Helltown Trustee Takes on Tennessee Williams!

John Dennis Anderson

Helltown Trustee John Dennis Anderson is appearing in two plays for the 2024 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival September 25-29 at Town Hall. The plays are The Glass Menagerie and Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Anderson answers the following questions about his roles in the Festival. For more information and tickets, go to https://www.twptown.org/

Question: Something Cloudy, Something Clear takes place in two times: the past and the present. How does that affect your performance?

John Dennis Anderson: In the play, my character August is an avatar of Williams; several times he uses the metaphor of a “double exposure” for the superimposed time frames of present and past. As an actor, my 70-year-old physical self is always present. When August conjures moments from his past, his younger self speaks through my older embodiment. It’s not so much that I toggle back and forth between present and past as that I embody and voice a doubly exposed August.

Question: What are the differences between 29-year-old August and older August?

John Dennis Anderson: In 1940, 29-year-old August has a cataract (as did Williams at that age) that makes his left eye cloudy, so he avoids eye contact unless he’s drunk, he says--or horny, I’m guessing. He tells Clare that he wears sunglasses to mask his cloudy eye, so I sometimes put on the sunglasses for the 1940 August, often taking them off to signal the shifts to older August. It’s telling that Williams gives Kip’s companion the name Clare (clear). She functions in the play as a kind of conscience, reminding him to see beyond the sensual to a spiritual plane. The older August is aware of how his lust for Kip blinded his younger self; he sees more clearly in the present the questionable ethics of the bargain he offers Kip. I see his naked exposure of his past selfishness as a kind of penance, even as he vividly relives the intensity and pain of his first passionate relationship with a man.

John Dennis Anderson and Luke Philip Bosco in a scene from Something Cloudy, Something Clear 

Question: You're also playing Tom in The Glass Menagerie. How do the two roles support each other?

John Dennis Anderson: Tom, another avatar of Williams, is also exposing a selfish act, that of abandoning his mother and sister. But Tom’s escape from his family is a desperate act of survival. He describes his life with them as a nailed-up coffin. In order to find himself artistically and sexually, he had to get out. Tom’s opening monologue ends with telling the audience that his long-absent father’s last communication with the family he abandoned was a postcard containing only the words “Hello—Goodbye!” He will end the play telling Laura, the sister Tom has also abandoned: “And so goodbye.”

It’s fascinating to juxtapose these two memory plays, The Glass Menagerie written in the 1940s about the late 1930s and Something Cloudy, Something Clear written in the late 1970s that is mostly about the summer of 1940 but also includes flashblacks from other decades. There are countless echoes between the plays, such as the theme of bargaining, of coming to terms: for escape in the earlier play, for sex and money in the later play. Similar elements are highlighted when the same actors play characters that represent archetypes in the Williams pantheon (the male sex object, the faded Southern belle, the damaged sister). Both plays have climactic kisses, recurring fetishized objects (a typewriter, a victrola) and even tiny, granular echoes such as glancing references to parades and the sphinx. An important through-line in both plays is love and the need for forgiveness.

Question: You've performed at the Festival before, in “The Municipal Abattoir.’ How is this experience different?

John Dennis Anderson: My first appearance was in a very short Williams play; playing both Tom and August on the same day is epically greater in scope. Running up and down a dune in “The Municipal Abattoir,” though, was good training for the stamina needed for this year’s marathon. 

Question: Anything else we should know?

John Dennis Anderson: This process has been a voyage of discovery through research as well as in rehearsal spaces. I’ve loved immersing myself in the life and work of Tennessee Williams. It’s been as rich and absorbing as my Chautauqua performances as William Faulkner, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Lynn Riggs, and Christopher Isherwood. I get a kick out of knowing that Williams met Faulkner, Hemingway, and Riggs—and had a fling with Isherwood that evolved into friendship!