Smoke Bomb

by Toby Zinman

"I daresay, we’re all a bit peculiar, Father." Miss Alma, the neurasthenic spinster and the central character of this rarely produced play by Tennessee Williams, understates the case. They’re all a lot peculiar.

Summer and Smoke takes place in Tennessee country -- not the state, but the state of mind, a hot, Southern small-town world of eroticized longing and debauched despair, where men are "exasperated to the point of profanity" by women named Alma for soul (first cousin, surely, to "Stella for star" in his most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire). Williams, America's tragic poet of sexuality, gives us Glorious Hill, Miss., where Alma, prissy and highfalutin, has secretly always loved the boy next door, son of the town's doctor. John is now back home, also a doctor, watching himself run downhill with fast women and hopeless gambling debts. Their doomed relationship is the play's plot, complicated by mad mothers, dictatorial fathers, cockfights, epidemics and heartbreaking misunderstandings and general bad timing. That Miss Alma finally winds up finding sex with strangers and drugs as the salve for her disappointment is Williams prefiguring his own life.

The production, directed by Joanna Rotté, is a big undertaking: lots of characters (17), lots of turn-of-the-century costumes (astonishingly ugly and often ludicrous here), lots of locales and lots of (bad) Southern accents. To make us care about these characters, to feel their sadness and disappointment as our own, they have to seem human -- larger than life, perhaps, often more extreme, but very, very human. Unhappily, most of the Villanova cast falls into caricature: too loud, too shrill, too weird and too annoying.

Most polished is Stephen Fletcher as John, whose patrician good looks serve the role well -- although once he's "saved" he becomes as wooden and pompous in manner as the others. Elizabeth Pool has the most difficult task of making Alma seem absurd yet charming, fragile yet preposterous. She mainly achieves little more than grating pathos, making it hard for us to see the allure she holds for John. Everybody else is pretty much a cartoon (most egregious are Taylor Williams as Alma's deranged mother and Daniella Leah Vinitski as Rosa Gonzales). The director has intimate speeches spoken out to the audience rather than to the person next to the speaker, and seems to have encouraged outsized cliche gestures and bizarre styles of walking; every woman exits laughing.

Well, not every woman; I didn't.

SUMMER AND SMOKE

Through Feb. 22, Villanova Theatre, Vasey Hall, Villanova, 610-519-7474

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there