In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel

By Tennessee Williams

Directed by Susan E. Evans

at the Eureka
215 Jackson Street, San Francisco

September 24-October 20, 2002

Written between the years of 1960 and 1969 during a particularly depressed period in Williams's life, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel opened to scathing reviews in 1969. Unquestionably this is a work ripe for revival, an experimental gem written before its time. Employing the intriguing stylistic device of the incomplete sentence, Tokyo Hotel is both a highly personal drama about a disintegrating artist and his sexually and emotionally frustrated wife and a larger statement about art and the artist. Williams told his original cast that the artist, once stripped of his faculties and his self-confidence, "hasn't the comfort of feeling with any conviction that any of his work has had any essential value." The play reveals Williams' interest in Noh theatre which he developed through a close friendship with the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (who later committed ritual suicide). Clive Barnes of the New York Times wrote: "The play seems almost too personal, and as a result is too painful, to be seen in the cold light of public scrutiny.... this is Mr. Williams's sad bird of loneliness."