Stricklyn’s Tennessee Travels to Edinburgh

Ray Stricklyn’s Tennessee Williams is getting to be as well-traveled as Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain.

Stricklyn has just returned from the Edinburgh Festival, where his one-man evening with Tennessee, “Confessions of a Nightingale,” received notices that Williams would have given a lot for, in his last years as a playwright.

Wrote John Peter in the London Sunday Times: “Wine glass in hand, Williams is all there: the drawling, gritty voice; the wise, bitchy humor; the dignity, the essential toughness. We begin with a little name-dropping, but the core of the show is a sense of inner freedom bought at a hideous expense.”

Raymond Ross of the Edinburgh News: “With grace and ease, Stricklyn moves from one subject to another: Williams’ upbringing, his loneliness, his homosexuality, his greatest successes, the death of his closest friend, the critical batterings, his close encounters with Hollywood and with death. The piece is both anecdotal and revealing, funny and fascinating.”

“You are left with the conviction that you have been brought close to a man without reticence or evasion,” wrote P. H. Scott in The Scotsman.

Stricklyn reports that a West End deal is being discussed.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville is best known for its spring marathon of new plays, but it also puts on a long weekend every fall entitled “Classics in Context.”

Plays, films and panel discussions focus on one author, period or theme in theater history. This year it’s the Victorian era. There will be performances of “Peter Pan” and W. S. Gilbert’s “Engaged.” James Winker will do his one-man show, “With Alice in Wonderland.”

There will be the 1947 film of “Nicholas Nickleby” and a 1973 Canadian documentary on Victorian theater, “Going on the Stage.” One of the colloquia will discuss whether Victorian attitudes toward sex were as Victorian as we think.

The weekend’s centerpiece should be “The Whore and the h’Empress,” Jonathan Bolt’s stage adaptation of Henry Mayhew’s 1851 “London Labour and the London Poor,” as shocking a book in its day as the Kinsey Report was in the late 1940s.

Dates: Oct. 14-16. Information: (502) 584-1265.

MOTTO OF THE WEEK: The credo of the first Fox Newsreel (1919): “To be tremendously interesting all of the time.”