If you want to read a couple of great posts about Provincetown go to Andrewsullivan.com and read two of his on his blog. One is titled Always and the other is Poem for a Friday. I can’t do any better than those two postings in relating what it’s like to be here once two months have passed and one is finally relaxing into the ebbing and flowing of Cape Cod village life. Every summer I think it will be my last one here in Ptown and I always end up coming back. Part of the allure is, of course, the debauchery found here along with the artistic dedication, a coupling that has somehow always flourished from generation to generation in the florid sunshine of the place, a coupling that finds a home in the heady flush of conversations one is able to conjur with a strikingly interesting stranger or a life-long friend as well as the stretches of contemplative silence one can attain on a bit of deserted beach or an achingly lonely patch of dune. That dedication to debauchery and art has always been part of the enduring appeal - it’s there for the scratching just beneath the town’s omni-sexual surface, as I’m sure Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and Jack Reed and Louise Bryant and Stanley Kunitz and Franz Kline and Tallulah Bankhead and Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner and Hans Hoffman and Norman Mailer and Mabel Dodge and Marlon Brando and Mary Heaton Vorse (a Greenwich Village novelist and labor organizer who was the town’s bohemian pioneer in the summer of 1907) all did as they dug their fingernails, already dirty with artistry, into it, dirtying them even more, making them even more artistic. Yet it’s the simplicity of village life and the play of light which daily amazes me and, in some sense I can’t quite quantify, restores my battered soul. I am a loner by nature but I do find a kind of solace in the sweet-natured yet cantankerous comaraderie I feel with my summer-long compatriots here as we sit around and watch the, yes, ebbing and flowing of the weekly visitors who spice up the lanquor of our lives.

The town is now filled with drag shows - both old-fashioned and good-naturedly-neo- as well as comedians and not-one-but-two reviews with naked-male-nymphs-singing as their curb appeal. The days have long passed when O’Neill would stage his one-acts on the makeshift theatre at the end of a wharf or Williams welcomed his own rush of words in his cabin at Captain Jack’s Wharf - though Captain Jack’s still colorfully stakes its claim jutting out into the bay with its array of cottages and cabins and loft-like spaces. Every time I walk by Capt. Jack’s with my dog Archie - who loves to hang there with his friends Julius The Schnauzer and Henry The Pug - I think of the twenty-something Tennessee pining for some summer boyfriend with as much ardor as he pined for success and recognition and a bit of peace for his own battered southern soul. On Wednesday, I went to the Provincetown Theater to see a staging of a play he wrote in 1940 in longhand in his journal there at Capt. Jack’s Wharf. It is titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer. He left the play unfinished, tore out the journal pages, and gave them to his roommate, Joe Hazan. The play - full of arduous pining - is about his tortured love affair that summer of 1940 with a young dancer in town. In 1962, a researcher discovered the pages and gave them to Williams to complete. Last October a young troupe here, Shakespeare on the Cape, staged its world premiere as part of Ptown’s first Tennessee Williams Festival. I’d seen the troupe’s production of Much Ado About Nothing and was immediately a fan of its youthful members, most of whom met as students at the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theatre BFA Actor Training Program. The company has revived its production of Parade this summer as part of the Provincetown Theater’s season. Though certainly not a great play, it is nonetheless heartbreaking in its glimpse not of Williams talent but of his achingly lonely, uncertain self before success and fame curdled that loneliness and uncertainty to the point that his great, unequaled talent curdled, sadly, a bit as well. There were lovely performances by Elliot Eustis as the dancer and Ben Griessmeyer as the Williams stand-in and especially Grant Heuke as the rich Jewish Hegel-reading platonic girlfriend of the lead Williams character. I walked out of the play in an odd mood - always delighted to see young actors of real talent tackle a difficult text yet realizing in that difficult text which contained the inchoate voice that would a few years later rock the theatre world with its power (indeed, Williams wrote much of Streetcar and Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke and Night of the Iguana during his four summers in Ptown) was a plea for understanding and acceptance on a very personal level that was finally left unanswered. Tennessee, take it from another southern sissy, a Mississippi one, you should have kept summering in Ptown where understanding and acceptance are part of the Cape Cod air if only you breathe it in deeply enough. I took deep breaths all the way home that night and gave Archie a midnight walk by Capt. Jack’s. The moon was three nights past its fullness yet its light was able to dance - its beauty as untouchable as Tennessee’s own dancer that summer sixty-seven years ago now - atop the bay.

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