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Still, the script is riddled with plenty of St. “I think if he had moved here at a different time, he might have had a different attitude.”

Louis, but at the same time, it captures the city and why he wanted to get out,” Hohlfeld said. “It’s really about how he was trying desperately to get out of St. Houk, who added that getting the festival started several years ago was a “battle” for that reason, thinks Williams didn’t hate the city so much as his family’s circumstances, many of which are on display in “The Glass Menagerie.” Louis from the South, it was a different St. Louis is admittedly an odd location for a festival celebrating Williams, considering that it’s a place he notoriously despised. “One of the things we were worried about is the neighbors complaining,” Houk said, “but I think they’re fascinated by it.” Actors only had to compete with a car alarm, a distant siren or two and a passing car’s thumping bass in the alley. Opening night conditions were slightly better. “He was polite enough to go around front when he came back.” He walked down three stories with his trash bag, and we had to direct him toward the trash bin,” Hohlfeld said. “Yesterday during rehearsal, this guy comes out to empty his trash. Louis Shakespeare Festival have both dealt with their fair share of rainy Missouri summers - putting on a show in an active neighborhood, on a residential street, comes with its own challenges. But unlike other outdoor undertakings here - the Muny and the St. The festival has had the typical concerns that most open-air productions have - mainly, the unpredictability of St. Many of the show’s entrances and exits are made through the back door of one of the units, to and from the second-floor fire escape. The housing decision was made, in part, to meet the Actors’ Equity Association’s ventilation guidelines - and frankly, Houk said, they needed the doorway. Louis native who now lives in California, and the cast - which also includes Brenda Currin, Elizabeth Teeter and Chauncy Thomas - are staying on location in the apartments during the run, which ends on Aug. (That edition, last November, became a radio play.) As they weighed venue options for this year’s festival with health and safety considerations during the pandemic, the apartments seemed to be a serendipitous fit. Hohlfeld and Carrie Houk, the festival’s executive artistic director, had initially targeted a local auditorium with ties to Williams’s early theater career for a 2020 “Menagerie” production. “We’re using fire escapes that he probably walked on,” the director, Brian Hohlfeld, said in an interview the week of opening night, adding, “It is very humbling and very daunting.” Louis, still feels unexpectedly immersive, with a set that stretches from a small stage in the parking lot to the existing maze of metal walkways that cover the side of the building. He was long gone by the time he wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” his first hit, in 1944 - but this production, which opened Thursday from the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Williams’s family moved to 4633 Westminster Place - now called “The Tennessee” - from Mississippi in 1918, when Williams was 7, and lived there for four years before moving elsewhere in the city.