In celebration of Tennessee Williams’ 100th birthday, The White Horse Theater Company has taken on a revival of one of Williams’ most challenging plays, Suddenly Last Summer. Set in the wealthy Garden District of New Orleans in 1936, the story revolves around domineering family matriarch Violet Venable (Elizabeth Bove) and her niece, Catharine Holly (Lacy J. Dunn), who has been confined for the past year to Saint Mary’s, a private mental hospital.
Violet was obsessed with her adult son, Sebastian, who died under mysterious circumstances while vacationing abroad with his cousin Catharine at the European beach resort of Cabeza de Lobo. Unwilling to accept her niece’s shocking account of what happened to Sebastian, the infirm and delusional Violet is hoping to persuade Doctor Cukrowicz (Douglas Taurel), a neurologist from the state asylum, that Catharine is mad, so that he will perform a lobotomy to permanently subdue Catharine and silence her “babblings” about the circumstances surrounding Sebastian’s death. Catharine’s mother, Mrs. Holly (Lué McWilliams), and brother, George (Haas Regen), have their own ulterior motives for wanting the traumatized Catharine to change her story to Violet’s liking; they are afraid they will lose an inheritance that Sebastian has left them in his will should Violet not have her way with Catharine.
As any true Tennessee Williams fan knows, his plays explore themes that are disturbing, which is particularly tragic because they are often highly autobiographical. The character of Catharine was inspired by the troubled life of his older sister, Rose, with whom he was extremely close. Very pretty as a young girl, Rose became mentally unstable by the time she reached adolescence, was institutionalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia, and—with their mother's approval—given a lobotomy when she was 34.
Dunn, Taurel and Bove have the next to impossible task of recreating roles that were made famous by Hollywood film legends Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn in the 1959 film adaptation of the play; overall, they do succeed in presenting a harrowing story. But as written in the script, the role of Doctor Cukrowicz is underdeveloped, and he is relegated to serving mainly as a backdrop for the passionate Violet and volatile Catharine.
The notes in the playbill mention that Williams referred to Suddenly Last Summer as an allegory about “how people devour each other.” More than 50 years later, this morality play is still as poetic, consuming and unconventional as he hoped it would be.
Suddenly Last Summer; Written by Tennessee Williams; Directed by Cyndy A. Marion; Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 West 26th Street, New York, NY.
