Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans.
"A Streetcar Named Desire."
From the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."
On first glance, Big Daddy Pollitt’s mansion looks like a house not meant to stand. Walls shoot upward and loom over the family at crooked angles. Mosquito nets hang from the ceiling, haunting as ghosts. A birthday cake lays in ruins on an antique dresser.
From the darkness, a voice calls out, “Places for the top of act three!”
If Big Daddy’s home threatens to sink into the marshes of the Mississippi Delta, the same cannot be said of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (TWTC), which closed out its tenth anniversary season with Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in August.
In fact, TWTC and its national reputation appear sturdier than ever, at a time when theatre companies across the country struggle to recover from the reverberations of pandemic-related closures, combined with fresh uncertainty over funding for the performing arts.
Co-founded in 2015 by Augustin J. Correro and Nick Shackleford, TWTC started out as a way to introduce Williams’s lesser-known works and brilliance to his “spiritual hometown.”
[Read more about New Orleans's theatre scene in "Off-Stage Left."]
“Our first production was Kingdom of Earth, which we opened in the rec room of the St. Charles Avenue Christian Church with fifty-five seats for audience members,” Correro recalled. “And we only had about $5,000 that we had fundraised from friends and community members, so we pulled it off on a very shoestring budget.”
“It was risky to do a lesser-known Williams play,” Shackleford added, “but the material resonated with the community. So, we decided to take a bigger risk with our next production.” That play would be Small Craft Warnings, another late-era Williams production that other companies considered too obscure to produce.
“It was a wild adventure, because we set this play that takes place in a bar in an actual bar—Mag’s 940 on Elysian Fields. But then we walked in one day, and the owners had put up their Christmas decorations. So, we said, ‘Well, I guess the show’s set at Christmas now!’”
Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans.
Shots from the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
There’s a long tradition in New Orleans of producing theatre in unconventional spaces. But it didn’t take long for more established institutions to take note of the impressive work Correro and Shackleford were doing on a consistent basis. In 2019, Dr. Laura Hope, the chair and artistic director for the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at Loyola University New Orleans, invited TWTC to become the resident theatre company at Loyola.
“And in that first year at Loyola,” Correro says, “we were getting ready to open In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, and we had even brought in an actor from New York to play one of the roles, when the university announced that we needed to shut down because of the pandemic.”
TWTC joined the thousands of theatres across the United States that were forced to go dark for eighteen months or more. And when pandemic protocols finally eased in 2021, the costs of labor and building materials started to rise, putting significant financial strain on institutions that had been around for generations and were still struggling to get back on their feet.
According to American Theatre, more than thirty major regional theatres have permanently closed their doors since 2020, including several in Louisiana. Southern Rep in New Orleans closed in 2022 after laying off many of their staff during the pandemic and struggling to regain their audience base. Just this year, Theatre Baton Rouge (TBR)—one of the oldest community theatres in the country—announced that it was closing in the middle of its 79th season, with Board President Andrea Tettleton saying that TBR was “a victim of long COVID.”
“We were lucky because we didn’t have a mortgage to pay,” said Shackleford. “And we do a lot of our own marketing and box office operations, so we were able to limit our overhead costs while we waited to figure out what to do next.”
“Next” wouldn’t happen until the spring of 2022, when TWTC finally opened their production of Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a spoof of Williams’s plays that Correro had cast nearly two years earlier. For the company, the end of pandemic signaled a rebirth as they filled in the void left behind by so many shuttered venues.
“We watched as other companies lost their audiences,” Correro said. “But we had the opposite experience. People wanted to come back. We were selling out performances like crazy.” When TWTC finally produced A Streetcar Named Desire in 2024, they extended the original sold-out, three-week run by an additional three weeks and set a company record for most profit raised from a single production.
Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans.
Shots from the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Now, local and national organizations have taken note of the work Correro and Shackleford are doing and have offered even more resources to expand their programming. Gambit Weekly named TWTC the “Best Local Theater Company." A grant from the New Orleans Theatre Association allowed the company to remount shows that had been canceled due to the pandemic and the subsequent series of hurricanes that swept through the Gulf. The Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Provincetown, MA, invited Correro to bring his production of Clothes for a Summer Hotel to an interested audience of New England arts lovers. And earlier this year, TWTC announced that they were the recipient of a grant from The Shubert Foundation, the nation’s largest provider of unrestricted arts funding in the country.
“We watched as other companies lost their audiences,” Correro said. “But we had the opposite experience. People wanted to come back. We were selling out performances like crazy.”
“We had applied for the grant before,” Shackleford said, “and we didn’t get it, but the [staff] wanted to have a conversation with us. And they said they would love to see us produce newer, original works.”
This led Correro to start developing more experimental pieces inspired by the work of Tennessee Williams, but completely original in concept and execution. First, there was The Six Blanches, a play in which six actresses explored different aspects of Williams’s most famous heroine within the storied walls of the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans.
A shot from the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans production of "Penny Dreadful."
“But my most twisted idea by far,” Correro said, “has been The Felt Menagerie. I had this idea to give voice to all the thoughts and feelings that go unspoken in Williams’s plays, but I wanted those voices to come from the mouths of professionally designed puppets.” Bold perhaps, but the Shubert Foundation clearly saw the idea as a risk worth taking.
When it comes to 'what's next,' Shackleford and Correro aren’t afraid to admit that they’re dreaming big. “One of our long-term goals is that we want to have a Tennessee Williams Cultural Arts Center that can be a museum during the day, but a fully staffed performance venue in the evenings—some place where we can bring the genius of this playwright not only to New Orleans, but to audiences and tourists from around the world as well.”
Back at Loyola’s Marquette Theater, Correro stood in front of the stage with his arms lifted like a conductor before a world-class orchestra.
“Okay, everyone, take your bows. You’ve earned it.” He smiled. “But then we’re doing it again.”
The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans is performing Williams's play Out Cry: The Two Character Play September 10–14 and 17–21 at the Lower Depths Theater. twtheatrenola.com
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