Tennessee Williams had a knack for giving his plays lovely, off-beat titles. This one has perhaps one of his most evocative and mysterious.
What does it mean, Suddenly Last Summer? What exactly happens? I wondered about this long before I heard of the play, back when it was the title of a sultry, ominous pop hit that seemed always in heavy rotation back in 1983: “It happened one summer/It happened one time/It happened forever/For a short time.”
The Motels didn’t give me much to go on there. For the first three scenes of this one-act play, Tennessee Williams keeps you guessing, too.
The play is set in a literal hothouse, an estate so lush with tropical flora that “massive tree-flowers…suggest organs of the body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood.” Dialogue is underscored by exotic bird cries and reptilian hissing, coming from who knows where. The stage directions say this is set in the New Orleans’ Garden District, but it feels more like The Lost World.
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| A stately manor in New Orleans' Garden District. Mrs. Venable's stately manor there in Suddenly Last Summer has even lusher vistas inside. Image from https://www.10best.com/destinations/louisiana/new-orleans/garden-district/ |
The house’s owner, Mrs. Venable, is getting ready to confront her niece, Catharine, who accompanied Mrs. Venable’s middle-aged son Sebastian on a trip to Europe where he somehow died. Catharine’s explanation of what happened infuriates Mrs. Venable. Having already had the girl committed, she now contemplates forcing a lobotomy. But first she wants the satisfaction of proving Catharine wrong.
MRS.
VENABLE:
I’ve waited months to face her because I couldn’t get to St. Mary’s to face her
– I’ve had her brought here to my house. I won’t collapse! She’ll collapse! I
mean, her lies will collapse – not my truth – not the truth…
If you carry any clichéd expectations of what to expect from Tennessee Williams, well, you’ve come to the right play because Suddenly Last Summer is stuffed with them. Mad old ladies, sexually ambiguous men, fetching wallflowers in need of love, and dry-drunk soliloquies about what life is really about, they are all here, served up in a rich Southern Gothic gumbo that will leave you puzzled – but never bored.
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| When first staged, Suddenly Last Summer was paired with another Tennessee Williams play, Something Unspoken, collectively titled Garden District. Sometimes the two plays are still staged together, as in a 1995 production at Broadway's Circle In The Square Theatre. Image from https://www.playbill.com/production/garden-district-circle-in-the-square-theatre-vault-0000003231 |
Williams was at the peak of his powers the year this play debuted, and you feel it in the way he devises his scenes and builds tension. Characterization isn’t robust – it’s really just a two-woman show – but the concept is engaging, built around a character, Sebastian, who has been dead long before it begins. Think Laura or Rebecca, only gayer.
To be fair, assigning any one sexual or thematic idea to Suddenly Last Summer is reductive. While Sebastian’s homosexuality is brought up often if never spelled out, it’s hardly the whole show.
Sebastian, we learn early, had a lot going on:
MRS.
VENABLE:
My son, Sebastian, was not a family snob or a money snob but he was a snob, alright. He was a snob about personal charm in people, he insisted upon good looks in people around him, and, oh, he had a perfect little court of young and beautiful people around him always, wherever he was, here in New Orleans or New York or on the Riviera or in Paris and Venice, he always had a little entourage of the beautiful and the talented and the young!
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| "This sounds like vanity, Doctor, but really I was the only one in his life that satisfied the demands he made of people." Katharine Hepburn as Mrs. Venable tells Montgomery Clift's Dr. Sugar about her boy Sebastian in a scene from a 1959 film adaptation. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053318/mediaviewer/rm2535992832/ |
Sebastian was a poet, a great one in his mother’s estimation, who lived off his family’s old money rather than earning a living of his own. He wrote sparingly, and not for public consumption, only for fame, which he only wanted “after his death when it couldn’t disturb him.” He took long trips with his mother, in what she says was his search for God in such sights as birds ripping apart baby turtles on the Galápagos Islands.
As she relates this, the fact becomes clear Mrs. Venable has serious issues. She talks about how Sebastian and she traveled as a couple, not as mother and son, and how her boy was “chaste,” a word so important to her she spells it out so Dr. Cukrowicz won’t think she means “chased.”
The Doctor, by the way, explains his name thusly: “It’s a Polish word that means sugar so let’s make it simple and call me Doctor Sugar,” he says, which shows he knows who is writing this play.
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| "Do you want to bore a hole in my skull and turn a knife in my brain?" Grayson Heyl as Catharine puts the question to Wardell Julius Clark as Dr. Sugar while Mary K. Nigohosian as Mrs. Venable looks on in a 2018 Chicago Theater production. Photo by Michael Brosilow from https://www.stageandcinema.com/2018/05/09/suddenly-last-summer/ |
The play spends its first three scenes spinning its wheels like this, with brief conversations between Catharine’s mother and brother spelling out how eager they are to placate Mrs. Venable as they beg her to stop telling that “fantastic story” about Sebastian’s demise. All this sets up an epic final scene where the truth comes out. Or most of it. Like the song, you won’t know what suddenly happened even after it’s all over.
Which I don’t think concerned Tennessee Williams all that much. He is more interested in the emotional toll left behind.
MRS.
HOLLY:
Tell Aunt Violet how grateful you are for her makin’ it possible for you to rest an’ recuperate at such a sweet, sweet place as St. Mary’s!
CATHARINE:
No place for lunatics is a sweet, sweet place.
What drove Catharine to the asylum is at least as big a mystery. It connects to Sebastian’s fate, and in the fourth scene we get a clearer idea what that was, but while I re-read this, I began to wonder if the whole Sebastian thing wasn’t a red herring for the playwright, who seems more interested in Catharine when the play gets down to business.
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| Rose Williams and her brother Tom, not yet Tennessee, with mother Edwina, circa 1914. After her lobotomy, Tennessee supported his sister financially and emotionally for the rest of his life. Her decline is often cited as a reason for his addictions to pills and alcohol. Image from https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/the-glass-menagerie/rose-williams-with-tennessee-and-their-mother/ |
A bit of backstory worth knowing: Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose, whom he cared deeply about and was reputedly the model for one of his most iconic characters, Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, was lobotomized to treat her schizophrenia, which wrecked her and devastated her brother. The threat of the same operation being performed on Catharine offers more suspense than Sebastian’s fatal frolics ever do.
Dr. Sugar has doubts about authorizing such a surgery, but he also needs grant money. Mrs. Venable is not subtle in spelling out a quid pro quo:
DOCTOR:
Would you still be interested in my work at Lions View? I mean would the Sebastian Venable Memorial Foundation still be interested in it?
MRS.
VENABLE:
Aren’t we always more interested in a thing that concerns us personally, doctor?
Whether the doctor goes through with this generates some real suspense, and might have gone further if Williams developed it. Instead, the focus returns in its climax to Sebastian’s strange fate, and whether what we learn can validate Catharine’s mental health and spare her brain.
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| A 1993 British-American television production starred Natasha Richardson as Catharine, Rob Lowe as Dr. Sugar, and Maggie Smith as Mrs. Venable. Richardson and Smith showcase perfect Southern drawls and raw emotional power. I enjoyed it even more than the play itself. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108247/ |
In the end, we learn something about Sebastian’s fate, with suggestions of pedophilia, cannibalism, and perhaps Catharine’s overactive imagination. It’s emotional dynamite, though the abstract, dream-like way it is delivered removes some of the sting.
What we are left with are Sebastian’s rumination, relayed second-hand by his mother, on the fates of those poor little turtles, and how love might in the end boil down to more of the same:
CATHARINE:
Yes, we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what’s – hate…
Agree
with this or not, you won’t be bored. Tennessee Williams is worth reading for
more than those cool titles.
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