Sands Theatre Center (now at the Athens Theatre), Deland, FL 2008
We are a kind people living in a cruel time. We don’t know how to show our love. This inability was the subject of his plays, the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language.
— David Mamet on the work of Tennessee Williams
The STC cast
Amanda Allison Moseley Tom David Knoell
Laura Nikki O’Donnell Jim William Lage
This was a really wonderful cast. The play is such a staple, such a part of the American canon, that it’s sublime qualities are often dismissed by those who first encountered it in a high school classroom or on a college stage. All I can say to that is, it takes a lot of dismissing to elide the genius of what Williams accomplished in this beautiful play.
Nikki had played Laura before, but for the rest of us, it was a first production of this classic play. David and Allison in particular tore into the Tom and Amanda scenes like starving actors which was, as I recall, not far from the truth for all of us at the time.
[slideshow]