“Playwright and Dancer” by Marc Kundemann.
Early in the summer of 1940, Tennessee Williams was invited out to Captain Jacks wharf by an acquaintance. He walked into the “two-story shack” to find dance Kip Kiernan facing the stove, up-stage, preparing clam chowder, New England style, the dish on which he and his friend Joe [Hazan] were subsisting that summer through economic need. He was wearing dungarees, skin-tight, and my good eye was hooked like a fish.” When he turned around, Williams could appreciate Kiernan’s “slightly slanted lettuce-green eyes, high cheekbones, and a lovely mouth,” having already taken in his “callipygian ass.” Hazan and Kiernan invited 29-year-old Williams to room with them, on a cot next to Hazan’s on the first floor. There he stayed until the night of a party in a nearby cabin, during which “Sweet Leilani” played seductively on the radio. Williams managed to get Kiernan alone back in their shack and, “with crazed eloquence,” declared his desire. “He was silent a few moments and then said, ‘Tom, let’s go up to my bedroom.’”
“Playwright and Dancer” by Marc Kundemann.
Provincetown artist Marc Kundemann (b. 1963) here references an episode from the Queer seaside resort, frequented in the early 20th century by artists, writers, and intellectuals.
Among these bohemians, Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) met, during his first stay in Provincetown in the early summer of 1940, a 22-year-old dancer named Kip Kiernan, who lived there in poverty with his lover, Joe Hazan.
Nov. 1940, Tennessee Williams in New York
The dancer Kip Kiernan
Tennessee and Kip, who became lovers for the duration of a summer, are the subject of the autobiographical play that Tennessee Williams wrote in 1941, a short play entitled "The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer," telling the story of Don, a 29-year-old writer living in a summer resort, who is madly in love with a young dancer named Dick. For Don, however, love may never be more than a distant echo of a procession. As the monotonous month of August passes,
This play inspired Marc Kundemann's painting.
The dancer Kip Kiernan (1918–1944) was actually a Canadian draft dodger named Bernard Dubowsky. When he met Tennessee Williams, he was the latter's first, and according to some, only, great love.
