Premieres mark Williams festival

David Kaplan, cofounder and "curator" of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, hates talk-backs - the tame post-play Q&A sessions during which audience members lob predictable queries across the fourth wall. Instead, he has instituted a more free-form tradition: follow-up mixers at nearby watering holes.

It's a move that the honoree, who met the great love of his life, Frank Merlo, on the porch of the Atlantic House (a preeminent gay gathering place since the '40s), would surely have approved.

Kaplan, who sees his role as juxtaposing events rather than running the show (hence the unusual job title), has been tinkering with the festival's format ever since he and a quintet of coconspirators cooked up the idea over dinner five years ago.

At the time, Kaplan was in the process of writing a biography, "Tennessee Williams in Provincetown," and his one demand was that he be allowed two years to ramp up. The book and festival debuted in sync, the latter garnering acclaim for a hitherto lost one-act which Kaplan discovered in the course of his research: 1940's explicitly homosexual "Parade," in which Williams addressed the heartbreak of his first love affair.

Year two of the festival took a walk on the wild side, presenting the kind of work "that only Provincetown would allow to be done," Kaplan recently noted over lunch in a Manhattan cantina. This year's theme is "The Healing Power of Love."

"Williams didn't have an adolescent's idea that love is the answer to everything," Kaplan says. "There's no fade-out, no happily ever after. It's a respite; it heals. You move forward."

Decrying the predominant "homophobic concentration on Williams's despair" (the work, he insists, is "life-affirming, not depressing"), Kaplan has enjoyed plumbing a period of the playwright's life - Williams spent four summers in Provincetown during the '40s - when "he wrote out of joy."

For this year's festival, Kaplan chose to direct another world premiere: "The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View," a prototype for what was to become "The Rose Tattoo."

Williams was in the habit of writing one-act studies before embarking on a full-length script. "Dog" precedes his involvement with Anna Magnani, whose influence infused "Rose Tattoo" with dark sensuality. The half-hour playlet, which was unveiled in a sneak preview at the Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Theatre Tuesday night, is far lighter - "sunny, pleasant, happy," in Kaplan's view.

Clara, an Italian widow (Nancy Cassaro), breathlessly prepares for the arrival of a gentleman caller, a truck driver whose last name, Mangiacavallo ("horse-eater") indicates the scope of his appetites. Larry Coen lends him a comic rapacity; even as Clara demurs and parries, concerned for what the neighbors might think, you sense she may be amenable to his argument that "we're two lonely people."

Also premiering at this year's festival is "Green Eyes," a 1970 play about a pair of young newlyweds which director Jef Hall-Flavin describes as an "erotic thriller." That's paired with 1939's "Adam and Eve on a Ferry," about a young woman's encounter with an aging D.H. Lawrence.

Williams greatly admired Lawrence's quest for sexual liberation, and Hall-Flavin sees a crossover theme. "Both plays are about unlocking your own sexual honesty - and you can do that in Provincetown like no place else," he says.

P-town audiences will also get to see selections from the Lee Hoiby/Lanford Wilson opera "Summer and Smoke," presented by the New England Conservatory of Music; DanceLoop Chicago's "Lorita!," adapted from a short story about two brusque businesswomen surviving a sweltering New York August in the company of the title character, a parrot; and five other theatrical and film events.

Throw in get-togethers with distinguished guests Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach (a Tony winner for "Rose Tattoo"), and Olympia Dukakis, who has taken on "Tattoo" five times in the course of a 50-year career, and you've got a lineup geared to the most rapacious of Williams connoisseurs.