The Boo Cat Club, recently renovated in St. Louis, may soon reopen by playing host to a Tennessee Williams festival.
While Williams is often more closely associated with New Orleans, the setting of his best-known play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, he moved to St. Louis with his family when he was eight years old and attended both Soldan and University City high schools. Although he never graduated, he was a student at both the University of Missouri in Columbia and the Washington University in St. Louis.
The chairman of the Grand Center Arts Organization, Ken Kranzberg, referred to St. Louis as a “natural fit” for a festival centered on the playwright.
Williams is a frequently celebrated playwright in the U.S.; Cape Cod hosts a festival in his honor in Provincetown, while New Orleans celebrates the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival. Columbus, Mississippi, his place of birth, has recently added a new festival as well, and will no doubt now be turning to poster printing companies to drum up interest in it.
Jef Hall-Flavin, a representative of the Cape Cod event, said that each festival has its own character, and that many of the more established festivals also include plays by Williams’ colleagues.
The Boo Cat Club reopens in November, presenting a little-known Williams’ work entitled ‘Stairs to the Roof’.
