This Little World

Tennessee Williams Road Trip Finale

Looking back over my last entries, it might appear that somewhere in Clarksdale, MS, I fell off the face of the earth.  The reality is less dramatic and has much more to do with the fun of the road trip wearing me out before I found time to write about the road trip.  

But sitting in a hotel room in Boone on a day off between two events at An Appalachian Summer Festival, I finally have the time to go back over the rest of the trip

The Tennessee Williams Road Trip:  Day 5

Waking up in Clarksdale, Nick and I discussed keeping the cabin for another day, but eventually decided to rush through a few sights and then hit the road.

First stop was Delta Amusement Café for grits, sausage and eggs.  Unfortunately the state run Blues museum was closed for the holiday.  But that gave us time for the Blues and Rock and Roll Museum, a fabulous collection of memorabilia showcasing American roots music and a stop by The Riverside Hotel. 

I had planned to stop long enough to snap a couple of pictures, but as I was taking a photo of the historic marker outside the front door, the owner of the hotel, Frank Ratliff, invited us in.

Talk about history!  The Riverside Hotel was originally the African-American hospital in Clarksdale.  The place where the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith died.  Since 1944 it has been a home for musicians and people who love music.  The hotel for the blues musicians travelling through Clarksdale.  And Frank Ratliff knows them all.  He should.  His mother opened the hotel and it has been his home since 1944.  The tour was better than any museum and Mr. Ratliff is an incomparable guide and storyteller.  From the Bessie Smith room to the room where Muddy Waters loved to stay to the stacks of guest books in the office, Mr. Ratliff shared the history of this extraordinary building and got me hooked.  I can't wait to stay.

After that it was Tennessee Williams Park and then the Great River Road—strange name, since you rarely see the river, just the levee off in the distance.  But there are still sights worth seeing.  There was an Indian Mound Historical Park, the crossroads where the devil bought the musician’s soul, Greenville—home town of one of my favorite novelists, Walker Percy, lunch at a Piccadilly Cafeteria, Vicksburg, a roadside folk art church made from a trailer and a bus, beautiful Port Gibson, an early evening drive down the final miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway and finally, Natchez.

Natchez was the town so beautiful Sherman wouldn’t burn it.  And it is beautiful, sharp contrast to the poverty and decline of so much we had seen along the road.  This was my first, and all too brief, visit to Natchez and I hope to return.  BBQ for dinner (NC BBQ is better), cocktails, a dip in the pool and then bed.

Day Six

Day six is the day we’ve reserved for plantations.  Headed down the Great River Road from Natchez to St. Francisville, La.  Of course, Nick and I can’t resist The Myrtles—the most haunted house in the US.  Or so some would say.   The only thing scary about the visit was the admission price.  Just a regular old plantation house with a brief tour and a couple of half hearted ghost stories thrown into the mix. 

St. Francisville is my top pick for the least friendly town in the South.  Not one person that we met smiled or showed the slightest interest in welcoming us to their plantation, restaurant, coffee shop, etc.  I found this odd since their number one industry is tourism.  I was delighted to say goodbye and continue on the way to Baton Rouge.

I must confess to have always been fascinated by Huey Long.  Crook.  Demagogue.  And yet… I love the fact that he was to the left of FDR and could have been a serious challenger for the Democratic nomination if he hadn’t been shot.  But this wasn’t a trip for Huey Long, so the capitol and historic sites will have to wait until I direct ALL THE KING'S MEN. 

From Baton Rouge we drove along the river, crossing sides whenever a bridge provided the opportunity.  The drive is legendary for the great plantation homes.  But the most prominent  site is not graceful antebellum palaces, but enormous, hulking, hideous chemical plants.  But in between the massive eyesores one can find beautiful homes, restored and turned into museums, bed and breakfasts or private homes.  Of course, the history they present is sanitized and little mention is made of the horrors and inhumanity of slavery that made these houses possible.  All of that is best forgotten when you are making your livelihood selling the myth of the genteel South.  Since, I am directing THE GLASS MENAGERIE and am on this road trip to dive into this mythical South, I tried not to let my anger at the hidden history distract me from the work at hand—idealizing an antebellum fiction that ripped our country apart and still tears at our national fabric today. 

(Sorry, a road trip South always gets me angsty about my own love/hate relationship with the region.  All those memorials to the Confederate Dead and Confederate flags infuriate me.  It got so bad in Anderson, SC—site of a particularly offensive Confederate memorial— that I actually ordered my iced tea unsweetened and said—perhaps too loudly—“ Sherman was right!”) 

The first plantation was the Houmas House.  One of my favorite Agnes Moorehead films, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, was filmed there.  Lovely house.  Unfortunately no door prize for answering trivia questions about the movie.  Everyone on the tour knew Bette David was in it.  But how many people would have known  Grandma Walton and one of the Baldwin sisters appeared briefly as extras, looking exactly as if they had wandered down from Virginia in search of John Boy or a bit of the Recipe?  And who in the group could have sung the theme song? 

Me.  That’s who.  I once won a prize in Chester, England for knowing the only other city in the world to have bi-level sidewalks.  I collect useless trivia and am delighted when it pays off with a t-shirt or gift certificate. 

We crossed the river and visited Oak Alley.  Again, a beautiful house.  And iconic with its graceful avenue of live oaks leading up to the house.  And here at least there was some mention of slavery and the slave quarters.  The tour guide was also delightful.  We were on our third plantation of the day and only a real talent could have gotten me through another discussion of the symbolism of the pineapple, the use of a shoo fly, or the design of a fly catcher.  And there were mint juleps for sale at the end of the tour.  Real ones.  I love it when a cocktail is historical research.

By this point all the other plantations had closed, but we pulled into parking lots, peered through fences and snapped pictures of all the big houses all the way in New Orleans.

And then:  NEW ORLEANS! 

I adore the city but haven’t been back for a couple of years.  Thank heavens Tennessee always gives me a reason to visit again.  I long ago foreswore the hotels of the French Quarter in favor of the constant search for the perfect funky guest house.  This time around it was the Royal Barracks Guest House—just up the street from the home of an Oscar winning British actress that I adore.  The guest house was great fun, cleverly carved out of an old shotgun cottage.  After checking in it was off to Acme Oyster House and then to have a drink in some of my favorite places far from Bourbon Street bars—local hangouts where one can witness the parade of characters that keep this city feeling unlike anywhere else in America, even after the devastation of Katrina.

Day Seven and Eight:

New Orleans.  Walk.  Eat.  Wander.  Wonder.  Eat.  Drink.  Walk.  Admire.  Soak it all in.  There’s the house where Williams wrote STREETCAR.  There’s the house where Faulkner wrote his first novel.  There’s the apartments where Sherwood Anderson lived.  There’s a drunk college student vomiting on Bourbon Street.  What am I doing on Bourbon Street?  Get me back to the real city, the place that has inspired so much creativity, so much music, so much life, so much literature, so much drama.  I could write a novel here.  The inspiration hangs in the air, heat and humidity slowing you down till you take up pen and paper and write by the glorious crescent of the Mississippi and try to pick a story out of the endless, heavy night.

Day Nine:

Driving the along the coast from Biloxi, MS to Fairhope, AL, the sense of the tragedy of the BP oil spill is palpable.  At night, the stink of oil almost overpowers the salt of the surf.  By day, the beaches are empty apart from workers trying to keep them clean.  In an area already devastated by Katrina, another tragedy like this seems too much.  After a day of the gulf we head North to Greenville, AL, dinner at a Shoney’s and a brand new Quality Inn where nothing works.

Day 10:

To balance out the false romanticism of the antebellum mythology we’ve been soaking up all week today is about the other side of the Southern story.  Montgomery and Selma. We start with the Roasa Parks Library and Museum.  I’ve been before but am thrilled to be back.  It is a small but exceptional museum that succeeds brilliantly at bringing the story of a courageous woman and a daring act of civil disobedience to life.  From there, we stop by Dexter Avenue to see Rev King’s church, then tour the Civil Rights Center at the Southern Poverty Law Center—a deeply moving experience.  After that, we head off for Selma.  Stopping halfway for the Lowndes County Interpretive Center—a new museum detailing the events of the Selma to Montgomery march and the Tent City built to house African Americans thrown out of their homes in Lowndes County for attempting to register to vote.  Somehow we missed the monument to Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white woman who drove down from Detroit to help with the Selma to Montgomery march.  After the march she was driving marchers back to Selma when she was killed by Klansmen in a passing car.  I’ve always been fascinated by her because I wonder what I would have done in those difficult times.  And what I should be doing now in these difficult times.  And if I would ever have the courage to leave everything I know to go fight the good fight.

There’s a play in there somewhere.

The first sight of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is heart stopping.  There it is, just like in all the photos, newsreels and movies.  There is the place where so much hate was met by so much courage and conviction.  There was the place where the US finally had to face the injustice of Jim Crow, where voting rights were won, and where the ugly underbelly of racism in this country was fully exposed to the world.

Selma has a beautiful old hotel, The St. James.  Nick and I had dinner there—catfish and collards (now, that’s what I call the good part of the South)—before heading back to Montgomery, shifting gears, to search for Hank Williams grave and the house where F. Scott and Zelda Fitgerald lived in their brief time in Montgomery.

Leaving Montgomery always makes me happy.  And so we left late that night, headed to Atlanta. 

Day 11

All road trips must come to an end.  But I was determined to prevent a conclusion until we had investigated every last object of interest on I-85.  That didn’t take long on a Sunday morning, so we headed over to Athens, GA, one of my favorite college towns for some used book shopping and burgers at The Grill.  And the REM that always seems to be blaring from some bar somewhere.  Then it was up 29 to Anderson (site of the disgusting Confederate Memorial, claiming that history will prove them right) and on back to Greensboro.  Back at last, weary from the road, but reeling from the joy of our first Sun Drop in a week.  Ah, the taste of home.

Last thoughts:

And so after 11 days and a thousand miles was it all worth it?  What did we learn?  Would we do it again?

I believe that creativity is fueled by travel, by experiencing place in meaningful ways.  Knowing the environments that inspired writers helps us understand the worlds of their creativity even better.  My Belle Reve may never be the Blanche Cutrer mansion, but memories of that house wrestled in Williams' mind from his childhood on.  And my Moon Lake Casino is a grander place than reality would have it.  It’s lit by paper lanterns and a band plays swing as the summer night draws out secrets and violence.  But Moon Lake is now forever etched in mind as a sunset mirrored in muddy beauty as fireworks explode from an island.  The south also comes alive on such a trip, both the mythology, the reality, the secret history and the struggles for justice.  The food, too.   The music in a blues club in Clarksdale.  The sight of a stunning piece of architecture in the midst of poverty—design as an act of social justice.  The oil on the surface of the Gulf waters reminding us of our current woes.  The wounds and divisions of a region that has great poverty, greaty hypocrisy, great discrimination as well as great history, great courage, great conviction, great literature, great music and great iced tea. 

This was a Southern road trip, setting out to track down bits of Tennessee William’s past, but ultimately confronting head on my own personal conflict with the region.  Love and hate and yet I wouldn’t be happy any other place.  There is something here that calls us home.

The Tennessee Williams Road Trip: Day 4

Speaking of not seeing the inside of houses associated with famous people, driving out of Tupelo, Nick and I saw the sign for the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum and Park.  We had decided that time was short and that we were going to use Tupelo as only a brief overnight, but the sign said it was less than a mile off the highway, so we went.  Since it was a Sunday morning and July 4^th, the museum and home were closed.  Even though I am not really an Elvis fan, there was something deeply moving about the small house, such humble beginnings for the King of Rock and Roll.  We didn’t stay long, because I was determined to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home.  It is named for the mythic, magical qualities of the Rowan and so I felt a special connection since PROVIDENCE GAP started with a fascination with the legends of the Rowan tree.

Add another one to the houses I got to view from the outside only.  It is beautiful indeed and I will make sure I come back on another day than the Fourth of July.  And Oxford’s town square is pure Southern charm.  Well worth a repeat visit.

After a brief stop in Batesville, where a packed parking lot led us to a remarkable buffet of fresh vegetables and brilliant beef brisket, we pulled into Clarksdale, MS.  I am always amazed when a community can maintain a sense of place and uniqueness in the face of globalization and homogenization.  Such a community is Clarksdale.  I fell instantly in love with its past glory and faded elegance.  I can’t wait to go back.

Clarksdale is known for two things.  It was a childhood refuge for the young Tennessee Williams, who would spend time with his grandparents.  It is also a leading candidate for the location of the birthplace of the Blues.  I came for Tennessee Williams and fell head over heels in love with the blues.  

Our first stop was the funky, fun and incredibly cool Shack Up Inn, a collection of sharecropper shacks, barely restored and reassembled on the outskirts of town.  After several nights of cookie cutter roadside motels, the fresh and unexpected Shack Up Inn ranks as one of my favorite places I have ever stayed.  Next was the church where Williams’ grandfather preached.  The church and rectory were the inspiration for several plays.  As was a glass collection displayed in the window of a house owned by Mrs. Wingfield over on Catalpa Ave.  And Blanche Cutrer impressed young Tennessee with her Southern style, lending the Cutrer name to a number of plays, Blanche to one of his greatest creations.  And many believe her Italian Renaissance Mansion on Clark St is the real life Belle Reve.

There’s also no doubt that an old gambling, dancing and dinner joint on Moon Lake about 20 miles north of the city is the real life Moon Lake Casino that features so prominently in so many of the plays.  Williams, Faulkner and many others use to come out to Moon Lake for games, booze and romance.  The Casino is now a small bed and breakfast and restaurant—Uncle Henry’s Place.

Nick and I arrived as the sun was just beginning to set over Moon Lake.  And I felt the presence of Blanche and her young husband with a secret about to be uncovered hovering in the humid summer heat, waiting to explode like the fireworks from an island in the middle of the lake that illuminted the night.  We had reservations and when the waitress led us into the dining room, I expected a crowd, but the only other table was made up of two of my directing students and Cheryl, the delightful young actress who played Millie in PICNIC last season and will be Laura in Glass Menagerie.  Bryan and JB have heard me talk about the value of visiting the places that inspired the plays we are directing and since JB is directing ORPHEUS DESCENDING next Spring at UNCG, they had flown into Memphis and come down to Clarksdale for a couple of days.

Dinner was not only delicious, but a real experience as the owner/chef entertained us with stories and ended the evening with a tour of the building.  A total experience in Southern hospitality and a great character study.  He frequently referred to actors as pseudo-intellectuals.  We all left Moon Lake and headed back downtown to Bluesberry Café to catch Watermelon Slim in concert.  The music, the southern night, the sense of being in a place so real, so unique made the whole evening a Fourth of July to remember.

A couple of months ago, my friend Elizabeth and I took a weekend trip out on Long Island, stopping at the Jackson Pollack house and Studio.  We were both overwhelmed by the experience, but after leaving, I asked what it was that made a paint splattered floor so inspirational.  It could have been Triad Stage’s paint shop.   After all it was just floor and paint.  We began to talk about what it was about places that make them more than just the building, the geography.  I’ve seen hundreds of Episcopalian churches in hundreds of small Southern towns.  Why should the one in Clarksdale been worthy of hundreds of miles of driving.  Is it something special like an energy, or is it just that we imbue them with that special energy by our love for the work produced in them?

Nick and I ended the evening sitting on the front porch of our shack, drinking tequila, slapping mosquitoes and talking about this fabulous, unexpected town—making plans to visit the site of Blues legend Bessie Smith’s death, the Blues Museum and Tennessee Williams park before heading down the Great River Road toward Natchez.

(See the photo albums for samples of architecture we have admired.)

The Tennessee Williams Road Trip:

Day 2

I’m a day late posting this because there is little to post—nothing at all literary.  A day of driving, outlet mall shopping and BBQ eating on a road often traveled.  From the NC border all the way to Tuscaloosa, AL.  And there’s nothing literary to report—no famous writer’s birthplace, no setting of a play.  Just interstates 85, 20 and 59.  And Atlanta--  I guess that’s GONE WITH WIND.  But the thing I love most about Atlanta is leaving.

I suppose the fact that CRIME AND PUNISWHMENT got banished from the CD because neither of us could concentrate on keeping the names straight is literary, but perhaps not something to brag about.  Dostoevsky was replaced by a collection of ghost stories by Joe Hill.  A bit of suspense and a tingling spine seemed more likely to keep us awake than a novel that demands total respect and complete attention.

So, here we are in Alabama, hotel room crammed with outlet center finds dreaming about the journey to come—a day of brilliant modern architecture and the birthplaces of Tennessee Williams and Elvis Presley.

Day 3

Any good road trip needs good food.  My vote for the best road food is a local restaurant serving the specialties of the region, ideally in a space that has been open for decades.  Such places are getting harder and harder to find as Cracker Barrels and other chains take over the American roadside, homogenizing the highway culinary scene.  But some still survive.  Day 3 started out at The Wayfarer, a Tuscaloosa shrine to biscuits, red eye gravy and University of Alabama football.  Ranked one of the 50 Best Places for Breakfast in the US by Esquire, The Wayfarer is a small red building, impossibly crowded with tables and customers.  It’s easy to miss on the first attempt to find it, but impossible to forget.  The breakfast is amazing.  Unfortunately being gluten intolerant, I had to turn down the biscuits, but they looked like perfection.  And the eggs, sausage, cheese grits, country ham and red eye gravy were all true road food wonders.

Leaving Tuscaloosa, Nick and I headed down a two lane highway.  Our first stop was Greensboro, Alabama and the beginning of our Rural Studio tour.  The Rural Studio is a stunning example of art, design and social policy combining to create brilliant architecture that serves a community.  Believing strongly that good design and beauty should not belong only to those who have money, I am a huge fan of these daring buildings in the midst of some of the poorest counties in the US.  From houses to public spaces, the Rural Studio works with its clients to create bold, unexpected designs.  Our first sighting was a social service center on Greensboro’s main street.  By late in the afternoon, we had seen chapels, skate parks, fire stations, museums, cultural centers and houses.  We had driven down red dirt roads to find towns so small they weren’t on any map.  Just when we thought we were lost,  a group of trailers would appear and then suddenly a home of such extraordinary design it would take our breath away.  Unfortunately, the Rural Studio’s offices were closed and the nice man at the Newbern Grocery had given away his last copy of the map, so we were left trying to navigate the Rural Studio’s not very user friendly website and using the GPS on my blackberry and an out of date article from the NY TIMES to try to find all we could see in day.  There are many wonderful projects we couldn’t see, but I am thrilled to see what I did in context and I am now an even greater admirer of the Rural Studio’s work.

But back to food.  Despairing of finding anything open, we turned a corner coming into Aliceville, AL and found The Plantation House-- an 19^th century plantation turned restaurant where hospitality and simple food made the supper an evening to remember.

From Aliceville, across the Mississippi border and into Columbus, we were dismayed to find Tennessee William’s birthplace under renovation and surrounded by fence.  But we snapped a few pictures, walked to the church where his grandfather preached and then headed north to Tupelo.   Now William’s Columbus home can get added to the list of famous writers’ homes that I haven’t gotten to see inside.  I’ve been trying for over a decade to see O’Neill’s Monte Cristo cottage.  Seems like I still can’t time a trip to Asheville to see the Thomas Wolfe house.  And I always forget the time change at the Georgia border when I’m driving back from New Orleans and have yet to show up when the Erskine Caldwell museum is open.

The Tennessee Williams Road Trip: Day 1

If you haven’t seen PROVIDENCE GAP, it closes this Sunday.  It is already one of our highest grossing shows, has sparked some lively debate in the communit,y and is playing to standing ovations each night.  This weekend is also your last chance to catch the late night Durang shows in the UpStage Cabaret and the morning kid show over at Brown Theater on the UNCG campus.  Seeing all three demonstrates the enormous talent of the UNCG company.  Watching them shift in the course of a few hours from kung fu kittens to Appalachian allegory to Durang’s dark comedy is a thrilling experience.  I’m so proud of their work in this year’s THTR 232.

I saw PROVIDENCE GAP for the last time tonight.  Just bits and pieces, really.  I haven’t seen the show the whole way through since I said my goodbye on opening night.  My job is done when rehearsals end and I hand the show over to the cast, stage manager and crew.  It’s theirs now.  They have given it more life than my words or direction ever could.  And since opening night, I’ve been traveling.  First to Chicago for the annual Theater Communications Group Conference—the national conference of not-for-profit theaters.  Then I headed up to Cherokee to see UNTO THESE HILLS and to pay a brief but delightful visit to Flat Rock to have lunch with Jamison Stern from AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS.  And now, I’m settling in for a brief night in a hotel south of Charlotte as I begin a Tennessee Williams Road Trip.

This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself headed down Interstate 85 on the way to discover the roots of a Southern writer.  A couple years back , at about the same time of the year, I was headed to Demopolis, AL to trace the family connections of Lillian Hellman- - seeing the home and hometown of the family that inspired THE LITTLE FOXES.  Realizing I was less than a day’s drive from New Orleans, I headed on south to my favorite American city and found the home where Hellman had grown up.  A few years earlier, I had gone to New Orleans to see Elysian Fields and ride a streetcar named Desire.  And merging onto I-77, another trip took me to Augusta, GA and the land of TOBACCO ROAD—with a side trip to Milledgeville and the almost holy experience of walking where Flannery O’Connor walked at Andalusia.

Now here I am again, headed south to explore Columbus and Clarksdale, two towns in Mississippi with strong Tennessee Williams connections.  As with any good road trip, I have a few diversions planned.    A side trip to Greensboro and Newbern, AL will take me to see the work of the Rural Studio—a secret dream when the world of theater wears me down is to run away and join the Rural Studio.  I’m stopping in Tupelo and then in Oxford  to pay homage to William Faulkner and so many others . And another day or two is dedicated to the Natchez Trace and the River Road as I wind my way down to New Orleans,  again.  And I hope this time to finally make it to the Erskine Caldwell Birthplace Museum somewhere southwest of Atlanta.

I’m accompanied on this trip by Nick Hussong, who will be working on the projection and video design for THE GLASS MENAGERIE.  For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been so excited to hit the road, to explore the South and to escape.  We were supposed to leave on Friday, but finally the urge to wander wouldn’t let us be, so here we are, late, late Thursday,  south of Charlotte ready to explore.    Incongruously, we’re listening to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT on CD in the car and I’m doing a crash course reminder reading of a Chekhov biography.  Russians and magnolias, an odd combination.    But somehow it just feels right.