There are good reasons Tennessee Williams’ work is still performed so often 50-60 years later. I know people who wouldn’t set foot in a theater but love his work, and I know theatre buffs who still revel in and discover things in plays they know by heart.
Suddenly, Last Summer is less immediately accessible than undisputed classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire, but it’s a favorite of many fans (myself included) because it reaches an almost perfect synthesis of the grotesque and the tragic – there’s real poetry and a real grappling with the nature of God and how we find God and beauty in the often horrible ways we treat one another, wrapped in a sweltering Southern Gothic. It scratches the itch for the pulpy and the profound in almost equal measure without selling either out, while providing a fascinating look into the way psychoanalysis was infiltrating the arts by the late 1950s. Because the material is so strong, the uneven nature of Columbus Civic Theater’s production is disappointing.
It begins very promisingly with a sparse but perfect set courtesy of Keely Heyl, Set Designer, and Stephanie Ayotte, Assistant Scenic Designer. Every inch of it evokes a garden in New Orleans. The play tells the story – through misdirection and detours – of what happened to the golden child of a Southern society family, Sebastian Venable, a self-styled poet who only made one poem a year and a bon vivant who died the previous summer while on vacation with his cousin Catharine Holly (Britt Kline). The first half is the family matriarch, Mrs. Venable (Vicky Welsh Bragg) discussing with Doctor Cukrowicz (Kyle Smith) what’s to be done with this niece of hers, Catharine, and waxing poetic about her late son as she is tended to by her caretaker Miss Foxhill (Christina Yoho) and intruded on by Catharine’s mother (Ellen Knolls) and brother (Jesse Smith). The second half is a long interrogation-cum-reverie wherein Catharine recounts the gruesome truth – or at least what she believes to be the truth – about what happened in Spain the year before.
The biggest issue is a lack of cohesion among the cast – the characters feel like they’re in different plays. Cukrowicz is the through-line of this piece; he’s an indictment of the way medical institutions can be twisted and used for spite or selfishness but he also gives that profession some dignity, there’s a sense of the truth and a desire to get to both an objective and an emotional truth. Smith’s interpretation feels too young and doesn’t have the gravity it could; his attempts at charm feel stilted, and the currents of smugness and kindness feel equally insincere. Christina Yoho, who was very good in Civic’s earlier production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, plays Foxhill in old age makeup with a limp and a halting, cartoonish voice; her performance is distracting and baffling. Ellen Knolls and Jesse Smith are both quite good with the more limited amounts they have to work with but they also play their roles very naturalistically, in contrast to the broad strokes of the other supporting characters and, frankly, in contrast to their costumes, adding to the tonal disconnect.
The two performances any production of this play has to live and die on are Mrs. Venable and Catharine, the meat of this long one act is in their two monologues, and the production chose well here. Vicky Welsh Bragg’s Mrs. Venable is an interesting take, low-key and with a real gravity even in her delusion; it’s a good performance, but mismatched with everyone else. Britt Kline as Catharine is the brightest light in the production; she’s just about perfect in her combination of desperate loneliness and lashing out using whatever tool is closest at hand, and she pulls off a bracing, physical performance that no one else reacts to with the same alacrity.
Where the production lets these two actresses down is pacing. The lines that need to work usually do, but the impact is undercut and blunted far too often. Mrs. Venable’s lusciously disgusting and disquieting description of Sebastian constructing god out of watching carnivorous birds devour newly-hatched sea turtles as they try to make their way to sea lands perfectly, but other chunks of that speech drag. The final fever dream in which Catharine reveals what she knows alternately takes too long – sequences of lighting a cigarette are interminable – and is too rushed, with prompting exhortations like “Saw what?” or “And then?” delivered so quickly that there isn’t even a pause, just an interruption.
The play ran about an hour and 45 minutes, a good 15-20 minutes longer than other productions I’ve seen, and that extra length is really felt. It’s a restless production that embraces neither the molasses-slow poetry of the south nor the ratcheting tension of the thriller. Its length is also not helped by the almost complete absence of sound or light design. The flat, white light feels like it would be more appropriate for an avant-garde Richard Foreman exercise than something with as much blood as this play has, and after some really evocative pre-curtain sounds, some subtle sound cues would have gone a long way toward evoking the milieu of the “real world” and giving depth to the stories being told, since so much of this play is characters describing things that happened in the past.
There are strong elements in this production. Unfortunately, they can be hard to see through the muddled direction, uneven tone, and torturously slow pacing.
Suddenly, Last Summer runs through April 12. Performances are at 8:00pm Thursday-Saturday with matinées at 2:00pm Sundays. For tickets and more information please visit www.columbuscivic.org.