Summer Bloody Summer

by David Anthony Fox

Theater Review

Suddenly Last Summer takes place in a 'luxe mansion in New Orleans' Garden District but the vegetation inside the house is jungle-like and dangerously lush, including (as playwright Tennessee Williams noted in his stage directions) plants that suggest a bloody, dismembered body.

What better setting for the family feud to end all family feuds?

Last summer, Violet Venable, an aging Southern matriarch, lost her only son, Sebastian, who died mysteriously on a tropical holiday. Violet and Sebastian had previously been inseparable, always traveling together until suddenly, Sebastian chose instead to take his young and beautiful cousin, Catharine Holly. It was on Catharine's watch that Sebastian died, and the poor girl cannot forget how -- and why -- it happened.

Violet wants her to forget, though -- so much so that she's employed a surgeon of questionable ethics to give Catharine a prefrontal lobotomy -- unless the girl recants her story, which grows more detailed and sordid with each retelling.

Summer has always been controversial. When the play opened in 1958, many critics -- repulsed by the baroque writing and Grand Guignol vision -- excoriated it. In particular, the image of Sebastian's death that Catharine describes -- he is literally devoured by a pack of hungry native boys -- made the play an object of instant camp in some circles.

True, Summer cannot be judged a success on traditional criteria for a well-made play. The plot inconsistencies are enormous and the dramatic arc is riddled with seemingly extraneous details.

But as with so much of Williams, there are flashes of poetic insight that astonish us. On this level, Summer extends our understanding of Williams' earlier (and better) plays. It's a world of weak, self-denying homosexual men and the women they turn to for salvation (who, in turn, become monsters of sexuality), and of failing artists and predatory family members desperate to escape the truth. It's not pretty, this compendium of images, but it's soul-piercingly vivid.

Summer is also an impossibly difficult play to bring off, with its tone that veers between naturalism and the surreal, and its monumental emotional scale. It's a challenge for even the most experienced and gifted company. Vagabond's director Aileen McCulloch has emphasized a maximum degree of artifice. The actors -- particularly the women -- flutter with traditional Williams mannerisms but all fail to connect with each other and with the brutality of the story.

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