After a long day of class or a stressful all-night cram session, the sight of your bed is a comfort and a relief, representing a haven of well-deserved rest. But to troubled playwright Tennessee Williams, his bed lost all symbolism of warmth, and came instead to embody loneliness, insomnia, and substance abuse. This unfortunate association is the subject of Service of My Desire, a 15-minute solo performance which runs this weekend in the Gonda Theater as part of The Glass Menagerie Project.
This performance, a monologue adapted by and starring Jimmy Dailey (COL ’11), is drawn from Williams’s own memoirs and notebooks. Performing as the playwright, Dailey highlights Williams’s complex and often tortured relationship with his own sexuality, and with one partner in particular, Kip Kiernan. The performance is entirely set in Williams’s bedroom, which the monologue makes clear is a chamber of his sorrow and solitude.
The format of the performance is untraditional, with Williams speaking casually to the audience from his bed, with the audience members, according to Dailey, “descend[ing] beneath the Gonda stage…where they discover Tennessee Williams in his bedroom,” Dailey wrote in an email.
“I wanted to make the event as intimate as possible,” Dailey wote. “Where is a person his most comfortable and vulnerable? His bedroom. Tennessee Williams has such a lovely charm about him that resonates most fully in this bedroom atmosphere.”
The story focuses on Williams’s love affair with Kiernan, whose death from lung cancer devastated Williams. But their relationship was brief, with Kip leaving him for a woman because he feared Williams was “turning him homosexual.” The performance chronicles the trauma that Williams experienced through this relationship, with his bedroom coming to mean both love and loneliness. Kiernan’s death and Williams’s inability to find a lasting partner helped to spark the cycle of addiction and madness which characterized the later years of his life, in which he often went days without leaving his bedroom.
But Dailey chose the story of Kiernan as the subject of his monologue for another reason besides Williams’s subsequent downward spiral.
“Kip was Tennessee’s first great male love,” Jimmy said. “He had had long-lasting, loving relationships with women and several flings with other men, but Kip was his first real male love.”
And it’s this presence and power of love, despite the relatively quick end to the relationship, that Dailey really hopes to emphasize in his performance.
“Kip loved him,” Dailey wrote. “He finally gave Tennessee the opportunity to show another human being how full of love he was, and the opportunity to know what it is like to have another person love him.”
Service of My Desire runs in the Gonda Theatre Thursday, Mar. 17 at 10:45 p.m., Saturday, Mar. 19 at 4 p.m., and Saturday, Mar. 26 at 12:30 p.m.
