As a playwright, there’s something very special about an early draft – unedited and raw, a jumble of ideas that tumble out in the most honest and immediate way. There’s the potential for so much to happen, and then subsequently for anything to happen. Another draft is written, then another and another, and so on. The play evolves as the writer evolves. An iterative process. But there will always be the early drafts, the first draft, to serve as a reminder, as a time capsule even, of what the story and the characters felt like in their most immediate states.
Director and Co-Artistic Director of The Fireweeds, Jaclyn Bethany, understands the importance of an early draft. For the company’s second season, she’s acting in and directing a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Pretty Trap and Interior Panic, both early versions of what will later become Williams’ most acclaimed works – The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire. The double-billed evening, entitled Outraged Hearts, plays at Houghton Hall from May 15th through May 30th and will be an immersive examination of Williams’ evolving creative process through his most famed female characters. I got the opportunity to chat with Bethany about this piece, her company, and the exciting challenges that come from having both a New York and New Orleans audience base.
Lindsey Walko: To start us off, I thought we could begin with the name of your company. Where did “Fireweeds” come from?
Jaclyn Bethany: The Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu has a film called Floating Weeds about a traveling troop of actors in Japan in the 60s. I taught an Asian Cinema course at Loyola University New Orleans, and it was one of the films that I taught while I was simultaneously starting a theater company. It’s poetic. I don’t think it has any kind of actual connotation other than it was a combination of a film that inspired me, and just like being a woman wanting to ignite change in the industry.
LW: How did you decide that it was time to found this company? And what brought you together with your co-artistic director, Lin Gathright?
JB: The company originated in New Orleans, and I think there was a real need not only in New Orleans, but everywhere for a kind of new voice and perspective from the female gaze. We saw it as an opportunity to not only move New Orleans forward, but also create this cultural conversation with New York. New Orleans is a great American city, and we want to be a part of the artistic and cultural infrastructure. New York is so vibrant in a different way from New Orleans. To be welcomed into the theater community of both cities with our company has been really fantastic, and of course, you know, challenging as it always is whenever you start something like this. But I think overall, we just wanted to create female-driven work in a female-driven environment. We felt we had something to say and then went from there.
LW: We talk so much about the male gaze so often in media and in relation to art, and I’m curious what your definition is of the female gaze and how that feeds into your work?
JB: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because I’ve been thinking a lot about it thematically since one of the plays we’re doing in Outraged Hearts in particular speaks a lot about sexuality and trauma. It’s an early version of Streetcar, but in this version, I didn’t want the main character to be a victim. I don’t want this story to be about a victim. I don’t want her to be seen as the hysterical woman or a trope. But I think because I am a woman, looking at the play and looking at the character, hopefully, and inherently, won’t be those things. To me, the female gaze just means that you’re enough and that you have something to say that is unique to your perspective, singular perspective, as a woman,n and your experience as a woman.
The directors and also the filmmakers that inspire me have not been afraid to be daring and bold and we shouldn’t even have to use these words – female and male gaze – but it is just a product of our society. I think what Tennessee Williams did so well, and I don’t even know if he realized that he was doing it, he wrote these women because he felt other himself. Unconsciously, he was sort of projecting his own experience as a gay man in the south, during a time when this was socially unacceptable, into these very complicated and rich female characters. To me, every female director has something to say that can be interpreted through your team, your actors, and your characters.
LW: There’s so much to unpack!
JB: There’s so much to say.
LW: So much to say about being a woman in this industry and trying to put these plays on stage that are written by men, but do have this inherent connection to femininity through their complicated female characters. What was the decision to direct an early iteration of Streetcar and Glass Menagerie? What is there to gain from digging in the archives?
JB: Being from Mississippi myself, I had always grown up with Tennessee Williams, and he was the first playwright that I read in high school that I really responded to. I knew that it would be a part of my life for a long time. Over the pandemic, I really went back in and read a lot of his work while I was home, and it struck me in a different way, probably because at that time we all felt the world was ending. I was just like, I really want to figure out a way to produce something. So I did a production of The Glass Menagerie in 2022 and played Laura, and because of that, people started recommending his letters to me and his short stories.
That’s how I came across The Pretty Trap, which is an early draft of Menagerie. It’s basically, if you know the place, it’s an iteration of the Gentleman Caller scene – the famous scene with Lauren and Jim. But this version it’s not a tragedy. It’s billed as a one-act comedy, which is really interesting. Both plays function as a sort of homage to his sister Rose, who was lobotomized in her early 30s, but when he wrote The Pretty Trap, she had not had that procedure. Post lobotomy was the ending of the completed Menagerie, with the speech, “Blow your candles, Laura and say goodbye”, but in Pretty Trap the ending is more hopeful for her. In Menagerie, the entire story is Tom’s memory, Tennessee’s memory, but The Pretty Trap is Laura’s memory. And that feels like an important statement and testament to his sister and women who have lost their lives in similar, tragic outcomes.
And then with Streetcar, that one act is called Interior Panic, and it’s very experimental. He wrote many, many drafts of Streetcar, and with this, he was clearly still trying to figure out the character that later becam
e Stanley. This character has very little dialogue in this early version. There are so many directions it could have gone. But the tension of Panic– while told from Blanche’s perspective– still feels very focused on the two sisters, which is one reason I was attracted to it, So I guess with these two pieces, I was really struck when contrasting them to their final form by how much they focused on the woman and how we could bring that out through the staging.
LW: I love what you said about The Pretty Trap – being a portrait of Laura before tragedy hits in Menagerie, and that this production brings that version of her to the forefront. Both are such a tribute to William’s sister Rose.
JB: Yes! They both are, and that was the throughline, and I think I didn’t realize this until now, but the connection between Laura and Blanche is very strong because, like Rose, Blanche was sent to an asylum, we never find out what happens to her. In this version, which does have a different ending, she is having some sort of mental psychosis, caused, I think, by societal mores. By her being a woman at that time, and the men surrounding her. Yeah, it’s really really interesting.
LW: I know the company started as a reimagining of classics, with Williams and Albee, but you have a festival coming up specifically for new work and emerging writers. What led to that decision?
JB: That was always one of our goals, but it’s hard to start with new work, especially in New Orleans. We’re working with three emerging playwrights: Grace Curly, who’s a company member, Emma Schillage, and Surrey Houlker. We’re giving them all directors, cast, time to workshop their plays, and then have a developmental reading. Our guest for the festival, our keynote speaker conversation is Beth Henley, who is a really huge influence on me. We’re doing a reading of her play The Jacksonian as kind of the grand finale, which is about my hometown actually. What I realized, having directed work by two mid-century American male playwrights, is that it’s interesting to look at the throughlines in contrast to female-identifying writers today because these issues haven’t changed. It felt like a really natural next step for us, and it creates community in both places.
LW: What is it like to create work for both New Orleans and New York audiences? This production was first seen in New Orleans, correct?
JB: Yes! I mean, there was something very magical about doing this play on Desire Street, which is where we performed, in the Bywater, very close to where Stanley and Stella’s fictional home is. But also, New Orleans, to me, is a wonderful place to grow and workshop, and produce, and gain an audience. We’ve really been able to cultivate a young audience in New Orleans, many of whom have not yet experienced these playwrights before and are hungry for this kind of theatrical experience, because there’s unfortunately not tons of it in New Orleans.
I think New York is a cultural conversation. Of course, every actor, every director, every theater maker wants to be in New York, but like Tennessee Williams wrote, that is the catastrophe of success. Theater is so hard, and to even get to this point feels a little surreal. Here, you’re dealing with the whole competitive theater market that isn’t so present in New Orleans. Are we gonna sell tickets? Are people gonna come? There’s 1 million things going on all the time. So I think it’s interesting, that juxtaposition.
I’m also pretty determined and tenacious, and I was just so willing to come up here and do it because it’s such a good opportunity for us in general and to even gain more interest in the New Orleans arts scene as well.
LW: I have a friend who grew up in New Orleans, still lives in New Orleans now and I’ve talked to her a lot about, since the pandemic, the need for new and up-and-coming voices and spaces in both cities.
JB: Totally. We perform in New Orleans in an old department store, and we’re performing in New York in this big ballroom in Midtown, so there is this kind of spatial, experiential, immersive factor that’s really kind of the connective tissue in terms of how we produce in both places.
LW: Immersive theater can take on so many forms. What does it mean to you?
JB: We have preshow elements happening before the show that involve the characters ,and we also have the audience very close to the playing space. It’s about bringing the audience into the world immediately, which helps the feeling of the rawness and the truth of the pieces.
LW: When the audience is that close, there’s nowhere to hide?
JB: Yes, exactly, there’s nowhere to hide!
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