Vieux Carré

Written with his characteristic passion and compassion for the damaged and dispossessed, Vieux Carré is in many ways the condensation of all Tennessee Williams’ plays, yet it is unique in its depiction of his loneliness, despair and longing for something new. Many of his other great plays delve into his mother’s story, or the events of his sister Rose’s tragic life – this one is a search for Williams’ own truth as he tried to understand it.

Stripped bare of the huge sets and endless scene changes that have dwarfed previous productions, the inmates of ‘722 Toulouse Street’ in the French Quarter of New Orleans will come into dazzlingly sharp focus.They include Mrs Wire, the young writer’s demented, manipulative landlady; Nightingale, an older, predatory, tubercular artist who refuses to accept his condition; Jane, a New Rochelle society girl dying of leukemia; her sexually ambiguous, drug-addicted lover Tye, who works as a bouncer in a strip club; Mary Maud and Miss Carrie, two eccentric elderly women who literally are starving to death; and a gay
photographer with a passion for orgies.