well as Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, to Adelina Patti as well as William Faulkner and Walker Percy, to Lillian Hellman and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as Williams. Yes, New Orleans has changed, but certain qualities in the nature of the place are indelible and rooted deep. It will endure.
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