Behind the Curtain with Annalee Jefferies

Full Given Name:
Annalee Jefferies

Hometown:
I live on a farm in Brenham, Texas and am wishing that some of this rain would find its way down there.

Playhouse Debut:
Suddenly Last Summer

The thing you do before every first rehearsal:
I try not to drink too much coffee because my nerves are such a mess, but I comfort myself with the fact that all the wonderful people there that are involved in the production all feel similarly, and we will ultimately take each other by the hand and leap off the cliff together and create a magical experience.

Why you love Suddenly Last Summer:
I love the work of Tennessee Williams. It is an honor and a challenge to be at the helm of such magnificent words. I have been so lucky to have done many of his plays and it has consequently elevated my work as an artist. Fellow cast member Susan Bennett and I did The Glass Menagerie directed by David Cromer several years ago. It's great to be sharing the stage again with her.

First time on stage:
In Brisbane Australia at the Twelfth Night Theatre in 1966, which at that time was an old abandoned church . I played a Chinese man. The Twelfth Night Theater is a major, well known theater now.

Biggest onstage disaster:
One of the many things that went wrong in a production. Playing Helen of Troy on a set full of spears facing heavenward, with body parts pierced through the top of them. Trying to portray the fact that the "temptress" was a mere image and the Trojan War was all for nothing. I swung sensuously around one of the spears and a heavy thigh and leg fell on me causing me to clumsily fall down under the weight of the prop. The image of the image was certainly blown. Fortunately I was behind a mask and no one could see my painful grimaces.

Last great movie you saw: 
Tomorrow from a Falkner novel adapted by Horton Foote, starring a very young Robert Duval.

TV show you can't miss:
I do not have a TV at my farm. So at the moment I don't have anything that I must see. I watch movies projected on a taught king size sheet in my barn, which can also be seen outside like a drive in. It's great during a meteor shower. 

Book on your nightstand:
Tell to Win by Peter Guber

Guilty pleasure:
Pleasure wouldn't be pleasurable to me if guilt were involved.

And… “how do you learn all those lines?”:
Well, for me the theater is not a hobby that I do after my day job. It is an 8-hour-a-day job with one day off a week. That is many hours devoted to the lines and, like many other jobs, I take my work home with me. When you know what and why your saying something and it makes since to me then the words are absorbed.

 

Celebrating Tennessee Williams

Over the course of the past 80 years, Westport Country Playhouse has developed a long history with one of America’s most recognized playwrights, Tennessee Williams. Beginning in the 1930s, a relationship was sparked between Williams and the Playhouse when founder Lawrence Langner, saw the early signs of success in the young playwright and invited Williams to stay with him in Connecticut while he rewrote parts of his first play, Battle of Angels, later known as Orpheus Descending, before its 1940 premiere in Boston. While this play was not well-received by Boston audiences at that time, Williams went on to have great success all around New York with his later plays including, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1961, Westport Country Playhouse hosted two of Williams’ plays produced by New York Repertory Theatre, which then travelled to cities in the North, Central, and South Americas. In 1981, Battle of Angels finally made it to the Westport stage with a top-notch cast that included John Ritter. The Playhouse has also produced some of Williams’s most beloved works, including The Glass Menagerie (1959), Summer and Smoke (1973), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1975).

This year, in celebration of all his work, theaters across the nation are recognizing the Tennessee Williams Centennial, and the Playhouse is right there among them. On August 23rd, we will begin preview performances of our fourth show this season, Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Playhouse Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy. To further extend the Centennial celebrations and to expand the experience of the performance for our patrons, the Playhouse staff will be hosting salons after each performance to encourage an open discussion among audience members about the content and themes of the play. In addition, the Playhouse will be staging a one-night-only performance of A Distant Country Called Youth, starring Richard Thomas on Monday, August 29th at 7:00pm. The Playhouse is thrilled to have the opportunity to be a part of the celebration of not only a remarkable playwright, but another historic alumnus!

Suddenly Last Summer will play at Westport Country Playhouse August 23rd-September 10th. Click here for more information or to buy your tickets today.

Allison Van Driel
Arts Management/Finance Intern

 

Spotlight on A Distant Country Called Youth
with Playwright Steve Lawson

As the Playhouse prepares to join the nation-wide celebration of Tennessee Williams’ centennial with our upcoming production of his poetic masterpiece Suddenly Last Summer, playwright Steve Lawson is helping us lead the charge with a special reading of his work A Distant Country Called Youth on August 29. Based on the letters of this great American playwright to his family, friends, lovers and fellow writers, Lawson’s show follows the early years of Tennessee Williams from childhood through the opening of The Glass Menagerie, his first major success. Performed across the country, along with its companion piece Blanche and Beyond, our special celebratory reading of A Distant Country Called Youth will feature Playhouse alum Richard Thomas as the young Williams and will be directed by Lawson himself.

Recently, Steve Lawson devoted a bit of time to answering questions posed to him by Playhouse Artistic & Management Associate Kim Furano, about his diverse and prolific career in the arts, and his critically acclaimed exploration of a true theatrical genius.

From your current position as Executive Director of the Williamstown Film Festival to your many award-winning theater and television credits to your extensive work with the Williamstown Theatre Festival as Literary Manager, you have had a prolific and diverse career in the arts. With such a varied background, what attracted you specifically to the work of Tennessee Williams? Before beginning your work on A Distant Country Called Youth and Blanche and Beyond, what was your previous experience with his canon?

I'd read all the major Williams plays in high school and college, and felt from the start that he was America's greatest playwright. No one except O'Neill in his last work touched the tragic the way Tennessee did in Streetcar, and no one including O'Neill consistently wrote such splendid roles for actors. For years, I was dramaturg at Williamstown, and got to witness a number of productions of Williams close up. In fact, two of the highlights of my work in theater involve Tennessee. The first was when WTF produced Camino Real in 1979 and he drove up from New York to see the show. He was introduced at the curtain call opening night, beamed at the standing ovation, and said just one sentence: "When my own words scare me, I know it's beautifully done." The audience melted as one.

Because Tennessee admired that show so much, [in the 1980s] he gave Nikos Psacharopoulos – [Williamstown’s then artistic director] - special permission to weave together an extraordinary celebration of nearly all of his writing - the famous scenes, lesser-known plays, and poetry - and I was lucky enough to be one of the weavers. Six hours over two nights, a cast of 35...and Tennessee was in residence for the whole rehearsal period and run of the play. Nobody knew at the time, of course, but this would turn out to be the last major production of his work in his lifetime; he died the following winter. A couple years later, Williamstown did his late play Vieux Carre - Richard Thomas played the Writer, the Williams stand-in, and I was the nutty society photographer. This production was the direct result of a promise Nikos had made to Tennessee, and throughout that entire production, you felt that his spirit was hovering.

Throughout his long and often tumultuous life Williams wrote literally thousands of letters, many of which have been published in several collections. What inspired you to take on the daunting task of dramatizing them for the stage?

In 2001, I was running the Writers in Performance series at Manhattan Theatre Club. I was trying to identify a one-man show for an actor, and heard about this new volume of Tennessee's early correspondence edited by Al Devlin and Nancy Tischler. I started to read it and was hooked. In fact, I can pinpoint the moment when I knew I had to turn this collection into some kind of theatrical event: when I came upon a one-sentence letter the struggling young Williams sent to an editor at Poetry Review, "Would you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?" That's the genesis of Blanche DuBois' departure line in Streetcar two decades later: "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." A chill went up my spine. And when Robert Sean Leonard - who originated the piece at MTC - read that letter, the audience gasped.

What was your process in creating A Distant Country Called Youth? What resources did you employ?

When the Williams estate gave me permission to adapt the letters, it was understood from the beginning that the letters would be the only source, period. So this wasn't going to be like Barrymore or Tru or Master Class, where a play was built around a famous person using liberties and different source materials. My biggest challenge was winnowing down the sheer number of letters; I ended up using 81 out of 330, and it was a killer distilling that much. The ratio was even smaller in Blanche and Beyond, the sequel to Distant Country. All the way through the process, I kept reminding myself about alternating peaks and valleys, drama and comedy, romance and realism, high spirits and "blue devils." Not too much of one subject or the same pitch at one go; that makes the actor's task harder. Having to carry this incredibly rich material alone for an hour and a half is a big enough load!

A Distant Country Called Youth had a unique first run when it premiered at Hartford Stage Company in 2002. Can you tell our readers a little about that, particularly our very own Mark Lamos’s involvement?

Michael Wilson was artistic director at Hartford Stage then, and when he contacted me about Distant Country being part of their month-long Williams festival, the idea was that several actors would divide up the run. So we had seven very distinct Tennessees, and because none saw his predecessor doing the piece each actor brought his own vision of Williams to the event. Richard Thomas kicked off the run, followed by Michael John Higgins, Andrew McCarthy, Campbell Scott, James Colby, John Feltch, and…Mark Lamos. They were all terrific in their own ways, and it was a treat for me to direct, as it were, seven different productions. I was happy to conclude with Mark because, ever since seeing him in Longtime Companion, I'd always thought he was as gifted an actor as he is a director. In the one rehearsal we had, I was never conscious of "directing" him; Mark had an instinct for the material - as did Richard - which made the process not just painless but fun. And in the performance he rang all the bells.

Finally, what are your thoughts as you prepare to direct A Distant Country Called Youth at Westport Country Playhouse in Williams’ centennial year?

Distant Country and Blanche and Beyond have sort of become my Love Letters - scarcely a year's gone by in the last decade that one or both haven't been done somewhere in this country and Europe, especially once they were published by Samuel French. Working with Richard Thomas has been incredibly rewarding; because we've known each other over 30 years and he's done these pieces so often, we've developed a shorthand that picks up when we reunite. I thought it so appropriate to do Distant Country at Westport in the centennial year for several reasons -Mark had done the piece at Hartford; I've known Joanne Woodward for a long time, and she has her own strong Williams affiliations through the film The Fugitive Kind and stage productions of The Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth; Richard's very first film was Winning opposite Joanne and Paul Newman. Talk about connections! Let's hope that Tennessee's spirit will be hovering this time, too.

 Kim Furano
Artistic & Management Associate

 

Wood, Williams & Westport

Talent agent Audrey Wood didn’t take any nonsense from anyone. Remembered today not only for her illustrious clients, but also for her unique ability to spur these talented artists on through adversity and strive to continue working, she was known best for her tumultuous but fruitful time as agent for Tennessee Williams, arguably the most talented yet tortured of her clients. And like her client, Audrey Wood would come to share a connection with a place that the Playhouse holds near and dear to our hearts: Westport, CT.

Beginning her career in the theater as a script reader for a New York literary agency, by her early thirties, Audrey Wood had opened her own talent agency and, shortly after, partnered with fellow agent William Liebling, whom she married in 1938. In addition to Williams, the Liebling-Wood Agency would also go on to represent iconic theatrical artists such as William Inge, Carson McCullers, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1939, having heard of his talent, Wood reached out to then up and coming playwright Tennessee Williams to offer her services as an agent. Under her care, Williams created some of his best known works: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer.

In her autobiography, Audrey recalls the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. After the show she went down to congratulate Laurette Taylor (who played the powerhouse matriarch Amanda Wingfield) on a wonderful opening. “The opening night was the night before Easter Sunday. Her head now rested against the back of her chair. With great happiness, she chortled, ‘Jesus Christ will rise tomorrow- but I shan’t.’ Is it any wonder I decided years ago, to stay near the theater for the rest of my life?”

In addition to her notoriety in the New York theater scene, Audrey Wood was as a familiar character in our own local history. She and her husband owned a home in Westport that they frequented when they needed a breath of fresh air away from the hustle and bustle of New York. Their house was located on Whitney Street, just off North Compo Road. Wood also had further connections with the Playhouse itself. After the infamous Battle of Angels premiere in Boston, she recalls in her autobiography how she would repeatedly run into Lawrence Langner on the train traveling between Westport and New York and he would remind her that he still had the Battle of Angels set stowed away in storage on the Westport Country Playhouse grounds. Audrey returned to the Playhouse in 1949 with another one of her clients, William Inge, where his play Come Back, Little Sheba was given a week-long tryout run.

Audrey Wood and Tennessee Williams had a long and fruitful business relationship notorious for its dramatic highs and lows. During their first year of acquaintance, with Wood’s help, Williams was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his then-titled play Battle of Angels (which is now known as Orpheus Descending.) In her autobiography, Wood recalls in retrospect how it would be six long years from that first day they met in her office in 1939 until Tennessee’s first great triumph, The Glass Menagerie, would open on Broadway.

Those first six years were both exciting and harrowing for the agent and playwright. Wood struggled to find the balance between guiding Williams without hindering his artistic process, and also supporting the playwright as he battled with drug and alcohol addictions. Throughout their often difficult agent-client relationship, however, they continued to hold deep respect for one another. Wood said of Williams, “Wherever Tennessee went, his work went with him.” Similarly, Williams said of his agent in an article he wrote for Esquire, “She is a cross between a flower and the rock it sprang from.”

Martha Stout
Production/Management Intern

  

Honoring Bernadette Peters

At this year’s Gala event, Westport Country Playhouse will honor musical theater legend and alumna Bernadette Peters with the Distinguished Dedication and Service to the American Musical Theater Award, recognizing her illustrious theatrical career.

Peters first appeared on the Playhouse stage in 1966 in the little-known John Jennings musical Riverwind. Just a year later, she made her Broadway debut in Johnny No-Trump before going on to star opposite Joel Gray in George M!. She also received a Drama Desk Award that same year for her show stopping performance in the smash hit off-Broadway musical Dames at Sea.

Peters would go on to win Best Actress Tonys for her performances in Song and Dance and Annie Get Your Gun, but she is perhaps best known on Broadway for her work in the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (a former Playhouse apprentice and 2006 Gala honoree). She originated the roles of Dot/Marie in Sunday in the Park With George and the Witch in Into the Woods. This year, she appeared on Broadway as Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music opposite Elaine Stritch and starred in the Kennedy Center’s highly acclaimed production of Follies, which has recently transferred to Broadway.

The 2011 Gala, “Playing our Songs,” will celebrate the Playhouse’s distinguished 80 year history of musical theater and will feature an ensemble of Broadway’s best and brightest—whose names will be announced in the coming weeks.

Melissa Cail
Development Intern