S-T-E-L-L-A!

Tennessee Williams alive and well at N.O. fest

By MIKE BROSSETTE

Despite the blows inflicted by Hurricane Katrina on the city, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival in the French Quarter is going strong.

The festival will be held Wednesday, March 26, to Sunday, March 30, and will have – as it has done every year since 1987 – prominent personalities on discussion panels from the theater world and other branches of the arts, as well as plays, staged readings, musical performances, and instructional classes.

Highlights of this year’s festival promise to be four-time Tony Award-winner Terrence McNally, who wrote the book for the Broadway production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and the play “Master Class,” about opera-immortal Maria Callas, which won the Tony for Best Play in 1996; longtime Broadway director and producer Gregory Mosher, also a Tony winner; Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Tift Merritt; ageless film critic and former Louisiana resident Rex Reed; actress Stephanie Zimbalist; former “New Yorker” senior editor Dan Menaker, and journalist Hal Crowther.

Though no event at the festival covers Acadiana, people from the Tri-parishes may be interested in two panels on Friday, March 28, from 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., inside the Bourbon Orleans hotel, dealing with the South: “American Crisis: Southern Solutions” and “Wit & Wisdom: Southern Humor at Its Best.”

Two plays at the festival will feature portrayals of Tennessee Williams in one-man shows.

Doug Tompos will play the man in “Bent to the Flame-A Night with Tennessee Williams” and – for the second year in a row promnent New York actor Jeremy Lawrence will portray the playwright in “Everyone Expects Me to Write Another Streetcar: Another Evening with the Playwright.”

Additionally, theater troupe Brooklyn on Foot will put on a street-performance style version of Williams’ 1953 play “Camino Real” and New Orleans actor John McConnell, channeling Ignatius Reilly, will perform readings from “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

Authors at the festival will include Claire Cook (“Life’s a Beach,” “Must Love Dogs”), Valerie Martin (“Mary Reilly”), southern writer Lee Smith (“The Last Girls”), and poet Al Young (“Seduction by Light”).

Spokesperson Ellen Johnson said at the first festival in 2006 following Hurricane Katrina, participants waived their honoraria to help keep the festival in the black.

“Our first fest rocked,” Johnson said. “We didn’t miss a beat. We’ve been in the black ever since.”

Around 30 to 40 percent of visitors have been out-of-towners, she said, and those non-New Orleanians tend to return to the festival.

“It’s fantastic,” Johnson said. “We have a wonderful program this year.”

Helping to draw people back will be the now-infamous Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest, which closes out the festival, and a new “Tennessee’s Got Talent” competition wherein celebrity judges Rex Reed, Stephanie Zimbalist and Terrence McNally evaluate participants’ interpretations of scenes from Williams’ plays.