John Waters is a man comfortable in his own skin. The successful filmmaker, author and photographer is so at ease with himself and life that he has written a one-man show titled “This Filthy World” extolling the virtues of complacency. Because Waters was so influenced by playwright Tennessee Williams, he has taken his act on the road to this weekend’s Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival at Georgetown University. “Tenn Cent” marks the 100th birthday of the man who gave us the misunderstood likes of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski.
| ONSTAGE |
| Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival |
| » Where: Georgetown University |
| » When: Thursday to Sunday |
| » Info: performingarts.georgetown.edu/tenncentfest/festival/ |
Waters is thankful and considerably happy with a body of work that includes films such as “Mondo Trasho,” “Hairspray,” “Serial Mom,” “Pecker,” and “Cecil B. Demented.”
While John Waters is not an actor in the general sense of the word, he sees what he sees, likes what he likes and has chronicled these observations in a show that he updates every week.
“It’s a monologue about how to be happy and be a neurotic,” he said. “It’s about fashion and true crime, movies and religion, politics and every other way to have a life that other people might not understand, and still be happy.”
“It’s a self-help lecture,” he explained further of the show. ” ‘Lecture’ sounds a little serious. I think Tennessee Williams found out how to be a happy neurotic for much of his life.”
That Waters admires Williams is evident in the book he wrote called “Role Models.”
“What I think about Tennessee Williams is that he saved my life, as I say in the book,” he continued. “When I first read him, I realized I didn’t have to be like everybody else and that there was another world I didn’t know growing up in Lutherville, Maryland. So I learned that there was Bohemia, that there were people like he wrote about in the books at the library. He saved me.”
Waters is not bothered to say he grew up “different;” his world was one of bizarre ideas and violent thoughts transferred to the big screen.
“I only think terrible thoughts,” he said. “I don’t live them. “If audiences can laugh at my twisted ideas, what’s the great harm?”
Excited about the festival and his part in it, Waters spoke of his one-man show and its structured format, which, he says, “may look like I’m talking off the cuff but it’s completely written and rehearsed and planned.” What is normally a question and answer period with the audience afterward will, this weekend, be a discussion on his hero, Tennessee Williams.
“It’s a grand way to make a living,” he says of taking his show on the road. “I call it my John Waters impersonation tour.”
To me, bad taste is what it’s all about.
– John Waters
