The Glass Menagerie was one of the theatrical highlights of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

A literary festival is a bit like a marriage. It’s easy to get off to a rapturous start, but how do you keep it fresh? Even greatly talented mortals rarely produce more than a handful of masterpieces. These make for the honeymoon, you might say. But then what? Almost inevitably, attention turns to lesser works, obscure works, discarded works, apprentice works and, though such a word is always anathema, failed works.

I was once idly thumbing through the addenda pages of an edition of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire and came upon a thoroughly odd passage that contained words like Tawasentha and Tuscaloosa. I skipped back to the chapter head and found out I was reading a French translation of The Song of Hiawatha. What impelled the grand poet maudit to take on Longfellow? Who knows? Hope of profit, perhaps, or a rainy afternoon in the garret with a particularly potent pipeful of hashish. But of one thing you may be sure, if there is a Baudelaire Festival somewhere in the world, eventually a roomful of aficionados will be subjected to the shores of Gitche Gumee in rolling hexameters.

Now, there is a plausible defense for what might be called the “Gitche Gumee” effect. After all, if you are deeply interested in an author, how fascinating to see the more obscure sides of his or her personality. And maybe this argument should always carry the day. On another level, these “minor pieces” (positive spin) or “lapses” (negative spin) offer a sort of reverse inspiration to less-successful writers in the audience: “If someone as great as Tennessee Williams could write that junk, maybe there’s still hope for me.”

I use Williams as an example, because these thoughts arise in the wake of the most recent Tennessee Williams Festival. During this past Festival, at the Contemporary Arts Center one was able to see John Grimsley’s solid production of The Glass Menagerie. The cast (Maggie Eldred, Heather Hollingsworth, David Reichard and Joe Akin) brought this modern classic vividly and tastefully to life. No Gitche Gumee there.

But at Le Petit, director Perry Martin was saddled with a script called Tiger Tail, and though he did his level best to invent a style that would hold the pieces of this Gothic hodgepodge together, his efforts were largely in vain. Silk purse/sow’s ear, so to speak. An admirable performance was turned in by Kara Hadigan, who was knocked around so much and so convincingly by abusive men one feared for her health. Abby Lake was effective as the timorous Aunt Rose, and Jason Clement gave us a handsome, intense Silva, while Dane Rhodes’s brutal Archie Lee had apparently breakfasted on gunpowder and ground glass.

One could marvel at the ingenuity of touches like the modernist ballet, during which Clement and Hadigan played a sadomasochistic game of peek-a-boo in the deserted house, but eventually the story just collapsed in on itself. Sound and Fury, to borrow a phrase from the other festival. On the other hand, the most interesting glimpse of unknown Williams in quite a while was offered by director Charles Kerbs for a new company called Drama! at a small Marigny Street theater attached to a bar and bearing the coquettish title Cowpokes Theater Space (draw what conclusions you will about the chap-clad galoots).

At any rate, the play was a one-act called The Traveling Companion and, according to Kerbs, it was written late in the playwright’s life. In fact, the production was billed as a premiere (though I wasn’t sure if New Orleans, regional or world premiere was meant). I had never heard of it before, and unlike many of Williams’ late works, this piece is direct, clear, bracingly candid and moving.

The play is set in a hotel room on the East Coast. A writer enters, accompanied by a young man he has picked up in a San Francisco gay bar. What transpires is a delicate, painful verbal pas de deux. The young man tries to salvage his self-respect, and squeeze any material advantages that he can from the situation. Meanwhile the older man tries to win the young man over, to assuage his hurt pride and to seduce him. Seduce him not in the sense of corrupting his innocence, for there’s not a whiff of innocence left to be corrupted, but rather to create a kind of truce, where they’ll both be shielded from the more sordid aspects of their coming together. Blake D Balu as

the young man and Michael-Chase Creasy as the writer brought a great deal of naturalness and conviction to this hard-edged, poignant little drama.

It was heartening to discover a late one-act by Williams that has the concision and power of his early work in the form. And I guess that kind of discovery is worth the occasional Gitche Gumee, after all.