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Showing posts from April, 2018

The Gentleman Caller

Raven Theater,  6157 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60660 Now thru May 27, 2018 Raven Theater Website Friday evening (April 27, 2018) I had a remarkable experience attending a performance of The Gentleman Caller, a world premier production of a Philip Dawkins play. The play attempts to imagine what might have happened when Tennessee Williams met William Inge in Inge’s St. Louis garden apartment and later in a Chicago hotel room in 1944 and 1945. We don’t know exactly what took place, except that Williams encouraged Inge to pursue play-writing. Dawkins’ script attempts to recreate those moments based on what we know of the two men’s lives. The fact that the program has a credit for David Wooley as Fight & Intimacy Choreographer should alert you to some of the play’s content. (The extent of the fighting was a single face slap as I recall, if that helps you imagine more clearly.) Both Williams and Inge were homosexual, although radically different in their self-acceptance and ultimate