The actors have just 2½ weeks of rehearsal before opening night, and just one week on set. They've remained friends and they bonded - rebonded - very rapidly when they all came back together.”Īnd that’s a good thing, because the production is operating at a near sprint. “Totally convincing, even at this early point in rehearsal. Bringing the actors back together provides a second chance for the director and his dream cast. That production was originally meant to be onstage, shifting to an audio recording due to the pandemic shutting down live theater. Louis on the Air that the production booked the apartments to serve as its living quarters: “The cast and myself are occupying a couple of the apartments, and they're beautiful.”įor Houk and Hohlfeld, the production reunites three-fourths of the cast of the radio play version of “The Glass Menagerie,” which premiered at last year’s Williams festival. So how do the Airbnb guests feel about the inconvenience of the production? L.A.-based director Brian Hohlfeld explained on Tuesday’s St.

Louis’ new production of “The Glass Menagerie,” with a stage assembled in its parking lot and the set as “an organic extension of the back of the building,” in the words of festival director Carrie Houk. And now the building’s grounds will host the Tennessee Williams Festival St. But 4633 Westminster Place remains a residential building, one that now holds a number of Airbnb units that draw on Williams’ fame. The apartment building on Enright no longer exists.

Williams took details from both apartments in envisioning the home of the Wingfield family in “The Glass Menagerie,” describing their apartment building in the play as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population.” Louis with his family, living on Westminster Place in the city’s Central West End neighborhood for four years before moving to Enright Avenue in University City. Louis apartment building that helped inspire it.Īs a boy, Williams (then known as Tom) moved to St. 19, it opens in a place like no other: on the grounds of the St. Tennessee Williams’ beloved “memory play,” “The Glass Menagerie,” has been performed all over the world.

Tennessee williams play the glass