When Roger Fristoe was a high school student in Paducah in the late 1950s, he read The Glass Menagerie, a play that would lead him into a lifelong fascination with theater. Shortly thereafter, Fristoe entered a speech competition in which he recited the opening and closing monologues of that Tennessee Williams script about a young man’s melancholy memories of his dysfunctional family.
When he participated in the state-level competition at the University of Kentucky’s Guignol Theatre in Lexington, Fristoe recalls, “Those were the first words I ever spoke as an actor on a real stage.
“By that time, I had fallen in love with Tennessee Williams’ writing, and to this day, he remains my favorite playwright. I’ve always identified with him, and I’m so moved by the way he finds beauty in the lives of the misfits among us.”
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Now, Fristoe is portraying Williams in a one-man show, Confessions of a Nightingale, at the Boyd Martin Experimental Theatre, also known as the MeX Theatre, of the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville on Dec. 6-9 and 13-16. Louisville actor/producer/director Mike Seely is directing the show for his production company, Actor’s Choice.
The play was created in 1983 by actor Ray Stricklyn and author Charlotte Chandler, designed as a vehicle for Stricklyn and based on Chandler’s interviews with Williams for her book The Ultimate Seduction, along with other sources.
The action takes place near the end of Williams’ life. He died in 1983. The title refers to the poetic connotations of a nightingale as the “bird of love” and also as a symbol of the connection between love and death.
“The script gives you a choice as to where to set the play, which basically consists of Williams speaking intimately to the audience,” Fristoe says. “So, we decided to place it in the patio/backyard area of his longtime home in Key West.”
That’s where Williams regularly indulged in his pastime, oil painting. Most often, he painted portraits of friends and local sights in his adopted hometown. This inspired Fristoe—who, like Williams, began painting as a teen—to replicate several of Williams’ paintings for use on the set.
Perhaps influenced by their Florida locales, the paintings have an easy flow about them and utilize tropical colors. “It was a little disorienting at first, painting in someone else’s style,” Fristoe says. “But the process of copying his artwork became another way of establishing rapport with my subject. And I think these paintings really enrich and enliven our set.”
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Over the years, Fristoe has read everything he could find about Williams and has seen many productions of his plays and the films based on his writings. In 1980, Fristoe directed a production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Clarksville (Indiana) Little Theatre. “In our script, Tennessee calls Streetcar the pinnacle of his career,” he says. “And I recall telling the cast at the time, ‘Always remember that it’s a privilege to speak these words!’ ”
Fristoe, who served for 14 years as film critic and entertainment writer for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, has written monthly on a freelance basis for more than 20 years for Turner Classic Movies. He has a long history in the Louisville area as a stage actor, director and designer. His other one-man shows include I Am My Own Wife, The World of Carl Sandburg and An Evening Without Noel Coward.
Among 50 other acting credits, he is especially proud of roles in productions directed and/or produced by Seely. These include leads in Equus, The Lion in Winter, Sylvia and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“Whenever I’m charging into one of these epic roles, it’s always reassuring to be working under my buddy Mike,” Fristoe says. “I really value his judgment, his style and his easygoing temperament.”
Michael A. McKinney, a former writer for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, is a retired talent agent whose clients have included Kentucky entertainers Grady Nutt and Carl Hurley.