Wax, friends spoof Williams’ classics

• By GREG LANGLEY
• News Features assistant editor
• Published: Mar 30, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The plays of Tennessee Williams are dramatic, often gritty, sometimes violent. They are always eminently spoofable.

Enter veteran actor/director/producer Jamie Wax. Rounding up a few of his friends — including John “Spud” McConnell of Kingfish fame — Wax and company will take to the stage of the Manship Theatre to present The Glass Mendacity beginning Friday, April 4.

“It’s a combination of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Wax said. “It’s two acts. It is very fast and very funny. And it is presented in a reader’s theater style. In other words, it’s almost like watching a very well staged and well rehearsed radio play.

“We come up to music stands with the script on it and sort of read and interplay which allows the action to be very fast and the comedy to come very, very furiously.”

The play was written by two Chicagoans, Maureen Morley and Tom Willmorth.

“(It) has been one of the biggest hits in the New Orleans theater scene in the last five years, a huge, huge hit. It’s run multiple runs there,” said Wax, who is producing the Baton Rouge version. The director is Carl Walker. Bringing the play here is part of a larger goal Wax has.

“For the last year, I’ve been very involved in the theater scene in New Orleans. In fact I just won the Big Easy Award for best actor award for the play Doubt at Southern Rep (Southern Repertory Theater). I’ve sort of fallen in love with that theater community. It’s a bunch of really great people, a lot of working professionals in theater and film and television who, because of the movies that have come through and because of the volume of theater that’s done in that city, are able to make their living as actors.

“I realized, growing up in Baton Rouge and having Baton Rouge as one of my homes, that we don’t do any exchange. I mean, there’s things that are done there that are great, and they’re an hour away and we never see them. We’re getting shows in from New York and shows in from Chicago, but there has been very little exchange between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“Especially post-Katrina, it just makes sense to me that there’d be more of a culture exchange where we would bring some of our successful productions there and they’d bring some of theirs here. So the first thing I did was bring Going to Jackson to New Orleans for the first time which did really well there. And we’ll remount it there.”

Going to Jackson is Wax’s signature one-man show that he wrote himself.

“And then this is the second sort of project of the Baton Rouge/New Orleans theater exchange. Janie Oldfield (Manship Theatre executive director) and I want to start bringing some of the best of New Orleans theater to Baton Rouge, and, of course, vice versa,” Wax said.

“This show was a small production and just swept the Big Easy Awards for 2005 in its initial run. It ran three different venues, three different times, and was a huge, huge hit.

“It’s hysterical if you know Tennessee Williams’ work, but even if you were unfamiliar with him, it is still fall-down funny. It is one of the funniest pieces of writing that I’ve ever read.”