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EVENT LINKS
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White Horse Theater Company presents
Clothes For A Summer Hotel
Friday, February 05, 2010 through Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tennessee Williams' rarely performed Ghost Play about Zelda & F. Scott Fitzgerald
Length: 2 hrs 30 mins
Intermission: Yes
Seating: General Admission
You choose your seats when you get to the theater.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Mr. Williams' highly theatrical and evocative "ghost play", imagines an ethereal final meeting between the restless ghosts of literary great F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Set on a windy hilltop at the gates of the Asheville, NC asylum where Zelda was institutionalized before her death by fire in 1948, a desperate Scott pleads for reconciliation while Zelda blames him for her failed writing career and ensuing madness. Taking extraordinary liberties with time and place, "Clothes" fuses the past, present and future as Zelda and Scott re-visit the Jazz Age of their youth on the French Riviera and the ghosts of characters, including Ernest Hemingway, who helped shape their existence.
Williams had a life-long fascination with the Fitzgeralds. The tortures they faced as creative artists in a modern society paralleled his own. He identified directly with Scott's early success and later disfavor and empathized with Zelda's need to create and thwarted ambitions. He also had a special understanding and sympathy for Zelda's madness, having witnessed his own sister's struggles with schizophrenia.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which opened at the Court Theatre on March 26, 1980 with Geraldine Page in the role of Zelda, was Mr. Williams' last Broadway production. Other than a production mounted by the York Theater Company in 1995, the play has not been staged in New York City since. Despite the fact that many critics originally failed to appreciate Williams' post-modern dream-scape, several recognized the potential of this "quintessentially American romance" (as described by Our Town's Jeremy Gerard) acknowledging, as The New York Times' Clive Barnes did, that "Clothes" was a play "whose time has not yet come."
There will be a post-show moderated discussion following the February 14 performance with renowned Tennessee Williams scholar Dr. Annette J. Saddik and Dr. Nancy Milford, author of Zelda. Saddik is an Associate Professor in the English Department at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), a teacher in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Contemporary American Drama and The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams’ Later Plays. Milford’s Zelda was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and spent twenty-nine weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.
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