How far will a mother go to preserve her son's reputation? Tennessee Williams plumbs the depths of the human psyche in this haunting one-act drama.
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How far will a mother go to preserve her son's reputation? Tennessee Williams plumbs the depths of the human psyche in this haunting one-act drama.
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Tennessee Williams' short play "Suddenly Last Summer" is both beautiful and lurid. The play was first presented off-Broadway in 1959 together with another short work. The play consists of one act in four scenes and is usually presented without intermission. It is best read in a single sitting to capture the drama's cumulative effect.
The play explores loneliness, the ways in which people abuse and destroy one another, and the difficulties of looking below the surface of one's actions. The lurid components of the play center on a depiction of cannibalism, with homosexuality involving young boys and incest also playing large roles. The play is set in 1936 in a large, ornate Victorian mansion in New Orleans with an extensive garden that resembles a tropical jungle. A prominent and symbolic feature of the garden is a large carnivorous plant, a Venus flytrap. The two primary characters are the mansion's owner, an elderly, strong-willed, and ill widow, Mrs. Venable, and her niece from a much poorer part of the family on her husband's side, Catharine Holly. A psychiatrist, Dr. Cukrowicz, known as Dr. Sugar for short, also plays an important role.
In its lyricism and control of language, "Suddenly Last Summer" is as much a poem as a drama. The action of the play surrounds two lengthy monologues, the first delivered by Mrs Venable at the play's beginning and the second given by Catharine at the conclusion. The character who never appears on stage is Mrs. Venable's son, Sebastian, who dies under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40. At the time of his death, Sebastian was travelling with Catharine and Mrs. Venable suspects her of complicity in the death. Catharine has been telling a shocking story about the death, which only comes out at the end of the play, and Mrs. Venable has had her committed to an insane asylum run by Catholic sisters. She wants to have a lobotomy performed on Catharine and has invited the Doctor, a pioneer of the new operation, to the mansion.to examine the prospective patient with the lure of a large research grant if he agrees to perform the surgery.
Mrs. Venable tells the story of a Sebastian who was reclusive, sensitive, chaste, and a poet who wrote one poem every summer and travelled in the company of his mother. When Mrs Venable suffered a stroke, Sebastian invited Catharine, a party girl who had been taken advantage of by a married man, to accompany him. Catharine had been depressed before the trip as a result of her own experiences. When she returns she appears most distraught by her experience with Sebastian and by her subsequent confinement. Mrs. Venable wants to silence Catharine from telling her story.
The play builds up to Catharine's final monologue, delivered under a truth serum administered by the doctor, in which she explains how she and Mrs. Venable before her had served as a procurer of young boys for Sebastian. While she and Sebastian were travelling in the West Indies, Sebastian met his grisly fate when he was cannibalized by a large group of poor young African American boys many of whom he had victimized. The revelation comes at the climactic moment at the end of the play, and all the action and symbolism of the brief work inexorably prepares for it.
The play has a strongly spiritual component amid the gruesomeness with the many incidents of cruelty in the human and natural world juxtaposed against the mystery of God and goodness. The nun who accompanies Catharine from the asylum, the psychiatrist, and Sebastian each add a religious dimension to the work. Catherine quotes Sebastian saying to her at one point in their trip: "Somebody said once or wrote, once: "We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!'" Many readers see the influence of Euripides "Bacchae" in Williams' taut and provocative play.
"Suddenly Last Summer" has a strong autobiographical component. Throughout his life, Williams was plagued by guilt over a lobotomy performed on his sister in the early 1940s. When he wrote the play, Williams had begun seeing a psychiatrist. Williams' Dr. Sugar is a difficult character to assess and to perform in the play. He is better seen as an active participant rather than as an observer of the drama. Williams' own psychiatrist remarked that "of the many portrayals of the role of the psychiatrist that I have seen on stage and film, this rang truest. It has a quality of thoughtful, unpretentious, competence of responsibility and humanity. And he did not have bed-side manner oozing out of every pore." The play can be understood without knowing anything of William's life as a portrayal of the harshness of the human condition even in the middle of the search for beauty and love.
This play is available separately and in the second of the two volume of the Library of America compilation of Williams' plays. John Lahr has recently written an outstanding biography of Williams, "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" which discusses "Suddenly Last Summer" among many other Williams works. The quotation from Williams' psychiatrist is taken from Lahr's book.
Robin Friedman
SubRosaDallas
Jul 4, 2007
High drama in the Garden District
When it was first published, performed, and later filmed, the Catholic Board of Decency condemned this play for its immoral and shocking content. Katherine returns from a disaterous summer trip with he cousin Sebastian to be involuntarily institutionalized. Sebastian's mother, Violet, wants "Doctor Sugar" to perform a labotomy on Katherine to cease her "obscene ramblings". Katherine's poor and ignorant mother and brother are willing to go along with whatever Aunt Violet wants. But, "Doctor Sugar" is not convinced that Katherine is mentally ill at all, but suffering from the shock of something so horrible that no one is willing to accept or discuss. When Katherine is allowed to tell what happened that summer, the play comes to a dramatic, horrific disclosure of what happened 'that summer'. By today's standards the play is not shocking. But, the way in which Sebastian dies is still horrific.
