Decades after his death, Tennessee Williams still defies categorization

Or should it be measured by his entire oeuvre, which began life in Boston in 1940 with the catastrophic premiere of “Battle of Angels” at the Wilbur Theatre, and eventually grew to more than 100 plays?

The latter proposition has gained momentum in recent years, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival has played a crucial role in paving the way.

No cultural institution has demonstrated a greater commitment to Williams’s complete body of work than the Provincetown festival, which has staged 85 of his plays over the past 20 years, including 13 world premieres of previously unproduced plays, plus 12 adaptations of his short stories.

“He’s not a lake,” says David Kaplan, who has directed many productions of Williams’s plays and is cofounder and curator of the Provincetown festival, in an interview Wednesday with the Globe. “He’s an ocean.”

Starting this weekend, the Williamstown Theatre Festival will take its own deep dive into that ocean.

In his first year as Williamstown’s creative director, dramatist Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) is premiering his own new play, “Spirit of the People,” billed as a Williams-influenced piece.

Also slated for performance are Williams’s seldom-produced “Camino Real,” with a cast that includes “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson; and a production of “Not About Nightingales,” directed by Robert O’Hara, with a cast that includes William Jackson Harper (Chidi on NBC’s “The Good Place.”).

There will even be an ice-dancing piece, “The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason,” based on a Williams novel and presented at a skating rink.

On Wednesday, the New York-based Theater for the New City announced it had adapted Williams’s “Memoirs” into a play titled “Kind Stranger … a memory play,” which will premiere next month.

That variety suggests the breadth of Williams’s work. Part of his strength, and a key reason that theater companies are increasingly willing to venture into the lesser-known plays, is that he offers so many doors to open. The fact that he ranged so widely makes it hard to pigeonhole him. “He’s no more a ‘gay writer’ than Shakespeare is a ‘Stratford writer,’” said Kaplan.

When I interviewed Kaplan in 2013, he said that Williams “had a sojourn into respectability that lasted less than 20 years. In the work he did before that and in the work he did after that, he was pretty consistent in his desire to experiment, and his desire to work in nontraditional forms.”

“His work is contradictory and ambivalent, willfully so,” Kaplan added at that time.

Of course, the Big Three are always onstage, somewhere. Gloucester Stage Company recently wrapped up a terrific production of “Glass Menagerie.”

Williams’s best-known plays offer juicy roles that the biggest names want to tackle. Scarlett Johansson starred as Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway in 2013. And Broadway is always game for another revival of “The Glass Menagerie”; there have been seven since its 1945 premiere. One transcendent revival in 2013 was presented at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, starring Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, before transferring to New York; another, starring Sally Field, had a short run in 2017.

Few playwrights have endured a more sustained critical drubbing than Williams did. He was devastated by it, and became increasingly dependent on pills and booze. But he had been extraordinarily prolific from the start of his career, and he just kept writing, play after play after play, while experimenting more fully with form than he had when he enjoyed commercial success. The result is a large body of work that demands to be explored.

Williams’s plays can be staged in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of spaces.

Take “Green Eyes,” for example. In 2012, in a co-production between Company One and the experimental theater troupe the Kindness, “Green Eyes” was performed in a hotel room in downtown Boston for an audience capped at 25 spectators. In a critic’s notebook in 2013, I described the one-act play as ”a kind of danse macabre between a soldier about to return to war (clearly the Vietnam War) and his sultry wife, who relentlessly taunts him, in scenes of erotic and psychological combat, with her apparent infidelity.”

In 2009, Williams’s “The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde” was presented by Beau Jest Moving Theatre at Charlestown Working Theater, a former firehouse. In that same critic’s notebook, I described “Rooming House” as “a macabre, unsettling excursion into Grand Guignol in which a man named Mint, first seen clinging to hooks from the ceiling, is subjected to physical and verbal brutality before the arrival of the lethal title character, who ups the ante still further.”

At a time when readers and theatergoers often crave the back story, it adds to his mystique that Williams’s 71 years on the planet were exceptionally dramatic, and at times tumultuous, following a tragic arc. The subtitle of John Lahr’s excellent 2014 biography of Williams is “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.” How many other playwrights would warrant that description?

With many leading American playwrights — Eugene O’Neill, say, or Arthur Miller, or August Wilson, or the gone-too-soon Lorraine Hansberry — the essential character of their work is widely agreed upon. The nature and scope of their achievements are pretty clear-cut. With Williams, though, his legacy seems up for grabs.

The organization that has devoted itself to shaping that legacy is preparing for a major programming shift.

The theme of this year’s Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, scheduled for Sept. 25-28, will be “Last Call,” with live performances of plays by Williams that “celebrate endings,” according to Kaplan. The lineup includes productions of “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” “This Property Is Condemned,” “Lifeboat Drill,” and “The Frosted Glass Coffin.”

After that, the festival will cease operating in the form it has followed for 20 years. Going forward, Kaplan said, the festival will consist of pop-up events in Provincetown, across the country, and around the world. He likened it to Hemingway’s memoir of Paris, “A Moveable Feast.”

And, just as with Paris, there is always something new to discover about the work of Tennessee Williams.

Don Aucoin can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.