Summer And Smoke – Tennessee Williams, 1948 ★★★½

Here's To The Losers

Love isn’t horseshoes; there’s no scoring for landing near the mark. No one knew this better or communicated it more incessantly than Tennessee Williams, whose plays were epics of romantic frustration. One of his accessible and endearing, and at the same time perhaps the most depressing, is this.

Set deep in his classic time and place, the American South in “the first few years” of the 20^th century, Summer And Smoke spotlights a pair of star-crossed next-door neighbors, she a uptight minister’s daughter, he a hedonistic heir to his father’s medical practice. She believes in God, he believes in medicine, but somehow these opposites not only attract but are impelled toward each other.

As Williams takes us from him teasing her in childhood to their adult selves having deep conversations about choosing between self-gratification and social obligation, you begin to wonder: should I root for them to be a couple, or to break free of each other’s spell?

Period Of Adjustment – Tennessee Williams, 1960 ★½

Manly Men and Women Stuck with Them

Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.

Written both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither. Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a stiff, mawkish read.

Orpheus Descending – Tennessee Williams, 1957 ★★½

Hot for the Hired Help

Some authors test your tolerance for excess. Because they work at a higher pitch than more realistic writers, you know better than complain when that approach comes off as a bit extreme, even for them.

Tennessee Williams didn’t write normal plays, whatever those are. He wrote plays about desperate, decadent people struggling for love trapped in social orders that refuse to understand or accept them. Understand this, and you can see Orpheus Descending for what it is, a template for everything that followed in his glorious career.

For that, it is fascinating and revealing. Never mind it is a hot mess, too.

Suddenly Last Summer – Tennessee Williams, 1958 ★★★

Insanity is Relative

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.