A South African First! The Hotel Plays by Tennessee Williams Comes to SA.
Cape Town theatre lovers are in for a real treat this month as The Vineyard Hotel presents the exclusive South African première of The Hotel Plays by Tennessee Williams, a unique theatre experience that sees a series of short plays set and performed in hotel rooms. Produced by Abrahamse & Meyer Productions, this fabulous show is fresh from highly successful, sold-out performances in New York, London, New Orleans, Provincetown and St. Louis and will kick off at t the historic Vineyard Hotel in Newlands on 30 July 2016. The great news is, the Vineyard Hotel version is a dinner and a show experience and includes a sumptuous three-course, wine-paired dinner in-between acts. If it’s unique you want then you cannot miss out on The Hotel Plays at the Vineyard Hotel.
Author of classic plays The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams lived most of his life in hotels. From the 1930s until his death, in 1983, Williams wrote a series of short plays set in hotel rooms and for the past seven years selections of these plays have been performed in actual hotel rooms under the collective title The Hotel Plays. Audiences across the USA and in London have experienced some of Williams’ best writing, up-close and personal, in an exclusive, fully immersive, site-specific environment.
The Hotel Plays at The Vineyard Hotel will feature a double bill of Williams’s Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen and Green Eyes directed by veteran, multi-award winning director Fred Abrahamse. Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen was written in the 1950s and features some of Williams’s most exquisite lyrical passages. Set in a suite on the Lower East Side this delicate dramatic poem sees a couple connected by the intimacy of desperation. Green Eyes was written in 1970 and remained unpublished and un-staged until 2008. This intense, power-house play was Williams’s response to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Set in New Orleans, Green Eyes transfigures a honeymoon suite into a battleground. Melissa Haiden and Stephen Jubber star as the dysfunctional young bride and groom.
Tickets for the show will cost you R650 per person and includes the three-course wine paired dinner and the two plays. The Hotel Plays will première at the Vineyard Hotel, Colinton Road, Newlands on 30 July at 19:00 and additional performances will take place at 19:00 on 4, 5, 13, 19 and 20 August. Booking is essential! To book please email hotelplays@vineyard.co.za.
