Photos by Carol Rosegg
Excerpts from the reviews
“Marin Ireland is riveting . . . As a minister’s daughter in Glorious Hill, Miss., she aspires to the finer elements of humanity; her given name, she keeps pointing out, means “soul” in Spanish. Yet she flirts inexorably with coarser, more corporeal entanglements. In Williams’s world (if no longer our own), this is understood as a recipe for hysteria — that condition in which, according to men, a woman’s stifled sexuality attacks her body, leading to languors, palpitations, spells and worse. Ms. Ireland’s imagination is so well calibrated that she manages, almost single-handedly, to correct for that distortion. . . . Her manic laughter, gulping breaths and drooping shocks are carried off with such authenticity that they reframe hysteria as a natural, even brave, response to deprivation and constant insult. . . . But this “Summer and Smoke” has been scraped too close to the bone. Dane Laffrey’s big white shoe box, or coffin, of a set conveys all too well Alma’s empty prospects but offers nothing to suggest either the suffocating trap of her Victorian circumstances or the richness and romance of her imagination. Williams specified minimalism — no doors or windows — but he meant something more poetic by it.” – New York Times, Jesse Green
“Williams’s 1948 melodrama launched the Off Broadway movement, a fertile zone where commercial instincts and artistic ambition could intermingle productively. Transport Group’s exquisite version at Classic Stage Company is strong enough to power a rocket into orbit—and that’s without mentioning the gigantic performance at its center. Marin Ireland plays Alma Winemiller as though the part had been written for her, and as though it had been written yesterday; her Alma is at once radiant and frightening, as heart-stopping as a painting that looks up and catches your eye. . . . There are awkward stretches: Williams includes a nasty bit of “Mexicans are so passionate, no?” racism, and there’s a tendency in the final act to discuss things we’ve already seen. These are the drawbacks of a 1948 play, and the production doesn’t fix them. But elsewhere the revival is grand.” – Time Out NY, Helen Shaw
“Ireland is indeed a fine actress, and everyone else on stage did their best, but this super-spare, impressionistic staging somehow lacks energy and clarity. This is a play imbued with emotional richness and lyricism, but it’s tapped into only occasionally here. . . . This is a sprawling play and the playwright’s own stage directions called for simplicity. But minimalism can work effectively, but it can distract as is the case here by keeping the audience so focused on trying to figure out what’s happening and where we are in Glorious Hill, Mississippi. Consequently this sizzling battle between the soul for which Alma is named, and the flesh just doesn’t engage us.” – Curtain Up, Elyse Sommer
“Marin Ireland [gives] a solid performance as the neurasthenic preacher’s daughter who falls in love with the boy next door, John Buchanan, a sensualist wastrel . . . The minimalist set design by Dane Laffrey presents a long white rectangle overhung by a matching white dropped ceiling with no props except six antique chairs, an easel with an oil painting representing the angel sculpture/fountain in the town square and, for part of the play, another easel with an anatomy chart. With no other props, the actors must mime such acts as making a phone call, using a stethoscope and eating an ice cream cone. The lack of any division of space sometimes makes it difficult to discern where a scene is taking place.” – Gotham Playgoer, Robert Sholiton
“A spare, intelligent, deeply affecting production . . . Its tale of wrenching transformations over the course of one humid southern summer feels newly piercing, and the performance of its lead, the stellar Marin Ireland, is an exquisite study in awakening. . . . The play can be purple, so Cummings keeps the space empty and the performances sharp. He and his ensemble make Williams’s sometimes cloying language feel pointed and necessary. The actors use no props, save for a few chairs, and yet Cummings doesn’t push them to mime the objects they mention. Talking on a phone or wearing a hat don’t require elaborate physical illustrations. The connections between performers—and the struggles for connection between characters—are what matter, and the play’s elegant staging is a lesson in trimming the fat.” – Vulture, Sarah Holdren
“In an emotionally fraught drama about loneliness, suppressed desire and the eternal quest for love in the face of an overwhelming need for sex, that line, an almost perfect summation of the play, is delivered with the realization of a lifetime by the superb Marin Ireland in a performance of heartbreaking intensity and meticulous desperation. . . . Possessing matinee-idol looks and the perfect balance of sex appeal and longing, Nathan Darrow’s performance perfectly walks the line between wantonness and sincerity. . . . In addition to lots of clumsy blocking, it’s a shame so many distractions of Cumming’s making pull the audience out of the action and away from the story. Why isn’t the cast using props? I can forgive the spartan set (though it does nothing to help the story), and all the white lighting, but why have detailed, period costumes with no props?” – Talkin’Broadway, David Hurst
“An intelligent and immaculately staged production . . . A beautifully crafted reminder that away from Broadway there are other jewels.” – Daily Beast, Tim Teeman
“Makes clear the play’s strengths, as well as its many weaknesses. . . . On the plus side, this revival, which opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Classic Stage Company, brings two compelling performances to the stage, Ireland’s and Darrow’s . . . At times, the direction is Ivo van Hove Lite. . . . Cummings . . . uses a bare stage and eschews props, but unlike van Hove’s stagings, the “Summer and Smoke” actors mime (badly) and are stuck in turn-of-the-century costumes. It’s a mish-mash.” – The Wrap, Robert Hofler
“A scorching revival [that] smolders with unsatisfied longing thanks to powerful performances and a handsomely pared-down staging . . . A drama of unexpected richness, Summer and Smoke reaches full bloom in this glorious production.” – Theatremania, ZacharyStewart
“A minimalist co-production by the Classic Stage Company and the Transport Group, which feels neither classic nor transporting. . . . It seems clear what director Jake Cummings III, Transport’s artistic director wants [is] to stage the play in such a way as to “return the focus back on the acting and writing.” But ironically the staging has the opposite effect. . . . The writing is vintage if second-tier Williams, and the production has a fine 12-member cast. The clear standout is Marin Ireland . . . Designer Dane Laffrey’s set looks like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie about life in a spaceship. . . . The set is otherwise bare except for the six old chairs that the characters bring on the stage to sit in. The only prop that I recall is the gun in Papa’s hands. Everything else, some of which are prominently mentioned, are mimed. It doesn’t work for me . . .” – New York Theatre, Jonathan Mandell
Dress rehearsals
Full reviews
Gotham Playgoer, Robert Sholiton – This revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1948 drama marks the first time that either of the two co-producers, Classic Stage Company (CSC) and Transport Group, has presented one of his works. Williams, who took over three years to write the play, was never fully satisfied with it and ended up revising it substantially under the title The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in 1964. Nevertheless, it has been frequently revived, probably because the juicy part of Alma Winemiller has been catnip to a series of fine actresses including Anne Jackson, Geraldine Page, Betsy Palmer, Mary McDonnell, Laila Robins and Amanda Plummer. This time around, Marin Ireland (Big Knife, reasons to be pretty), does the honors, giving a solid performance as the neurasthenic preacher’s daughter who falls in love with the boy next door, John Buchanan (a fine Nathan Darrow; Richard III), son of the town doctor (Phillip Clark; Come Back, Little Sheba). Alma, who is quick to point out that her name is Spanish for “soul,” is looking for spiritual love while John is a sensualist wastrel. He argues that his anatomy chart has no place for a soul. Alma’s father Rev. Winemiller (T. Ryder Smith; Oslo) is strict with her and her mother (Barbara Walsh; Falsettos) is emotionally challenged. Alma gives voice lessons; her favorite pupil is Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless), a talentless girl with a disreputable mother. John becomes involved with a Mexican beauty Rosa Gonzales (Elena Hurst) whose father (Gerardo Rodriguez) owns the local casino. A tragedy leads John and Alma to reconsider their lives and they essentially switch their philosophical positions. This being a Tennessee Williams play, don’t expect things to end well for the heroine. The minimalist set design by Dane Laffrey (Come Back, Little Sheba) presents a long white rectangle overhung by a matching white dropped ceiling with no props except six antique chairs, an easel with an oil painting representing the angel sculpture/fountain in the town square and, for part of the play, another easel with an anatomy chart. With no other props, the actors must mime such acts as making a phone call, using a stethoscope and eating an ice cream cone. The lack of any division of space sometimes makes it difficult to discern where a scene is taking place. Kathryn Rohe’s costumes effectively set the period as early 20th century. Director Jack Cummings III; Strange Interlude), artistic director of Transport Group, deals effectively with the problem of playing to an audience seated on three sides. I was glad to have the opportunity to see this minor play by an important American playwright, but I disliked a lot about the production. Running time: two hours 30 minutes including intermission. NOTE: CSC managed to annoy me before the play even began. As usual, I had to run the gauntlet of coffee house patrons to get their box office. Today, after making it to the auditorium, I learned that programs would not be distributed until after the play. For no discernible reason, the audience was forced to watch the play without the names of the actors, the setting of the play or whether there would be an intermission. I cannot think of any possible justification for this policy. When I finally got my hands on the program, I perused it carefully for possible “spoilers” but could find nothing other than the fact that one of the actors is married to the director. I hope they stop this ridiculous policy immediately. 4.28.18
New York Times, Jesse Green – Marin Ireland is one of the great drama queens of the New York stage.
I’m referring to her roles, of course: a colossally ticked-off lover in “reasons to be pretty,” for example, or an actual queen in David Adjmi’s “Marie Antoinette.” But whether playing a Polish immigrant wrestling with America or a grasping arriviste in prerevolutionary Russia, she comes off as contemporary; her Marie was a Valley Girl with an updo.
In short, Ms. Ireland specializes in modern women caught between their intelligence and their circumstances. That makes her a fascinating if counterintuitive choice to star in Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” which is mostly set in the mid-1910s. In the otherwise lackluster revival that opened on Thursday evening — a Classic Stage Company and Transport Group coproduction directed by Jack Cummings III — the choice pays off; Ms. Ireland is riveting as the passionate yet prudish Alma Winemiller.
Mocked by her contemporaries as a “white-blooded spinster,” though she is just in her 20s, Alma is one of Williams’s most complicated creatures. As a minister’s daughter in Glorious Hill, Miss., she aspires to the finer elements of humanity; her given name, she keeps pointing out, means “soul” in Spanish. Yet she flirts inexorably with coarser, more corporeal entanglements.
In Williams’s world (if no longer our own), this is understood as a recipe for hysteria — that condition in which, according to men, a woman’s stifled sexuality attacks her body, leading to languors, palpitations, spells and worse. Indeed, in some ways, “Summer and Smoke,” which had its Broadway premiere in 1948, is a spiritual prequel to “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which opened a year earlier. It’s a how-to guide to becoming Blanche DuBois.
Start with a martinet of a father (T. Ryder Smith), so hung up on the appearance of propriety that he fulminates when his wife licks an ice cream cone in public. Then there’s that mother (Barbara Walsh): a malicious, possibly crazy woman who has dealt with a bad marriage by reverting to emotional infancy.
Next give Alma a hankering for poetry and cathedrals in a town that has none, and a job teaching voice to unmusical girls. This while substituting for her mother as the rectory’s chatelaine, with all the submission and drudgery that entails.
Finally add as her impossible love the glamorously tortured boy next door. The son of a revered local physician, John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow) is a physician, too: the kind that needs to heal himself. Years spent trying to escape from under his father’s thumb have left him a confirmed sensualist and serial screw-up, wearing his crisp white linen suits as if they were on fire.
The relationship between Alma and John, begun in childhood, blossoms in the months of the play’s main action into a game of erotic cat-and-mouse and, at the same time, a philosophical grudge match. John diagnoses Alma’s hysteria — saying she has an “irritated doppelgänger” — as Alma denounces his fleshly weakness. Underlining the point a bit thickly, Williams associates each with a relevant symbol: Alma’s a stone statue of an angel called Eternity, and John’s an anatomy chart.
Those, and a few chairs, are just about the only props you’ll find in Mr. Cummings’s production. As the artistic director of Transport Group, he is known for minimalist, or essentialist, stagings, like an endearing unisex version of “I Remember Mama” in 2014. Doing more with less is also the house style of Classic Stage under John Doyle, who has revived musicals as different as “Sweeney Todd” and “The Color Purple” by depriving them of distracting stagecraft.
But this “Summer and Smoke” has been scraped too close to the bone. Dane Laffrey’s big white shoe box, or coffin, of a set conveys all too well Alma’s empty prospects but offers nothing to suggest either the suffocating trap of her Victorian circumstances or the richness and romance of her imagination. Her statue of Eternity is not even stone; it’s a framed photograph.
Williams specified minimalism — no doors or windows — but he meant something more poetic by it. In his production notes he refers to de Chirico and Renaissance paintings as a way of suggesting the natural world Alma must finally embrace. Which is not to say “Summer and Smoke” is hopeful; Alma and John convert each other too late, ending up, once again, on opposite sides of love. But it mustn’t play out its bleakness too soon or there’s nothing to lose, and thus no drama.
Ms. Ireland’s imagination is so well calibrated that she manages, almost single-handedly, to correct for that distortion. If this “Summer and Smoke” were performed silently you could still understand the story from her physicalization of Alma’s character. More than that, her manic laughter, gulping breaths and drooping shocks are carried off with such authenticity that they reframe hysteria as a natural, even brave, response to deprivation and constant insult.
But of course a silent performance would not be Williams, and if much of the dialogue has a high butterfat content, Ms. Ireland delivers it naturally. Mr. Darrow, properly dashing and tortured as John, hasn’t quite achieved that facility; his emphasis on the character’s self-loathing and cynicism sometimes makes him seem hollow instead of harrowed.
Williams is partly to blame. John’s feelings for Alma aren’t as clear as hers are for him, and he often hovers, like the rest of the residents of Glorious Hill — especially the stereotypically “passionate” Mexican family that runs the local casino — on the verge of caricature. Williams tried to solve these problems with massive rewriting; the result was “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” which puts the main characters in a rather different framework.
“Eccentricities” is an improvement, but “Summer and Smoke” is nevertheless Williams, with veins of rich pathos to be mined from its melodrama. Surely its central question remains profound: Why do we fall in love with a person’s struggle instead of with the person himself? If this revival doesn’t address that question convincingly except in its central performance, I don’t blame the cast, which also features Tina Johnson as the local busybody, Ryan Spahn as a traveling salesman and Hannah Elless as a pupil of Alma’s who turns out to be a rival.
No, it’s the parsimony of the production that’s at fault, offering little that’s lovely except Michael John LaChiusa’s original music, in an apt neoclassical mode. Perhaps it’s fitting that music should be the one element that gives you a taste of what this “Summer and Smoke” might have been with such an eloquent Alma if it hadn’t, like her, spent so much energy stifling its passion. 5.3.18
Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter – In October 1948, the fact that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was still running when his new play, Summer and Smoke, opened on Broadway has been suggested as a principal factor in the latter’s running only for 102 performances. While it shares some thematic ideas with the earlier masterpiece, Summer and Smoke paled in most critical eyes still dazzled by Streetcar’s pyrotechnics.
Only a handful of critics wholeheartedly lauded it and it had to wait for a renowned Off-Broadway 1952 revival at the Circle in the Square starring Geraldine Page as Alma Winemiller before its artistic stature was more widely recognized. (Page reprised the role in the 1961 film.) Williams continued to polish the script in later years, creating a revised version called Eccentricities of a Nightingale, published in 1965 and given its stage debut in Surrey, England, 1967.
It’s very likely, though, that, if Summer and Smoke’s lugubrious current Off-Broadway revival, directed by Jack Cummings III, were its premiere, it would suffer a fate worse than that of the original. Cummings, whose Transport Group has collaborated with the CSC on this production, shares an aesthetic not unlike that of CSC artistic director John Doyle of paring shows down to their minimum. Cummings says that the point of his sometimes daringly reconceiving familiar plays is to highlight the actors’ work, as in his memorable 2014 version of I Remember Mama. In Summer and Smoke, though, he seriously misfires.
The revival has trimmed the play to a two and a half hour, one-intermission, run time. It’s set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, in 1916, and circles around the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Williams calls for the fountain statue of the Angel of Eternity to be set between the house of the puritanical Reverend Winemiller (T. Ryder Smith) and his mentally ill wife (Barbara Walsh) and that of Dr. John Buchanan, Sr. (Phillip Clark).
The action concerns the relationship of the preacher’s timorous daughter, Alma (Marin Ireland), whose name means “soul,” and the doctor’s good-looking son, John (Nathan Darrow); they have been friends since childhood. Alma is a neurotic old maid and John a dissolute medical student. Alma seeks to reconcile her differences with John by getting him to accept her spirituality but he can see only man’s fleshly attributes, as symbolized by his anatomy chart.
Circumstances growing out of John’s lifestyle lead to the killing of his father and his discovering a spiritually fulfilling path. Alma, sexually awakened by her affair with John, who has married someone else, turns to a traveling salesman to satisfy her needs. As played here, Alma, her hair disheveled and her body wrapped in a long, purple robe, seems on the brink of madness, much like Blanche at the end of Streetcar.
As in other Williams plays, the playwright relies on symbolism, moody musical underscoring, poetic dialogue, sexual preoccupations, a frustrated Southern belle, and the conflict between morality and amorality.
Cummings, perhaps inspired by the play’s pre-Broadway, scantily designed production at Margo Jones’s famous Dallas theatre-in-the-round, stages it around three sides of a rectangle. But he goes much further in simplifying its appearance on Dane Laffrey’s set of little more than a raised, white, rectangular platform over which hangs a white ceiling of the same dimensions.
The furniture, often shifted by the cast, consists entirely of six old-fashioned, ornately-carved, straight-backed, dining-room chairs. Instead of a fountain statue there’s a painting of one set on a formal easel at one end of the platform; across the space is the competing symbol of John’s anatomy painting, on its own easel.
Not only are chairs asked to serve whatever needs the play requires, there also are almost no props. When water from the fountain is needed, the actors mime cupping it in their hands, just as actors mime licking an ice cream cone, eating food, carrying trays, and so on.
However, Cummings isn’t consistent: when Papa Gonzalez (Gerardo Rodriguez) shoots old Dr. Buchanan, a real gun materializes for the deed. The lame Buchanan gets to use a real cane but when he’s shot, it lies there until Ireland, stepping out of character, picks it up and walks off with it. And I believe I noted an actual, not mimed, pill packet used by Alma late in the play.
Removing all traces of traditional investiture and treating the play as if it were a cousin of the noh theatre completely deprives it of all-important atmosphere (albeit John Michael LaChiusa’s music occasionally offers some of that) and specificity of locale, even minimally, including the difference between interiors and exteriors. Scenes blend into one another with barely any distinct lighting shifts from designer R. Lee Kennedy, creating vague transitions and doing a serious disservice to the narrative and the characters’ evolutions. Too often it’s simply impossible to know where the action is taking place, as if place had nothing to do with the playwright’s intentions at all.
If the scenery is to be stripped to such basics, one might ask, why not do the same for the costumes by having everyone dressed in nondescript clothing lacking period details? Why, in fact, not have the actors simply present the play as a staged reading, with occasional infusions of movement for visual interest?
Kathryn Rohe has provided more-or-less period clothing although the actors retain contemporary hairstyles. That, however, isn’t enough to help them create believable, multidimensional characters while being, essentially, suspended in white space. If Cummings wants to focus on the actors, he has an awfully strange way of helping them.
Summer and Smoke is a relatively eventless play, depending heavily on Williams’s gift for Southern gothic characters and poetic dialogue, much of it in loquacious, two-character scenes between Alma and John. As Alma, the usually exciting Marin Ireland does a lot of acting, with numerous emotional transitions, but fails to conjure up the image of a wounded, soulful woman devolving into a creature of the flesh. The opposite fails to happen for the handsome, white-suited Nathan Darrow’s John. Neither brings the necessary romantic charisma to their tonally monotonous relationship.
The uneven supporting cast is mildly satisfactory but, hampered by Cummings’ approach and the lack of a compelling Alma and John, it’s simply not strong enough to sustain interest in this doleful revival. Judging by the attitudes of several patrons visible across the stage from me, perhaps a more suitable title than Summer and Smoke would be “Slumber and Slump.”5.3.18
Time Out NY. Helen Shaw – The 1952 New York revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke changed the city. Steaming with repressed emotion, gleaming like a jewel at the intimate Circle in the Square, Williams’s 1948 melodrama launched the Off Broadway movement, a fertile zone where commercial instincts and artistic ambition could intermingle productively. Transport Group’s exquisite version at Classic Stage Company is strong enough to power a rocket into orbit—and that’s without mentioning the gigantic performance at its center. Marin Ireland plays Alma Winemiller as though the part had been written for her, and as though it had been written yesterday; her Alma is at once radiant and frightening, as heart-stopping as a painting that looks up and catches your eye.
Dane Laffrey’s cantilevered white roof-and-floor set looks like a tomb with the lid lowering into place; the audience sits on three sides of it, never more than five rows away from the action. A picture of a stone angel stands on an easel, and it takes nothing more to put us in the turn-of-the-20th-century Mississippi Delta. The plot is barely a whisper: Alma is hectically in love with rake-next-door John (Nathan Darrow, also superb), the worst man in the world for an anxious, slightly prudish girl. Her antic brain tries to entertain itself amid a stifling intellectual circle (most hilariously the tart Tina Johnson), but her loneliness makes her awkward and bossy and strange. John’s medical background and swinging moral compass let him make excuses for the torments he puts her through—but while he claims objectivity and rationality, he’s a bad boy toying with a fly all the same. The show is a painful dance between the two.
There are awkward stretches: Williams includes a nasty bit of “Mexicans are so passionate, no?” racism, and there’s a tendency in the final act to discuss things we’ve already seen. These are the drawbacks of a 1948 play, and the production doesn’t fix them. But elsewhere the revival is grand. Director Jack Cummings III has stripped away a lot; people mime props, and when a man moves his hand over Alma’s hair, she mentions a veil that none of us can see. It works because Williams’s tale is full of unseen elements: the wind that stirs Glorious Hill; the morals that keep Alma jangling out of John’s hands; John’s own dazzlement, which makes him want to have Alma and hurt her at once. Cummings has taken away the heavy stuff of production so we can focus on—and have our hearts broken by—all those invisible shimmering things. And in fact the show does cling to you, hanging around you like a haze even once you’re blocks away. 5.3.18
Curtain Up, Elyse Sommer – Like many playwrights, Tennessee Williams tended to keep tinkering with his work. Summer and Smoke probably went through more versions than any of his plays.
It began in 1941 as “Bobo”, an unpublished short story about Alma (a name meaning soul) who rebels against her Puritan father, becomes a prostitute and gives birth to a magical child who brings her gold and jewels. He rewrote it as another Alma story in 1946, this one titled “Yellow Bird.” Alma is again the repressed daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, in this case she begins drinking, smoking and engaging in prostitution after a yellow bird flies into the window of her parish. This in turn led to a play about two sisters in New Orleans, originally called The Poker Night which, of course, became A Streetcar Named Desiree in 1947.
Summer and Smoke was never considered to be on a par with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and Streetcar. . . . Williams himself wasn’t satisfied with the way he told the story of the doomed attraction between the sexually repressed spinster Alma Winemiller and the sexy doctor next door to her father’s rectory. And so he did an extensive rewrite in 1951 and renamed it Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It became Williams’s preferred version of the unconsummated love affair, that ended with Dr. John finding his soul and the frustrated Alma’s heartbreaking surrender to the call of the flesh.
The revision, like its early version, never achieved top-of-the-Williams canon status. My colleague Simon Saltzman and I did get to see and review a beautiful production by T.A.C.T., The Actors Company Theater (Sad to say they stopped producing plays this year).
Much as I liked that T.A.C.T. production, Summer and Smoke has somehow become more popular and respected. And it is indeed also worth seeing, whether again or for the first time. The two productions we caught at Curtainup were both excellent, one directed by Michael Wilson in Connecticut and New Jersy and one in London. I therefore looked forward eagerly to the Transport Group’s staging at Classic Stage, especially since everything about it looked promising.
I’ve admired the work of Transport Group’s artistic director Jack Cummings III for years. His productions of John LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite was exquisite. LaChiusa’s original musical, Queen of the Mist, worked like a charm with only minimal scenery. The use of LaChiusa’s music enhanced the Transport Group’s revivals of William Inge’s plays, so I was happy to see my advance press information list him as contributing original music at the Classic Stage.
The performances at CSC also seemed to be in good hands. Marin Ireland has the acting chops to be riveting Alma. Nathan Darrow has the looks and experience (he’s played Shakespeare as well as O’Neill characters) to make a fine Doctor John. And with T. Ryder Smith to play Alma’s controlling preacher dad and Barbara Walsh as her embarrassingly nutty mother, the ensemble too seemed solidly cast.
Actually, regular theater goers won’t know anything about who’s doing what, since the Classic Stage has initiated an annoying custom of not handing out programs until after the show. This practice makes sense if it would be a spoiler, but that’s certainly not the case here. Given that for many years one of the pleasures of seeing a show at CSC was that they always provided especially interesting programs and enrichment notes. Unfortunately, the lack of pre-show programs, with or without enrichment notes, proved to be a minor disappointment, once the show began.
Ireland is indeed a fine actress, and everyone else on stage did their best, but this super-spare, impressionistic staging somehow lacks energy and clarity. This is a play imbued with emotional richness and lyricism, but it’s tapped into only occasionally here.
This is a sprawling play and the playwright’s own stage directions called for simplicity. But minimalism can work effectively, but it can distract as is the case here by keeping the audience so focused on trying to figure out what’s happening and where we are in Glorious Hill, Mississippi. Consequently this sizzling battle between the soul for which Alma is named, and the flesh just doesn’t engage us. Even LaChiusa’s incidental music echoes the excessively bare of mood setting platform stage that has become something of a trademark of CSC productions under John Doyle’s leadership.
To repeat, Summer and Smoke, despite not being Tennessee Williams’s best drama, has much in common with his seminal works, populated as it is with characters simmering with frustrated love and navigating the rocky path between human desire and a restrictive social environment. This social milieu is colorfully underscored by ensemble characters like the gossipy Mrs. Bassett (an amusing Tina Johnson) and Alma’s boring beau Roger Doremus (Jonathan Spivey). Both Alma and John’s need to rebel is underscored by brief scenes with her over-protective, overly moralistic father and mentally frail mother (Barbara Walsh and T. Ryder Smith) and John’s judgmental father (Philip Clark).
While Williams replaced the subplot involving the seductive Mexican senorita Rosa Gonzalez and her pistol-packing father in Eccentricities for a Nightingale, the melodrama Rosa and her father (Elena Hurst and Gerardo Rodriguez) bring to Summer and Smoke serves s a pick-me-up in this sluggish production.
Even in a disappointing production like this, Williams’s language still gives Ireland’s Alma an opportunity to break our hearts, memorably so in her final plea to John: “I’ve lived next door to you all the days of my life, a weak and divided person who stood in adoring awe of your singleness, of your strength. And that is my story! Now I wish you would tell me —why didn’t it happen between us? Why did I fail? Why did you come almost close enough —and no closer? 5.3.18
Vulture.com, Sara Holdren – “I’m afraid we have a bad connection,” says the doctor’s son to the preacher’s daughter. They’re speaking over the telephone, but the interference they’re battling isn’t really technological but spiritual. Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke—now in a spare, intelligent, deeply affecting production by Transport Group at Classic Stage Company—is a story of the most troubled connection in a modern America still in the grip of its puritanical roots: the uneasy link between body and soul. Being by Williams, the play is verbally lush and at times symbolic to the point of overripeness, but director Jack Cummings III’s light, exacting touch both lifts and elucidates the text. Its tale of wrenching transformations over the course of one humid southern summer feels newly piercing, and the performance of its lead, the stellar Marin Ireland, is an exquisite study in awakening. In Ireland’s hands, Alma Winemiller—the nervous, lace-clad young singing teacher living in Glorious Hill, Mississippi in 1916—seems to leap forward in time. She becomes a devastating mirror for plenty of contemporary young women still struggling to exorcise shame, acknowledge desire, and find a place in the whole roiling mess of sex and love for that thing called the soul.
“My name is Alma and Alma is Spanish for soul,” she says to the doctor’s son, whose name is John Buchanan, in the play’s prologue. It’s not exactly subtle, but then again, Alma and John are only 10 years old at this point. They’re standing near the fountain in the center of Glorious Hill, a kneeling angel whose carved name, Eternity, has faded in the stone. “You can’t make it out with your eyes,” Alma tells the skeptical John, “You have to read it with your fingers.” It’s a beautiful paradox: Right away, though Williams links Alma with the spiritual world and John with the physical, he has her encourage a moment of touch, a sensual act meant to access something sacred. The line between soul and body, between divinity and desire, is blurrier than the world these children inhabit would like it to be. For all her delicacy, Alma already senses that blur, though she’s not yet awake to it.
Cummings stages Williams’s prologue with Ireland and the excellent Nathan Darrow, as John Buchanan—surly and searching—playing their younger selves. The stage is empty save for a black and white framed photograph of a stone angel propped on a wooden easel. Williams devotes several pages of script to suggestions for the visual design of his play—from projected clouds and constellations to floating ivy-covered window frames—and it’s a relief upon entering the intimate three-sided space at CSC to see that Cummings and his scenic designer, Dane Laffrey, haven’t followed any of them. Laffrey gives us only a raised white rectangular floor and a low-hanging white rectangular ceiling: a wall-less box that evokes both spartan purity and, despite its open sides, claustrophobia. R. Lee Kennedy’s lights remain low, keeping Ireland and Darrow in shadow as they navigate this blank expanse.
Physically, the actors perform the teasing meeting of two young children, but instead pace slowly around the edges of the white floor, their gestures slow, their eyes downturned. Cummings is following Williams’s own earlier directions from The Glass Menagerie on creating a memory play: “It is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.” In this production the prologue is no twee epigraph but Alma’s memory. As she slips out of a kiss from the young John—leaving him suspended for a moment and observing the murky tableau with quiet, fascinated distance—the play is cemented even more firmly than usual as hers. Only Alma will brush up against the veil at the edges of her story, becoming more and more aware of it, more and more ready to slice through it and join us on the other side.
Cummings knows how little fuss-and-stuff a richly layered piece of writing needs to work on stage. Last year, he and David Greenspan turned Eugene O’Neill’s sprawling psychological melodrama Strange Interlude into a stunning solo show: six hours of text, a few simple changes of scene, one body, one voice. Summer and Smoke also profits from the director’s penchant for stripping away theatrical excess. The play can be purple, so Cummings keeps the space empty and the performances sharp. He and his ensemble make Williams’s sometimes cloying language feel pointed and necessary. The actors use no props, save for a few chairs, and yet Cummings doesn’t push them to mime the objects they mention. Talking on a phone or wearing a hat don’t require elaborate physical illustrations. The connections between performers—and the struggles for connection between characters—are what matter, and the play’s elegant staging is a lesson in trimming the fat.
There’s no hiding in such a space, and in the stark white box we can hear refrains of Williams’ play ring clearly. Alma and John, soul and body, grow up next door to each other, and Summer and Smoke tracks the tumultuous course of a summer in their mid-twenties when the disparate pair get “so close [they] almost breathe together.” They’re a product of their fathers—Alma’s a rigid minister she dutifully supports and John’s a stern doctor he tries to defy—and, in a less obvious way, of their mothers too. John’s died when he was young: “They made me go in the room where my mother was dying and she caught hold of my hand and wouldn’t let go—and so I screamed and hit her,” he tells Alma in the prologue. For all his impetuous rakishness as an adult, John is full of fear. That early image of mortality—of the ugliness and possible meaninglessness of the human machine—haunts him as he pursues a life or mortal pleasures — gambling, booze, and, of course, sex. “It’s yet to be proven that anyone on this earth is crowned with so much glory as the one that uses his senses to get all he can in the way of… satisfaction,” he says to Alma later. Alma, meanwhile, has grown up believing in “the everlasting struggle and aspiration for something more than our human limits have placed in our reach” — and in this production at least, the courage she carries beneath her prim, nervous exterior might in fact stem from her mother.
The riveting Barbara Walsh’s Mrs. Winemiller is one of this Summer and Smoke’s brilliant surprises. Williams describes her as “a spoiled selfish girl who evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness,” and the character can easily be played as a mentally vacant overgrown kid with a mean streak, demanding ice cream, stealing from local stores, and mocking her daughter’s voice (“I have sometimes been accused of having a put-on accent by people who approve of good diction!” Alma sniffs to John, and Ireland nails her heightened idiom, which is somehow both affected and sincere). But Cummings and Walsh have discovered something different in Alma’s mother: Walsh—in a black dress that smartly echoes the shape of Ireland’s softer, light gray one (the simple, clever costumes are by Kathryn Rohe)—is sharp-eyed and watchful. She’s no village idiot, but a woman who woke up one day to the idiocy of her village and said, “Screw this! I’m out.” Her seeming dementia is a kind of defiance. Twice during the play, the character cries out “Fight, fight!” in moments when Alma’s proper, forbearing surface gets ruffled. The words might be a taunt, like a child egging on playground violence, but coming from Walsh they’re a command. She’s suddenly brutally lucid, urging her daughter to do what she couldn’t figure out how to in order to survive.
Because Alma is headed towards a crisis. During the play’s hot, heavy summer, she grows more and more enamored with John, defending him against the community’s judgment as his behavior gets more debauched. The pair are engaged in an ongoing argument, Alma in favor of reaching up—like a “Gothic cathedral” for “something beyond attainment”—and John in favor of reaching out, of collecting worldly experience and feeding temporal desires. At one point he forces her to look at a doctor’s chart of the human anatomy—the stone angel’s symbolic counterpoint and the production’s only other real object—and roughly points out the locations of human hunger: “the sex,” the belly, and the brain. “I’ve fed all three,” he growls bitterly, “You’ve fed none.”
Darrow is delivering a tough, vulnerable performance. We can what Alma loves about him and what she despises, and we suffer with her as he flails about in selfishness and uncertainty. John spends his money and his nights at Moon Lake Casino, a gambling house where he meets the dancer Rosa Gonzalez, whose father runs the seedy establishment. In a red dress with a flower in her hair, Rosa mostly walks through the play as a symbol of everything Alma isn’t on the outside. Though the striking Elena Hurst does admirable work filling out Rosa’s humanity, Williams’s dependence on a pair of Mexican characters to represent all that’s carnal, impulsive, and earthy can feel dated and stereotypical. Papa Gonzalez (the tipsy, swaggering Gerardo Rodriguez) especially is little more than an engine of plot, the straw that ultimately breaks the back of John’s bad behavior and sends both him and Alma into painful periods of metamorphosis.
But then again, Williams was living with his muse and lover, the Mexican-born Pancho Rodriguez, while writing Summer and Smoke, and while we might wince today at what feels like the stereotype of tempestuous “Latin” passion, Williams was trying to make a complex argument for an embrace of life that held such passion as sacred as prayer. In the play’s final third, we watch Alma fall into a kind of sickness: Ireland’s hair comes down and she curls up bare-shouldered and barefoot on the stage. Eventually, she covers up not in her gray dress, but in a wine-dark floor-length velvet coat originally worn onto the stage by her mother. Notably, Mrs. Winemiller doesn’t abuse her daughter in her seeming illness, but only watches unblinking. Her father frets and criticizes: “What am I going to tell people who ask about you?” he grumbles. “Tell them I’ve changed,” says Alma with ominous steadiness, “and you’re waiting to see in what way.”
Marin Ireland is utterly thrilling as the heart of Cummings’s production. She’s both a masterful technician and an actor whose emotional presence feels so alive it’s almost dangerous. More still, she’s stealthily hilarious. Summer and Smoke isn’t usually billed as a comedy, but thanks to Ireland’s unerring comic touch—and to the wonderful supporting work of Tina Johnson, Jonathan Spivey, Glenna Brucken, and Ryan Spahn as the eccentric members of Alma’s ill-fated “little club” of local intellectuals—the play is filled with jolts of humor. Listen to Ireland’s distracted replies when a dopey would-be suitor (Spivey) shows her a scrapbook full of pictures of his mother, or to her bone-dry description of why things haven’t exactly worked out for her with boys in the past: “With each one there was a desert between us,” she tells John, and when he asks what she means by a desert, she cracks the audience up with what could be a soppy line. “Oh—wide, wide stretches of uninhabitable ground,” she says, with no iota of wistfulness. Ireland’s Alma, even at her most scattered and vulnerable, is on some level always aware of her own doubleness, of the change that’s coming, the “Doppelgänger”—to use John’s teasing phrase—within her that’s gradually coming to consciousness.
And that consciousness is heartbreaking. After a tragedy, Alma and John are both altered permanently, but Alma’s transformation is a complex, ongoing awakening, while John’s is a kind of going back to sleep. “I’ve come around to your way of thinking,” he tells Alma, trying to explain that he now believes in that “immaterial something” she tried to make a case for. But John’s newfound respect for the soul takes traditional form: He’ll clean up his act and “[settle] with life on fairly acceptable terms,” while Alma will move past tradition, past propriety, primness, and respect. It’s a wrenching case of ships passing in the night, and while it leaves John safely harbored in society, it strands Alma in open water, full of desires and revelations that the world will try to disgrace. Williams was fresh off A Streetcar Named Desire when he wrote Summer and Smoke in 1948, and in the suspended, opened-up Alma of the play’s ending we can see a kind of after-the-fact spiritual prequel to Blanche. In Ireland’s gorgeous performance, we can also see a hungry modern woman grappling with a world that seems to reward men both for their prodigality and for their return to the flock. Meanwhile, a woman walks tentatively forward through the smoke, seeking a path free from shame, a path towards a more perfect union of body and soul. 5.3.18
Talkin’ Broadway, David Hurst – The tables have turned with a vengeance,” says Alma Winemiller in the penultimate scene of Summer and Smoke, Tennessee Williams’ gothic potboiler now on view at Classic Stage Company courtesy of the Transport Group and their artistic director, Jack Cummings III. In an emotionally fraught drama about loneliness, suppressed desire and the eternal quest for love in the face of an overwhelming need for sex, that line, an almost perfect summation of the play, is delivered with the realization of a lifetime by the superb Marin Ireland in a performance of heartbreaking intensity and meticulous desperation. Ireland is joined by Nathan Darrow who portrays the object of Alma’s affections, John Buchanan, and he, too, is sensational in an almost impossible role. It’s a shame Cumming’s oddly directly production isn’t as electrifying as its stars and their game supporting cast in this rarity from one of America’s greatest playwrights.
In his stark concept for this revival, despite lovely period costumes (by Kathryn Rohe), Cumming eschews the traditional elements of any Summer and Smoke production including an expanse of sky and a large statue of an angel (named Eternity), with “wings lifted, and her hands held together to form a cup from which water flows, a public drinking fountain.” Taking the place of an actual statue and fountain is a framed picture of an angel which sits on an easel in the center of the stage on its farthest upstage side. The set (Dane Laffrey) consists of two, white rectangular cubes: one positioned on the floor which serves as the stage and one floating aloft in the air, serving as a ceiling of sorts, though the atmosphere created is one of claustrophobia and self-containment. A minimum of furniture is used, and, in a disastrous decision, no props are utilized by the cast; everything is pantomimed—badly, I may add. The only exception to this is an internal anatomy chart of the human body which figures prominently in John’s medical office. Like the picture of the angel, it sits on an easel positioned in the downstage left corner at the front of the stage.
Set at the turn of the 20th century through 1916 in Mississippi, Summer and Smoke opens with a prologue when Alma and John are ten years old. Cumming opts to have Ireland and Darrow play their childhood selves instead of employing child actors. They acquit themselves well but the scene, and its effect on the rest of the play, are diminished by not actually seeing the couple as childhood friends. It’s surprisingly that, in a city like New York where excellent child actors are plentiful, Cumming opted for this choice. It may have been cheaper, but it’s less effective. The action then moves forward to 1916 where Alma is a high-strung, unmarried daughter of the local minister (T. Ryder Smith) and his emotionally unstable wife (Barbara Walsh) who acts out in public and says inappropriate things as the result of a mental breakdown many years previous. Alma’s had to serve as in her mother’s role growing up and the burden has added to her own flightiness and resentment. Walsh overplays Alma’s mother, registering as more calculating than feeble-minded, but it’s still a credible performance.
John is home for the summer, having completed his training to be a medical doctor like his father, John Sr. (Philip Clark), instead of a biological researcher which he would have preferred. He and Alma have had a flirtatious relationship for many years but it’s clear John now wants a physical relationship. Alma, however, insists on remaining chaste because of her position in her father’s house. Her unbridled longing for John remains unspoken but it torments her as does his need for intimacy. To that end, he takes up with Rosa Gonzalez (Elena Hurst) a carnal hussy whose father (Gerardo Rodriguez) owns the riverboat casino where gambling and lustful inclinations are indulged. The town’s gossips wag their tongues, including one of Alma’s voice students, the beautiful Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless), but she refuses to believe the talk.
Alma invites John to the rectory for the next meeting of her “intellectual friends” who gather on Wednesdays to talk about new books and read things to each other. John arrives late, but bolts quickly once he’s assessed the boredom level provided by the willowy Vernon (Ryan Spahn), the shy Rosemary (Glenna Brucken), potential suitor Roger Doremus (Jonathan Spivey), and the hilarious Mrs. Bassett (Tina Johnson, in a pitch-perfect comic turn). Alma rushes after him but it’s too late and she berates her friends for not being more sparkling. She turns up late at night at John’s office under the guise of wanting to see his father, but John ends up seeing her and sending her home with sleeping tablets and renewed hope for a date with John soon in the future. Her father, however, forbids their association while her unstable mother continues to speak the truth about Alma’s obsession with her next-door neighbor. In the second act of the play we watch our star-crossed lovers’ philosophies change places as Williams explores the painful realities we face when sexual repression and societies conventions are inflicted on us.
In today’s permissive and sexually empowered culture, it’s hard (especially for young people) to imagine a time when any mention of sex or sexuality was utterly forbidden. Men and women suffered in silence and, if they didn’t, they were ostracized or branded as whores and lechers. The challenge in any contemporary staging of Summer and Smoke is to portray and empathize with John and Alma’s desire for physical intimacy in the context of people who were trapped in an age when the quest for a spiritual joining of souls was considered the highest attainment. The physical act of sex itself was seen as something horrible to be endured for the benefit of procreation only, not for bodily enjoyment.
Cumming and the Transport Group are fortunate, indeed, to have actors as ideally suited to their roles as Ireland and Darrow. Possessing matinee-idol looks and the perfect balance of sex appeal and longing, Darrow’s performance perfectly walks the line between wantonness and sincerity. And if ever there was the perfect match of an actor with a role it must be Ireland’s inhabitation of Alma. For many, the legendary Geraldine Page’s performance of Alma, first created in the 1952 revival of Summer and Smoke at Circle in the Square and later captured for posterity in the 1961 film, is definitive. But Ireland triumphs in a notoriously difficult part filled with minefields and contradictions. With her porcelain fragility and luminous eyes, she resembles a young Meryl Streep both in her appearance as well as her performance. Yes, she’s that good. But if you’re not sitting on the far side of the right section (the play is done on a three-quarter stage) you’ll miss some of her most shattering work in Alma’s last scene with John when she’s embracing him in her final, resigned, goodbye.
In addition to lots of clumsy blocking, it’s a shame so many distractions of Cumming’s making pull the audience out of the action and away from the story. Why isn’t the cast using props? I can forgive the spartan set (though it does nothing to help the story), and all the white lighting, but why have detailed, period costumes with no props. Can you give John a stethoscope and, for goodness sake, let Alma have a pair of gloves? And can Mrs. Winemiller please have a hat with a plume? What does such a decision serve. It’s bad enough they’re performing in a white cube of sterility and colorlessness, but then you force them to do all this crazy pantomiming. It’s a testament to how wonderful the cast is that Summer and Smoke remains as affecting and moving as Williams no doubt hoped it would be. Written in 1947 after The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, but before Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer, Summer and Smoke may not be top-shelf Tennessee Williams but it’s still a great play with the power to challenge you to think and feel. And with Marin Ireland’s blazing portrayal of its deeply flawed heroine, Alma Winemiller is restored to Williams pantheon of great female characters where she belongs with Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois and Maggie the Cat. 5.3.18
Daily Beast, Tim Teeman – In this week of flash and fire about the Tony Awards—who is nominated, who isn’t, which show is booming and which is crashing—here is a beautifully crafted reminder that away from Broadway there are other jewels.
The Classic Stage Company and Transport Group’s production of Tennessee Willliams’ Summer and Smoke, a collaboration to mark the 50th anniversary season of CSC itself, is near-perfect. It was written in 1947, the same year as A Streetcar Named Desire. Poor old Summer and Smoke. The world came to know who Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski were, but not so much Alma Winemiller and John Buchanan.
The play clearly obsessed Williams. Carolyn Vega, curator of the Morgan Library’s exhibit, Tennessee Williams: No Refuge But Writing, writes in the program that he kept working on Summer and Smoke for 28 years after it was first performed in Broadway in 1948.
In this new production, under Jack Cummings III’s lean direction, we are in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the early 1900s through 1916. There are not many glories in Glorious Hill. This is the familiar Williams territory of passion running smack bang against propriety, with a nervy background of mental illness, illicit passions, broken marriages, and secret heartaches. Still, everyone is beautifully dressed. Expect to hear flutey declarations of “I do declare…”
Facing the audience—sitting on three sides—is a bare, stark white stage, a square runway, with a white ceiling acting as a kind of sky above. There is very little on Dane Laffrey’s imaginatively configured stage apart from chairs and an easel with an image of a local park’s fountain on it; the fountain is designed as an angel named Eternity. The play opens and closes with Alma (Marin Ireland) staring at it.
R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting of the space is so effective we feel as if we are in the deadening heat of a summer’s day, and then inky night. With no adornment we feel as if we are switching between locations as disparate as stuffy parlors and licentious casinos.
Alma is one of those Williams Southern heroines who looks liable to shatter, but also has an invisible rod of steel hidden inside. She drinks not just water from the fountain, but also what she imagines Eternity embodies: the nourishment of the soul.
Next door, all her life, has lived the now ruffle-haired, handsome and inevitably damaged John (Nathan Darrow). He is a doctor, and dissolute. Where Alma has the image of Eternity—the easel being meaningfully and progressively displaced as the performance continues—John retreats to his easel, one that shows the physical components of a body.
The two share a wistfulness in this stultifying town. They are the sexiest people in any room, they should be together, but they aren’t, and the bitter truth at the heart of Summer and Smoke is the anti-romance that flows between them, the attractiveness of both actors fooling and wrongfooting us as we watch them.
Why are Alma and John in perfectly opposite alignment, rather than perfect alignment? They represent poles of the human condition—restraint versus sensuality—that Williams thought irreconcilable. (He apparently based the characters of Alma and John on his own parents.)
Alma is the daughter of a minister, played by T. Ryder Smith, who is not a stern, authoritarian, God-invoking patriarch, but a meek man confused by the frailties of his daughter and his wife. Mrs. Winemiller is played by a magnificently brittle Barbara Walsh, whose own mental illness manifests in a chilling, disconnected laugh and a gleaming, beady spectator’s eye on the dysfunction in her own home.
The play doesn’t merely interrogate the non-blooming of John and Alma’s relationship, but also Alma’s search for whatever is inside her. She convenes an “intellectual circle” of sundry locals, where the idea is to exchange meaningful ideas and thoughts, but really it is the forum by which Mrs. Bassett (an excellent, bustling Tina Johnson) curates and spreads gossip, including about Alma and John.
John wants Alma in a passionate moment, but it feels wrong to her; then they both change. We feel both their different pains, and sometimes—even when they are not sharing a scene, and time separates them and their circumstances change—they orbit each other, silently. Their psychological presence in each other’s lives is a constant.
The sole rankling note in the production is the portrayal of casino owner Papa Gonzales (Gerardo Rodriguez) and his daughter Rosa (Elena Hurst) whom John falls for. Sure, she is supposed to be a flamenco dancer, he a suspect casino boss, but all-too familiar Spanish-rooted stereotypes—whatever Williams wrote and intended—feel too one-note in 2018.
This doesn’t detract from an otherwise intelligent and immaculately staged production. Ireland’s final big speech to John is voiced with both a pained confusion and an absolute clarity, as it transmits its own terrible truth about the strange workings of head and heart. In a teasing coda, an encounter in the park in the dead of night, Eternity looking on, may signal another change in Alma’s personality.
In 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire took all the glory, and Summer and Smoke – while performed over the years – has remained something of a curio. The CSC and Transport Group’s rescue-from-obscurity mission is a sublime triumph. 5.3.18
Wolf Entertainment Guide, William Wolf – Although Marin Ireland gives a riveting performance as Alma Winemiller, the repressed, disappointed and conflicted unmarried woman in the Tennessee Williams play “Summer and Smoke,” the bare-bones production presented by Classic Stage Company and Transport Group is more like a dramatic reading than a full-fledged mounting.
The staging is bereft of all atmospherics under the minimalist direction by Jack Cummings III. I also have trouble with the audience set-up in this revival. Spectators are seated on three sides, and in one important and deeply emotional scene involving Alma and the tortured and elusive John Buchanan, on whom she has had a crush since childhood, Marin’s back was turned toward my seating section and I was deprived of the opportunity to see her facial expressions. As visible in other scenes, Ireland’s expressions are a most impressive aspect of her acting prowess.
Where is all this taking place? The program informs us that the location is Glorious Hill, Mississippi at the turn of the century through 1916. We have to take its word, as the action might just as well be occurring in a reading at a Manhattan rehearsal studio. Much audience imagination is required.
Fortunately, the acting does justice to Williams’s characters and plot. Phillip Clark excels as John’s disapproving doctor-father. Elena Hurst is excellent and appropriately sexy as Rosa Gonzalez, John’s girlfriend with whom he is about to run off.
T. Ryder Smith is convincingly uptight as Reverend Winemiller, Alma’s father, and Barbara Walsh impresses as her over-the-top, loopy mother.
The most famous portrayal of Alma was that of Geraldine Page in the 1952 Broadway production. Fortunately a 1961 film was made with Page in the starring role with Laurence Harvey as co-star, which gives those too young to have seen her on stage a chance to buy or rent the film and savor her acting.
Ireland certainly makes her own strong mark in the role, even in
this scaled-down production. And the poetic sensibility of Tennessee Williams comes through in various patches of dialogue, especially at the end when Alma, all hope with John having collapsed, seductively attracts a traveling salesman (Ryan Spahn). 5.4.18
NY Stage Review, Michael Sommers – A poignant story about lovers divided by psychological cross-purposes, Summer and Smoke is among Tennessee Williams’ most personally revealing of plays. Admirers of Williams’ works should make a point of seeing the resonant new revival of this 1948 drama, although the minimalist style of its staging may not appeal to everyone’s taste.
Set in a small town in Mississippi around 1915, the story centers on Alma Winemiller, the overly-genteel daughter of a minister and his mildly deranged wife. Ever since girlhood, Alma has harbored a crush on her neighbor John, who has just returned home from medical school this summer in a dissolute state of being. Alma, whose name means “soul,” is obsessed with spiritual and cultural attainments, while John deliberately pursues pleasures of the flesh.
Still, they are mutually attracted. Sparks fly during their summer nights together. But Alma and John remain too far apart otherwise in spirit for a meaningful relationship to catch fire. “I’m more afraid of your soul than you’re afraid of my body,” he tells her. A subsequent tragedy and the passing of time leads to an ironic change in both of their hearts.
“The tables have turned with a vengeance!” Alma says to John in their final scene. “You’ve come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him and no one to answer the bell!”
Alma is an especially fascinating character: A prim, refined maiden whose repressed sexual urges induce in her a hyperventilating, nearly hysterical, vivacity of manner. Some viewers may appreciate Alma as a prototypical Blanche DuBois on the verge of breakdown at Belle Reve. Yet she is even more interesting a figure if one recognizes that Alma, with her psychosomatic palpitations and anxieties, might well represent young Tennessee Williams in the years before he accepted his gay sexuality.
Williams’ identification with Alma was so meaningful that in an effort to improve the flawed, if touching, Summer and Smoke, he substantially rewrote it some years later as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Summer and Smoke remains the purer manifestation of the playwright’s impulse and it possesses lyrical passages of tremulous loveliness in the intimate scenes between Alma and John, which comprises the bulk of the two-act drama. The play’s major weakness occurs late in the story when the two characters separately reverse their viewpoints; the transformations are not effectively dramatized. Williams simply expects the audience to make that major leap on their own.
This co-production by Transport Group and Classic Stage Company at the latter’s three-quarter thrust theater space expects the audience to abide by abstract visuals. Designer Dane Laffrey’s setting, which sandwiches the action between a white deck and a relatively low white ceiling, suggests Alma’s chaste, confined horizons as a clergyman’s proper daughter. Formal dining room chairs are rearranged for interiors. A stone angel in the town park, symbolic of Alma’s spiritual aspirations and rigidity, is represented by a gilt-framed sepia photograph mounted on an easel. The actors mime their use of tableware and other props. For the most part, the production’s dozen actors wear their same 1910s clothes in every scene.
Such minimalism usually is characteristic of works staged by John Doyle, the CSC artistic director, and some, but not all, of the productions directed by Jack Cummings III, Transport Group artistic director, who gracefully stages this complex play. A poetic work, Summer and Smoke is scarcely realistic and employing a selective visual stylization suits its heightened quality. Accented by R. Lee Kennedy’s at times incarnadine lighting, the setting permits fluent transitions between the scenes.
What enriches the drama and contributes significantly to this production is an original score composed by Michael John LaChiusa: The rhythmic, insinuating music fosters variously yearning, even sensual, moods and through its interwoven use of violin and guitar suggests the differing natures of Alma and John.
Smoldering performances by Marin Ireland as Alma and Nathan Darrow as John live up to the play’s title. Dressed by Kathryn Rohe in a filmy, rose-tinted frock, Ireland often speaks Alma’s florid dialogue in a rapid, highly punctuated manner, usually accompanied by nervous, expansive, broken-wristed gestures. Darrow, looking a handsome devil in his white summer suits, portrays John in a contrastingly lower, slower register, both in vocal pitch and in his deliberate body language. Together, they provide a heated sense of intimacy in their closest encounters during which it seems they nearly breathe as one.
Elena Hurst slinks along the perimeters as the Mexican beauty who fatally attracts John. Hannah Elless seems as sweet and fresh as a strawberry soda as a local belle. Tina Johnson gives her busybody matron an amusing air of self-importance. All black lace and black comedy moods, Barbara Walsh depicts Alma’s weird and willful mama with a wicked smile.
The last five Broadway seasons have featured revivals of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so it is a treat to see one of Williams’ less frequently produced plays. It is especially rewarding to find Summer and Smoke staged and performed with such a fine sense of atmosphere and intimacy. 5.3.18
The Wrap, Robert Hofler -Jack Cummings III’s direction of Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke” makes clear the play’s strengths, as well as its many weaknesses. On the plus side, this revival, which opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Classic Stage Company, brings two compelling performances to the stage: Marin Ireland’s repressed Alma Winemiller, the daughter of a Mississippi minister, and Nathan Darrow’s libertine John Buchanan Jr., the son of the town doctor who lives next door. The two characters starkly embody the eternal struggle between body and soul that’s at the core of almost any Tennessee Williams drama.
After the back-to-back Broadway successes of “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Williams took a tumble in 1948 with the world premiere of “Summer and Smoke,” which closed after a short run. A 1952 revival starring Geraldine Page and directed by Jose Quintero at the newly founded Circle in the Square resuscitated the play’s reputation, and in the process initiated the Off Broadway movement in theater.
The dynamic of Alma and John’s relationship is similar, but not identical to Blanche and Stanley’s in “Streetcar.” John’s much smarter and Alma’s much less damaged, at least in the beginning. In other words, their adversarial discourse shoots off verbal fireworks that are among the finest (and funniest) Williams ever wrote.
In the opening scene, John criticizes Alma for being mannered and affected. Ireland takes that criticism to heart to make her Alma very affected and mannered, as if the good-looking satyr next door were the ultimate arbiter of manners in small-town Mississippi. Fortunately, she soon relaxes her voice and hands enough to find the character’s strong core of resolve, and often ends up making far more sense than the intellectual stud she finds herself inexorably drawn to.
In her review of the 1961 film version starring Page and Laurence Harvey, Pauline Kael objected to Williams’ take on female virtue and frailties, especially the scene in which John invites Alma to a cockfight and she gets her crisply starched bodice splattered with blood. If that’s what it takes to showcase a maiden’s repression, Kael wrote, “Carry me back to virginity.”
There’s no rooster blood in Cummings’s staging, but the beauty of Ireland’s performance is that she resists becoming hysterical. She goes toe to toe with the very understated Darrow, and seems well on her way to proving the superiority of spirit over flesh.
What derails Alma and John’s chaste love story is Williams’ penchant to overdramatize. Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay for the playwright’s “Suddenly, Last Summer,” once commented that Williams sometimes went overboard with his theatrical effects. Vidal was talking about cannibalism.
In “Summer and Smoke,” it’s another kind of overwrought violence that forces John to re-examine his life and see the value in Alma’s virtue. No sooner is a character named Papa Gonzalez (Gerardo Rodriguez) introduced — he’s the father of Nathan’s fiancée, Rosa (Elena Hurst) — than the Mexican ends up shooting Dr. John Buchanan Sr. (Phillip Clark).
When he wrote “Summer and Smoke,” Williams must have known W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Rain” (later a famous play) and possibly Jules Massenet’s opera “Thais,” two works in which the male and female leads essentially switch places in the moral universe. Although there’s violence in both “Rain” and “Thais,” it doesn’t directly lead to the characters’ respective conversions.
Cummings’ direction in no way softens, disguises, or attempts to deconstruct the crude mechanics of Williams’s plot. John’s involvement with a Latina is the height (or bottom) of the young man’s degradation in this production, which suddenly turns into a Met Opera staging of “Carmen” from the 1950s. Even Rosa’s costume and music are Spanish, not Mexican.
The other supporting characters are equally stereotypical: All three fathers are tyrants and the townspeople are stupid. Cummings gives each of these individuals his or her moment to shine on stage, where the text might be better served if he treated them all as what they are: one big chorus.
At times, the direction is Ivo van Hove Lite. In 1999, the Belgian director staged a much-panned but very enlightening production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the New York Theatre Workshop. The stage was bare except for the one thing usually left off stage in this play: the bathtub. Cummings also uses a bare stage and eschews props, but unlike van Hove’s staging, the “Summer and Smoke” actors mime (badly) and are stuck in turn-of-the-century costumes. It’s a mish-mash.
Only when Ireland and Darrow are on stage alone — and they are for long stretches of magnificent dialogue — does this “Summer and Smoke” actually catch fire to give glimpses of a play worth staging and seeing. 5.3.18
Theatremania, Zachary Stewart – Desire and resentment are like smoke and fire in the scorching revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke now playing at Classic Stage Company in a joint production with Transport Group. Long dismissed as a lesser Williams drama compared to A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke smolders with unsatisfied longing thanks to powerful performances and a handsomely pared-down staging by director Jack Cummings III.
Originally titled Chart of Anatomy and then later revised into a different play called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke’s fitful history can be partially traced to a lackluster 1948 Broadway debut. That’s a shame, since Williams always felt a deep personal association with the protagonist, Alma Winemiller: “It has become a sort of concrete truth that I am Blanche,” Williams told author James Grissom, referencing the doomed heroine of Streetcar, “but I am much more like Alma, peeking through actual and metaphysical curtains, spying on the things I want to love and to feel and to have, but afraid to get much farther than the porch.”
Yet Alma is no shrinking violet as portrayed by the commanding Marin Ireland. From the way she cuts into her big speeches with slow precision, winding up to a fiery finish, we come to understand this minister’s daughter as someone who would make a fine preacher herself, were this not early 20th-century Mississippi. The object of her restrained desire (and somewhat less restrained resentment) is the handsome John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow), son of the town doctor (a cranky Phillip Clark). John seems destined for a life of comfort and respect, despite his best efforts: A regular at the dodgy Moon Lake Casino, John enjoys gambling and sex with the casino owner’s daughter, Rosa (a sympathetic Elena Hurst). When John turns his attention to the buttoned-up Alma, she doesn’t know whether to respond with surprise, elation, or hostility — so she settles for a very real combination of the three.
Few actors would be able to make that synthesis seem as completely natural as Ireland does. She has an instinctual grasp on this character, who is both highly intelligent yet steadfast in her romantic vision of the world even as it constantly fails to live up to her expectations (Ireland lets the audience know when this happens with her unmistakable facial expressions). Barbara Walsh plays her ice-cream-slurping mother with the noisy discourtesy of an ignored child. Tina Johnson is a hoot as Mrs. Bennett, the consummate Southern busybody who seems to relish bursting Alma’s bubble. Not only do these older women seemingly conspire to humiliate Alma, but they offer a terrifying look into her future should she stick around this crummy town. If these were your only two choices, you would self-medicate too.
The little white tablets John offers Alma to calm her nerves should raise a red flag for anyone watching. A young doctor-to-be, John is more valued by this community than future spinster Alma, which perhaps explains why Alma is so straitlaced: She doesn’t really have a choice. Darrow plays John with the languid confidence of one who knows he doesn’t have to try very hard to be adored. But we are still aware that Alma is special: An average woman would not be able to inspire such white-hot rage in this cucumber of a man.
Cummings stages it all with brutal simplicity. It is telling that both John and Alma’s father (a severe T. Ryder Smith) violently wrap their arms around this disobedient woman at different points in the play, forcing her body to bend to their wills in a physical manifestation of the patriarchy.
Such clarity extends to the design: A framed portrait of Alma’s favorite angel statue occupies one corner of the bare stage, while the other contains John’s anatomical chart: romance and reason, squared off in set designer Dane Laffrey’s empty arena. Laffrey caps the central platform with a claustrophobically low ceiling, suggesting just how stifling this place is for a stargazer like Alma. The Mississippi heat seems to rise off the stage under R. Lee Kennedy’s warm lighting. Kathryn Rohe’s costumes conjure time and place while using color to convey social position: severe black for the minister, white linen for young John, red for Rosa. Wearing the palest pink, Alma seems to want to break out of her station without making the radical choice to do so completely.
A drama of unexpected richness, Summer and Smoke reaches full bloom in this glorious production. When so much of our collective angst is focused on the feelings of male dispossession that are driving violence around the globe, this timely revival reminds us that women have regularly felt disappointment too. Where is our hand-wringing for them? 5.3.18
Theatre Reviews Limited/Onstage blog, David Roberts – Begun in 1945, and first produced in 1947, Tennessee Williams called “Summer and Smoke” a “drama of sensibility.” Rich in allegory, yet grounded in realism, the play explores the deep conflicts between body and soul and between the sacred and the profane and examines the themes of the marginalized and the results of having a poorly integrated sexuality. Currently running at Classic Stage Company, this revival of “Summer and Smoke” is presented by both Classic Stage Company and the Transport Group and is directed by Transport’s Jack Cummings III.
Throughout the play, lifelong acquaintances John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow) and Alma Winemiller (Marin Ireland) wrestle with their seemingly irreconcilable understandings of the spiritual and corporeal and their struggles with successfully responding to complex emotional influences. These characters, and others, in “Summer and Smoke” collide with those of other Williams’ plays, notably “The Glass Menagerie” and “Streetcar Named Desire.” And the rhetorical devices in one rumble throughout all three, connecting the characters’ intertwined quests for self-discovery, self-awakening, and unconditional love.
Alma and John live next door to one another and explore the play’s themes from their early visits to the fountain in the town’s square to their separation at the play’s end. “Summer and Smoke” follows the antithetical development of Alma and John. Initially, Alma’s deep Protestant spirituality does not allow her to express her affection for John in ways he understands and needs, and John’s corporeal needs do not allow him to love Alma in ways she understands and needs. As the play develops, Alma becomes more “carnal” and John becomes more “spiritual” and at the end of the play – as at the beginning – the two are unable to connect. Their developmental paths never intersect at points of opportunity for a meaningful relationship. In a sense, Alma jumps on the “streetcar named desire” too late and John realizes he has been on that car far too long – the couple never on the same car at the same time.
Under Jack Cummings III’s careful direction, the cast captures the essence of Tennessee Williams’ seminal work in the Classic Stage/Transport production. Each member of the ensemble cast develops her or his character with sensitivity and each delivers an authentic and believable performance. Marin Ireland’s Alma is as frail as she is frightened of her own sexual status. Ms. Ireland allows Alma to develop subtly and surreptitiously in counterpoint to John’s more erratic movement forward. Nathan Darrow’s John is infectious, sensual, and gritty. Mr. Darrow, in a tour de force performance, reveals a John in a lifelong quest for someone to fill his emptiness and his longing.
Dane Laffrey’s set design honors Williams’ hope that “walls are omitted or just barely suggested.” Mr. Laffrey chooses to use a stage that remains bare except for a few chairs, the “fountain,” and the medical chart in John’s “office.” This expanse allows for a emotionally powerful scene that leaves Alma looking very much like Wyeth’s Christina understanding her limitations but attempting to move beyond them. Kathryn Rohe’s costumes and R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting further support the emotional strength of the play.
Both Alma and Blanche lack sensitivity and suffer from psychological frailty. Alma, Blanche, and Laura are both outsiders as well as artists. Like John and his father and Reverend Winemiller (the appropriately laconic T. Ryder Smith), their artistry is not defined by what they create or practice, but by their temperament and taste. In “Summer and Smoke,” Alma’s art is her vocal ability which she sabotages with her attacks of “anxiety.” John’s art, his practice of medicine, is sabotaged by his self-doubt and lack of integration. Reverend Winemiller’s art is his ministry at which he fails miserably through his faithlessness and hypocrisy. For Tennessee Williams, one cannot practice one’s craft without full psychological and spiritual integration. This developmental truth is given a captivating interpretation in this well thought out production. 5.3.18
Broadway Blog, Bobby McGuire – The plays of Tennessee Williams are rife with eccentric heroines whose desires are too great for their complex and fragile souls. But even the best-known amongst them (Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois) can’t hold a candle to Alma Winemiller. Yet due to infrequent productions, attention is rarely paid to the prim parson’s daughter turned wannabe bad girl of Summer and Smoke. Thankfully, due to a spectacular performance by Marin Ireland in a top-flight co-production by Classic Stage Company and The Transport Group, Alma is back in one of the best revivals of a Williams play in recent memory.
Set in the fictitious town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi in the summer of 1916, Summer and Smoke centers on Alma, a minister’s daughter on the cusp of spinsterhood who has long carried a torch for John (a wonderfully sexy Nathan Darrow), the bad boy son of the town doctor next door. Regularly informing people that her name is Spanish for “soul,” Alma yearns for a spiritual and marital bond with John, who prefers to indulge his carnal side with casino hostess, Rosa. A fatal gunshot in the midst of Summer ironically flips the script on the pair, leaving John with Alma’s soul and Alma with John’s desire.
“I came here to tell you that being a gentleman, doesn’t seem so important to me anymore, but you’re telling me I’ve got to remain a lady,” Alma laughingly laments at the play’s apex. “The tables have turned with a vengeance!” she adds — and indeed they have.
Brilliantly brought to life by Ireland, Alma is a walking ganglion of nerves, desperate to gain the attention of John while unsuccessfully feigning disinterest. And whether she is failing in her flirtations, or stymied by her artistically pretentious friends in her attempts at a social life, Ireland is as fascinating to watch reacting to her circumstances as she is when delivering Williams’ poetry.Darrow’s John oozes with almost compulsive cockiness and sexuality. His chemistry with Ireland is palpable as he tends to and later eschews what Alma calls her “affliction of love.”
Director Jack Cumming III economically directs the drama, placing equal weight on both the play’s apparent symbolism and unsuspected humor. When the tables turn on the star-crossed pair, he soft lands the evening to its ironic and heartbreaking denouement.
On board with Cummings is the design team. Dane Laffrey’s minimalist raised bare white stage and low hung ceiling appropriately sandwiches John and Alma, giving visual emphasis to the microscope they live under in their gossipy small town. R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting and Kathryn Rohe’s costumes are suitably understated.
The ensemble acting is for the most part superb. Standouts include Barbara Walsh as Alma’s shrewish mentally ill mother, Jonathan Spivey as Alma’s hapless suitor Roger, and Tina Johnson as a particularly antisocial member of Alma’s social group. Elena Hurst brings both heat and pathos to the role of Rosa.
Like finding a $100 bill inside a suit jacket at the back of your closet, this production of Summer and Smoke is a welcome reunion for those familiar with the piece, and a windfall for those new to it. The new theater season is in its infancy, but with this production, the bar is set very high for its remainder. 5.3.18
New York Stage Review, David Finkle – Marin Ireland—when initially seen in the first-rate, top-drawer, A-number-one revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke—is looking at a poster on an easel. It’s the black-and-white picture of an angel. Actually, Ireland—as unmarried minister’s daughter Alma Winemiller and viewed only from the back with long hair streaming—is meant to be in a Glorious Hill, Mississippi public park scrutinizing a statue of winged Eternity.
(Is it symbolic? This is Tennessee William, so you better bet it is. The man never shied away from symbols, which is one of his eminently forgivable sins.)
When Alma turns around in the modest turn-of-the-century off-white dress costume designer Kathryn Rohe has selected, she leaves the easel behind and steps down from the long rectangular off-white riser (with long rectangular cover hanging maybe nine feet above) that serves as the only set Dane Laffrey has put permanently in place.
Ireland begins walking around the riser clearly deep in thought until Nathan Darrow as doctor and doctor’s son John Buchanan has entered and calls to Alma from the other side of the riser. As John engages Alma in conversation, they continue walking counter-clockwise in such a way that director Jack Cummings III immediately establishes the connection and the distance between them—a connected distance that’s the unsettled basis of a relationship enduring since they were children together.
Also instantly established is the brazen subtlety of their intertwined performances. The teamwork in this look back at a play—set in the early 20th-century and first presented (briefly) in Broadway in 1948—is nothing less than the best tandem performance currently available on a New York City stage.
It’s been several years that Ireland has—through a series of performances, usually in new plays—quietly announced herself as one of the City’s most astonishing players—maybe the best. As the nervous, uncertain, giddy to the verge of frequent hysteria Alma, she gives her best performance yet.
And now a short digression to note that Summer and Smoke is what put not only off-Broadway but also Geraldine Page on the theater map when on April 24, 1952 she took on the Alma Winemiller role in a Sheridan Square theater now the site of a high-rise apartment building. (This was the original location of the Circle in the Square and accounts for the name.)
Though others have taken on an at-first skittish Alma—who transforms herself perhaps too late in her deprived life with John—it’s Page who’s the actor most associated with the poetic, of course, Summer and Smoke. (Alma claims the smoke from an inner fire is what changed her).
So perhaps the highest praise that can be given Ireland is to state that she’s performing at Page’s level. Distinguished by an inner glow, she inhabits Alma—Spanish for soul, as Alma insists more than once. Her face constantly signals Alma’s forever rapidly changing troubled thoughts; her wracked body does the same.
Just as astonishing is Darrow as Alma’s counterpart John, a young doctor with scientific accomplishments driven by physical desires that compromise his medical acumen. (Williams knows about desires, it’s needless to say.) Making certain no one misses the point about John’s bodily needs, Williams has the physician prominently place an anatomical chart diagonally opposite the relocated poster of the angel. Regularly pointing at the chart, he insists there’s nowhere in the body where a soul resides. With painful beauty, Darrow interprets John’s adherence to that conviction. This is particularly the case in the almost-love scenes he has with Alma.
John’s torment, thanks to Darrow, is equal is Alma’s. It could even be said that the heart-breaking Summer and Smoke asks a 64-dollar question for which no answer is offered: Which is worse—being a minister’s daughter or a doctor’s son?
In this revival, a Classic Stage Company/Transport Group co-production with filmily original music by Michael John LaChiusa, Cummings does something slightly unusual for him. He works within a much more traditional theater venue, and, like Ireland and Darrow, he works within it at the height of his substantial powers.
Segueing from last year’s dual look at William Inge’s Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba, Cummings takes his time and his red pencil to Inge’s major influence, Williams. Eliminating characters like the young Alma and John, he delivers a well-nigh perfect piece. (Incidentally, if William Inge had married Tennessee Williams—something the very good friends probably never considered—he might have become William Williams.)
Cummings achievement is also due to a cast in which Barbara Walsh assuming a non-singing role as Alma’s addled, perceptive mother, Tina Johnson as a gossipy neighbor with a mean streak, Philip Clark as Dr. John Buchanan Sr., T. Ryder Smith as Reverend Winemiller, Elena Hurst as Alma rival Rosa Gonzalez, Hannah Elless as Alma’s vocal student Nellie Ewell—along with Glenna Brucken, Gerardo Rodriguez, Ryan Spahn, and Jonathan Spivey—all pull their substantial weight.
Apart from eliciting the courageous performances, Cummings’s notable achievement here is to argue silently that Summer and Smoke—which Williams might just as persuasively have called Body and Soul—is easily comparable to The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened the year after Summer and Smoke and was much more enthusiastically received.
Surely, the different-in-many-ways battle waged between Alma and John is as emotionally wrenching as the campaign fought between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. If it isn’t, Cummings convincingly makes it seem so. 5.3.18
New York Theatre Guide, Sarah Downs – Aaah, Tennessee Williams. No-one writes wanton desperation the way he does. His characters live in a world of illusion, frustration their guide and loneliness their perennial companion. Even his happy characters are sad; they just don’t know it yet.
In Summer and Smoke, Alma Winemiller (Marin Ireland) unmarried daughter of repressive Reverend Winemiller (T. Ryder Smith) and his mad wife (Barbara Walsh) lives with her parents in the stifling limbo of singlehood, enduring the tedium and isolation of Southern respectability.
Young though she may be, Alma has somehow skipped past ingenue to spinster. She’s odd. She’s lonely. She lacks the giddy self-confidence of girls like her pretty voice student Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless) or the seductive allure of Rosa Gonzalez (Elena Hurst), daughter of the local casino owner, Papa Gonzalez (Gerardo Rodriguez). Spending her days managing her father’s household and wrangling with her mother’s vicious (and unexplained) insanity, Alma tries to content herself with social outlets like the weekly gathering of her motley social circle, the town busybody Mrs. Bassett (Tina Johnson), dweeby suitor Roger Doremus (Johnathan Spivey), and timid Rosemary (Glenna Brucken). It is, of course, not nearly enough.
Alma is ever conscious of being a ‘preacher’s daughter.’ Tempests may roil within her, but Alma must bank the fires and wait. As she hovers, the boy for whom she pines, John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow) struggles with his own powerless virility. Resisting the impossible expectations of his doctor father (Phillip Clark), Buchanan acts out. Dissipation leads to tragedy, the repercussions of which reverberate disastrously through his and Alma’s lives. Afterward, when Alma chances upon Archie Kramer (Ryan Spahn), a benign but opportunistic out-of-towner, you wonder how far these repercussions will echo.
Jack Cummings III has directed this production brilliantly. It is taut and purposeful yet unhurried. He has wrapped the actors in an invisible net that coils the energy ever inward. The set design by Dane Laffrey brings that tautness into three dimensions: a spare rectangle of white canvas underfoot, a handful of period wooden chairs, and two framed images on easels. Stripped of all but the essentials, it is the perfect untrodden space across which characters pace, meander or promenade. The warm white-on-white lighting by R. Lee Kennedy is similarly un-fussy – bright but not cruel.
Michael John LaChiusa has composed beautiful music that evokes and elevates the mood, the era, and the text. Dancing violin and lean piano lines weave a variety of musical elements together, even including a frisson of Chinese melody, which, in the attention to detail that defines the high quality of this production references the text of the play as well as cultural inflection. It’s America in 1916. East Asian design has become the fashion, as reflected in the well-executed period costume. Kathryn Rohe has made careful color and style choices to fit each character.
However, the centerpiece that drives this production is the cathartic performance of Marin Ireland as Alma. I don’t know when I have seen such exquisite acting. She mesmerizes. She dazzles. She tears your heart out. Nathan Darrow as Buchanan, complements her work with a committed, nuanced performance of his own. He gives us so much more than the handsome, charismatic yet troubled young man. Ireland and Darrow also share a palpable, almost painful chemistry. It stands sentinel between them. Indeed, it is the bridge Alma and Buchanan cannot cross, no matter their intent and intensity. 5.4.18
Time Square Chronicles, Suzanna Bowling -“You’ll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”
Marin Ireland is such an exquisite actress and she is luminescent in Tennessee Williams’ pared-down revival of Summer and Smoke at Classic Stage Company. Director Jack Cummings III’s has stripped away the set per se.
Set in Mississippi, at the turn of the century we meet the highly-strung, unmarried minister’s daughter, Alma Winemiller (Marin Ireland), who is madly in love with the wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door, John Buchanan Jr. ( Nathan Darrow). There is a sexual chemistry between the two, but also a spiritual connection, that they both fight against and towards. Alma identifies with the Gothic cathedral, “reaching up to something beyond attainment” and her name, which means “soul” in Spanish. Buchanan, defies her saying there is no soul. As Alma yearns Buchanan starts a torrid affair with the hot blooded Mexican Rosa (Elena Hurst) whose father owns the casino. After losing a lot of money at the casino Buchanan becomes engaged to Rosa, Alma takes action and calls his father Dr. John Buchanan Sr. (Phillip Clark) who is none to pleased. When he objects, Rosa’s papa (Gerardo Rodriguez) shoots him. By the play’s end, however, Buchanan and Alma have traded places. Alma gets suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her and Buchanan becomes engaged to to a younger version (A sweet Hannah Elless). It is only the pain medication he has given her that gives her relief. In the end Alma follows a young traveling salesman to the Moon Lake Casino, where she had resisted Buchanan’s attempt to seduce her the summer before.
There have been many versions, which at first was not a hit. The 1952 revival starring Geraldine Page and directed by Jose Quintero at the the brand new Circle in the Square and a 1961 film version starring Page and Laurence Harvey, which earned Page an Academy Award nomination. There is also a revision of this play entitled The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Ireland’s performance is so layered and incandescence as she pines for the man that is always just beyond her reach. Gotham’s Nathan Darrow goes toe to toe with Ireland and when they are on stage the play is a fight for the soul with the tables turning slowly. Each fight against melodrama and it is bewitching.
Cummings’ direction deconstructs the piece and it doesn’t always work. The Michael John LaChiusa’s music seems out of the 50’s, Rosa’s seems Spanish, not Mexican, the set by Dane Laffrey is almost non existent, and the costume’s are in the correct time period. It almost seems that this play doesn’t know where it takes place.
“Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.”
Summer and Smoke examines how when we judge, we just might end up there ourselves. Ireland and Darrow make this a revival worth seeing. 5.4.18
Theatre News Online, Brian Scott Lipton – Why has Summer and Smoke been produced less often in New York than almost any other Tennessee Williams play? (Since premiering in 1948, its only Broadway revival was a forgettable one in 1996). It’s a good question. Perhaps it’s because this tale of an almost-romance between Alma Winemiller, a somewhat flighty and hysterical minister’s daughter, and John Buchanan Jr, a handsome young doctor with a wild streak and a troubled soul, visits some of the same territory (geographical and otherwise) as A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but just not always as believably or astutely as those superior plays.
Or is the problem simply that no director has ever found just the right people to fill these difficult roles? (True, the amazing Geraldine Page played Alma to perfection in the 1961 film version, but she was always in a class by herself.) If it’s the latter case, the talented director Jack Cummings III has made the puzzle pieces fit completely in his often-mesmerizing revival, now at Classic Stage Company (co-produced by Transport Group). Even this early in the new theater season, it’s hard to imagine we will see many better performances in the next 12 months than Marin Ireland and Nathan Darrow.
Ireland (a former Obie winner and Tony Award nominee) is sheer perfection as Alma, capturing the many contradictions of this complex soul: passionate yet sexually repressed, strong willed yet extremely vulnerable, wise yet naïve. Alma sometimes transforms from second to second, yet we must always be aware these multiple qualities all live within her at every moment. It’s a less-than-easy feat to pull off, but Ireland makes Alma’s sudden shifts in personality feel as naturally changeable as the Southern weather.
She’s well matched by Darrow, whose often lascivious and louche outward behavior never fully hides his inner gentleman, which is evident not just by his constant wearing of beautiful white linen suits (provided by Kathryn Rohe), but by his courtly behavior towards Alma (calling her “Miss Alma”) and reticence to fully engage with her on a physical level. As in many of Williams’ works, it’s the male who is truly the weaker (and more pitiable) sex.
Given such strong anchors, one wishes everything and everyone on stage were completely ship-shape. Alas, Cummings has made a few extremely distracting missteps that detract from his triumphs. First and foremost, while Williams stated in his stage directions that the work did not require realistic sets, the almost complete lack of scenery and the constant use of miming (as if there were no budget for props) can make the evening feel like you’re watching an acting class rather than a full-fledged production.
Secondly, using Ireland and Darrow to play their childhood selves in the play’s prologue – which is meant to introduce us to the fact that Alma and John had a connection of sorts even way back then – may lead to confusion among some audience members, who won’t realize the work’s first scene takes place more than a decade before its second one.
And while the supporting players are not of the same prominence as in some of Williams’ other works, the unevenness of the rest of the cast is a bit surprising. The wonderful Barbara Walsh (who happens to be Mrs. Cummings) makes a three-course meal out of the relatively small role of Alma’s spiteful and unbalanced mother, and Tina Johnson is simply delicious as the gossipy know-it-all Mrs. Bassett.
Conversely, few of the other actors (including the usually excellent T. Ryder Smith) manage to make much of an impression. Moreover, while Hannah Elless acts the role of Alma’s cheerful vocal student, Nellie Ewell, with suitable aplomb, she’s far too mature looking to pass as a teenager (which is extremely vital for the play’s ending to land with its full effect).
Still, the production’s flaws aside, one’s chances to see this striking work, especially with such magnificent lead performances, don’t come along every summer (or every year or every decade). So don’t let your chance drift away like a puff of smoke. 5.4.18
Light & Sound America, David Barbour – In many ways, Dane Laffrey’s set for this new production of Summer and Smoke tells the tale: The designer has devised a white deck with a matching white dropped ceiling. Furniture is kept to a minimum, aside from half a dozen or so chairs. The fountain with a statue of an angel, a signature architectural feature of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, is a photo placed on an easel. The anatomical poster depicting the inner workings of the body, which also features in the action, will sit on another easel on the opposite end of the stage. It is, in many ways, a fine arena for the battle between the spirit and the body that constitutes the play’s main event.
Of course, virtually every work by Tennessee Williams, our most Manichean playwright, is based on a such conflict, but, in Summer and Smoke, the division may be starker than usual, even if the drama is a tad muted. The contestants are a young man and woman who have known each other all their lives, and who are on a collision course that will transform them both. Alma Winemiller — her first name is Spanish for “soul” — is a minister’s daughter drifting into spinsterhood. (If, in the South, circa 1916, a young lady reached her middle twenties without what used to be known as “prospects,” life as an aging maiden was a foregone conclusion.) Marin Ireland, in a dress that consists of white layered over pale pink, looks as if she is fading into a sepia-tone image of herself, a photo of someone who is destined to be forgotten. She is, to all intents and purposes, a caged animal, tending the household and acting as her father’s consort, because her mother, a malicious mental case, can’t be trusted in public.
If Alma has chosen a life of duty, her body is fighting her all the way. Her self-consciously “elegant” accent and artificial manners mask her lonely, yet passionate, nature; she is prone to bouts of breathlessness and insomnia, and she frets that her heart is destined to give out. All her airs and graces — her little, unconscious bouts of laughter, her watery glances, her little panics about being asked to sing in public — are really signs of distress from a woman who understands that everything she desires is passing her by.
It is Alma’s strange luck that her lifelong love object has been John Buchanan, Jr., the young man next door. Haunted by the memory of his mother’s slow, horrible death, raised by a father whose every expression of disappointment is another laceration, and forced to follow in the old man’s footsteps and get a medical degree, he drowns himself in dissolution, boozing, and chasing women at the notorious casino just outside of town. He is aware of Alma’s attraction to him — he sees her staring out the window as he passes by — and he isn’t shy about calling out her mannerisms, needlessly causing pain with a story about guests at a party doing imitations of her. But Alma gets under his skin, too, and he looks upon her with a certain fascination.
Unlike, say, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke lacks a certain urgency; at times, it seems more like leaves from an antique photo album. Alma and John circle each other, coming close and quickly backing away, as if in fear of what they might find. But there’s something compelling in the knot of attraction and revulsion that keeps them oddly connected. At CSC, where this co-production with the Transport Group is playing, the characters are vividly realized by Marin Ireland and Nathan Darrow. Ireland, who has often excelled at portraying iron-willed women, might seem a strange choice, but she captures something essential about Alma. She is an unstable element, leaning this way now and that way a little later, trying on different fancies and attitudes to see if anything fits. But there’s a piercing intelligence underneath the chatter, and when she turns on her mother, venting her frustration, we see how much her assumption of virtue has cost her. It’s a richly complex characterization. Darrow’s good looks make him a natural choice for John, but there’s much more at work here — a wounded look in his eyes and a palpable sense of self-disgust over the whoring and drinking he can’t give up. (So little does he care for himself that he is willing to be blackmailed into marriage by the casino manager, who has a daughter he is trying to move on the marriage market.) John clearly has no idea how to act around Alma — just watch him offering her a sip from his flask of brandy — but he studies her like a scientist who has discovered a new species of animal life. And when he turns on her — angrily insisting that she is made up of “nothing but hand-me-down notions! Attitudes! Poses!” — it seems clear that his deepest scorn is reserved for himself.
The director, Jack Cummings III handles both his stars with assurance, carefully orchestrating their mutual ensnarement. He provides a striking opening image of Alma, standing in darkness, posed against the illuminated angel statute. And he finds welcome humor in a meeting of the town’s local culture group, whose woebegone members keep voting to postpone the reading of a verse drama by one of their own. The supporting cast is generally strong. Hannah Elless is striking as a young lady from sordid circumstances with an eye on the future — and, quite possibly, John. Tina Johnson amuses as a local matron who violently disapproves of William Blake (about whom she knows nothing). T. Ryder Smith makes the most of his few appearances as Alma’s duty-ridden father. Jonathan Spivey has fine comic timing as Alma’s dull-witted, mother-dominated suitor. Ryan Spahn offers a sharply etched cameo as a traveling salesman who represents Alma’s bleak post-John future.
Nevertheless, there are moments when this sleek, emotionally acute production runs aground. The extremely spare staging works much of the time, but Cummings’ aversion to props proves unhelpful. There are at least half a dozen objects — a plumed hat, a flask, a packet of sleeping pills, the script of that verse drama — that should be present; without them, the actors are forced into awkwardly realized bits of mime that prove distracting. Even more strangely, when Alma’s mother is supposed to be working a jigsaw puzzle, Barbara Walsh is forced to kneel on the floor and pretend to move around pieces on the seat of a chair. One wonders if this ungainly staging has something to do with the actress’ apparent awkwardness in the role. Kathryn Rohe’s costumes are uneven, many of them lacking a period feel. (One wonders why, in this production, Alma, an avatar of propriety, goes everywhere with her hair down; it strikes a casual note that seems entirely foreign to the character.) The staging of the prologue — in which Ireland and Darrow, playing Alma and John as children, wander around the perimeter of the set in semi-darkness, faces down — makes for a weak, off-putting introduction to these characters; I can understand the impulse not to hire child actors, but this isn’t a better solution. And the director can’t do much with the scenes featuring Rosa, John’s Mexican lover, and her casino-owner father; the depiction of sexy, amoral rascals from south of the border seems, by today’s standards, risible at best and racist at worst.
Then again, Michael John LaChiusa’s lovely, melancholy original music — sensitively delivered by Walter Trarbach’s sound design, strikes exactly the right tone, and the ceiling of Laffrey’s set acts as a diffuser for R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting, casting a soft glow around the action.
Williams imagined a kind of ironic role-switch for his two lead characters that, to my mind, isn’t entirely believable, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of Alma, alone in winter, once again seated near the fountain, sadly reaching out to a total stranger, unconcerned where she will end up that evening. It has been twenty-two years since the last major New York revival of Summer and Smoke. Even if this is a sometimes flawed production of a play that is second-rank Williams, the poetry is there, and, thanks to the fine leads, it’s an opportunity that anyone interested in this great American playwright would be foolish to miss. 5.4.18
New York Theatre, Jonathan Mandell – “Summer and Smoke,” Tennessee Williams’ ripe Southern Gothic tale about a preacher’s daughter and her lifelong longing for the doctor’s son next door, is being given a minimalist co-production by the Classic Stage Company and the Transport Group, which feels neither classic nor transporting.
It seems clear what director Jake Cummings III, Transport’s artistic director, is trying to do (and if it weren’t clear, it would be after reading his note in the program): He wants to stage the play in such a way as to “return the focus back on the acting and writing.” But ironically the staging has the opposite effect.
The writing is vintage if second-tier Williams, and the production has a fine 12-member cast. The clear standout is Marin Ireland (Ironbound, Reasons to be Happy), offering another performance that allows us intimate access to a character’s vulnerability. Here she is Alma Winemiller, who from the age of 10 (as we see in the prologue), has been entranced by her reckless neighbor, John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow.) By the summer of 1916 in the Mississippi town of Glorious Hill, Alma, whose name is Spanish for soul, has become what she sees as an upright and spiritual being, busying herself with parish duties and intellectual teas (an example of which, a spot-on parody, we witness.) But she is also anxious, prone to panic attacks, and repressed; town gossips consider her affected and call her an old maid, though she’s only in her twenties. (I was especially drawn to Tina Johnson as the worst of the gossips, the delightfully blunt, hilarious Mrs. Bassett.) Meanwhile, John has grown up to follow his father in becoming a doctor, albeit reluctantly, but, though he cuts a dashing figure in his spotless white suit, he is also a hedonist – a gambler, a drinker and a womanizer. As he’s done since childhood, John teases, taunts, embarrasses Alma. As she’s done since childhood, she pines for John.
The playwright sets up their differences unsubtly and symbolically – she is of the soul, he of the flesh; she visits the town’s stone fountain, presided over by a winged angel entitled Eternity; he displays an anatomy chart. (The play was originally entitled “Chart of Anatomy.”) When he tries to seduce her, she primly rejects him. But Williams also lets us see that this freighted connection is both important and frustrating to John as well as Alma, and then the playwright does something intriguing: The characters in effect switch personas. As Alma confesses to John: “The girl who said “no,” she doesn’t exist any more, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.“
It’s a heartbreaking speech and Ireland’s delivery of it lets us see that fire, and that smoke, and how she suffers.
The writing and the acting would certainly be more affecting in the CSC/Transport production, however, if it weren’t for the distraction of the staging.
Designer Dane Laffrey’s set looks like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie about life in a spaceship. It’s a plain white platform on the floor, beneath a similar slab of white, functioning as a low-hanging ceiling. The platform is bare except for two pictures at opposite ends. On one end is a framed photograph on an easel of that stone statue entitled Eternity. On the other end on its own easel is an anatomy chart. The set is otherwise bare except for the six old chairs that the characters bring on the stage to sit in. The only prop that I recall is the gun in Papa’s hands. Everything else, some of which are prominently mentioned – tea sets, handkerchiefs, veils, plumed hat, parasol, stethoscope, water from the fountain – are mimed.
It doesn’t work for me – in part, I think, because the action is therefore removed from the overheated, rococo atmosphere of a small Southern town that helps explain its inhabitants’ behavior. There may be a less intellectual reason as well. For this production, audience members at CSC are seated on three sides of the platform, and proof to me of a hunger for more visual stimulation was how much time I spent looking at the faces of the theatergoers across from me.
“Summer and Smoke” appeared on Broadway in 1948 shortly after “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” but, unlike those massive hits, ran for only three months. It’s true that its 1952 revival at Circle in the Square downtown, starring Geraldine Page, is said to have launched Off-Broadway. (Page also starred in the 1961 movie.) But “Summer and Smoke” has some flaws that are hard to ignore today, including a melodramatic turn in the plot that depends on the racist depiction of a Mexican spitfire, Rosa and, her homicidal casino owner father Papa Gonzales. Williams himself tacitly acknowledged the play’s shortcomings by rewriting it two decades later, and giving it a new title, “Eccentricities of a Nightingale.” Yet, if it’s not one of Williams’ great plays, there are echoes of those plays throughout. Alma Winemiller could almost be the young woman who is forced out of her small town, and becomes Blanche Dubois. 5.5.18
Off-Off Online, Charles Wright – Classic Stage Company and Transport Group are taking a fresh look at Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Critical estimation of this lyrical drama—the playwright’s fourth Broadway outing—has fluctuated since its 1948 premiere. After the original New York presentation, Summer and Smoke seemed destined for obscurity. But Jose Quintero’s 1952 production for Circle in the Square was a triumph and, according to many commentators, marked the birth of Off-Broadway. The current revival, under sure-handed direction by Jack Cummings III, discards the realistic trappings of mid-20th-century American theater and features a nearly ideal cast.
Summer and Smoke takes place shortly before the First World War, when Victorian mores still held sway in the Deep South. The focal characters, Alma Winemiller (Marin Ireland) and John Buchanan, Jr. (Nathan Darrow), are former schoolmates in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
Alma is a minister’s daughter, high-minded, prim (especially about sex), and nervous to the brink of hysteria. John has excelled in medical school; but his yens are gambling, booze, and easy women. The two encounter each other shortly after John’s return from medical training. Their renewed acquaintance starts as a genteel mating dance; it swiftly becomes a Manichean skirmish between the urges of intellect and sensuality.
Ireland and Darrow—age-appropriate in roles often filled by performers too long in the tooth—display remarkable chemistry. They’re supported by an ensemble of 10 who furnish Southern Gothic flavor without capitulating to stereotypes. Especially memorable are Barbara Walsh and T. Ryder Smith as Alma’s ill-matched parents; Hannah Elless as a sweet yet forceful teenager; and Ryan Spahn, who doubles as an aesthete in Alma’s clique of misfits and the traveling salesman eager to explore her erotic fantasies.
Alma is among the best-crafted characters in Williams’ canon. The playwright captures her puritan self-righteousness so vividly that other qualities could be overshadowed.
“You have a chance … to serve a noble, humanitarian cause, to relieve human suffering,” Alma says to John. She’s distressed by his licentiousness and rues the fact that “all the gifts of the gods were showered on him,” yet “all he cares about is indulging his senses.”
Ireland balances Alma’s stridency and near-hysteria with charm, kindness, and intelligence. It’s easy to see why John is simultaneously intrigued and repelled. In Ireland’s hands, Alma is a Blanche DuBois whose fate isn’t yet sealed.
Williams’ script affords John arresting moments; but the character, unlike Alma, is underwritten. Darrow imbues him with patrician virility, so he’s appealing even when his behavior is repugnant. By dint of actorly will—or, more likely, technique over dearth of textual support—Darrow gives John’s rehabilitation, which occurs between scenes, credibility and poignance.
In the play’s most familiar sequence, John scoffs at Alma’s belief that humans have immortal souls. Using physical force to make her scrutinize a diagram of human anatomy in his medical consulting room, John points to the brain, “hungry for … truth”; the belly, “hungry for food”; and “the sex which is hungry for love because it is sometimes lonesome.” He berates Alma for starving all three with the “hand-me-down” prejudices of her Episcopalian upbringing.
Alma and John develop in opposing directions. She surrenders to desire (a term with special resonance in Williams’ work); and, as the play ends, her focus is body rather than mind or spirit. John, on the other hand, becomes a humanitarian with a keen sense of duty. In the end they’re as far apart as they were at the beginning. “The tables have turned,” laments Alma, “yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance!”
Everything about this handsome revival conspires to rescue Williams’ text, with its poetic qualities, from the dominion of 20th-century naturalism. Original music by Michael John LaChiusa, rich in strings and woodwinds, complements the playwright’s euphonious, sometimes florid, language. R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting design, splashed like paint against Dane Laffrey’s unadorned, off-white set, is as variegated and moody as LaChiusa’s score.
The actors mime use of physical items, except a revolver and a cane essential to a fight scene. Dispensing with stage properties is a bold but miscalculated stroke. Take, for instance, an important moment when Ireland and Walsh wage a balletic tug of war for possession of a plumed hat: Williams’ stage directions indicate that the upshot is a demolished hat, indicative of the broken relationships within the Winemiller household. With no prop to tussle over, the actors (who aren’t primarily mimes) are hard-pressed to convey what has happened. The result is not merely unclear but also distracting.
This production, like Transport Group’s recent revival of William Inge’s Picnic, makes a 20th-century classic readily accessible to 21st-century sensibilities. Alma is unlikely to displace Blanche or Amanda Wingfield in the hierarchy of Williams’ achievements, but this landmark reassessment repudiates the notion that Summer and Smoke is second- or third-tier Tennessee Williams. 5.6.18
YesBroadway – Summer and Smoke is a play that Tennessee Williams wrote between The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire and, when you see Classic Stage Company and Transport Group’s joint production, you won’t understand why it’s not as well-known. The writing is just as exceptional and the story just as epic. One could even argue that performing the role of Summer and Smoke’s doomed heroine Miss Alma is a harder feat to pull off than Streetcar’s tragic Blanche DuBois.
Both companies are known for slimmed down productions of classic American theater. The result? Clean, crisp, and accessible shows where the acting and the writing shine, distraction-free.
Marin Ireland plays Miss Alma in this production and knocks it out of the muthafuckin’ park. Quietly devastating and hilariously exuberant all at once, she. goes. in! Her rockstar performance will attract awards like a magnet. We also get a hunky leading man in House Of Cards’ Nathan Darrow, among several other fine performances. Special shoutout to the radiant Hannah Elless’ delicious performance as giggling schoolgirl Nellie. Just try not to fall in love with her!
Head down to Classic Stage’s Union Square-area theater and immerse yourself in the white linen, whisky drunk gentility of the early 1900s American South. The weather is stifling and the passion between our two lovers is even hotter.
Bonus: Seating is (mostly) in the round in this intimate theater. There’s not a bad seat in the house!
Summer and Smoke is extraordinarily good…go see it! 5.5.18
Pop Surfing, Michael Giltz – Right after the towering, never-to-be-repeated success of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, playwright Tennessee Williams delivered a prequel of sorts with Summer and Smoke. It told the story of how a Blanche DuBois character might come to be.
Alma (Marin Ireland) is the daughter of a preacher who yearns for artistic refinement and a superior existence, not to mention the handsome but callow son of the doctor next door. Their friendship remains just that, from a childhood fancy to adult recriminations, with Alma unable to accept anything other than a “spiritual” bond while John (Nathan Darrow) enjoys more earthly pleasures with every other woman in sight. Needless to say, when Alma approaches spinsterhood and is finally ready to savor the sins of the flesh, John has reformed himself and pairs off with a pretty young thing. Heartbroken and bitter, Alma tosses herself at the first of what is sure to be a string of traveling salesmen. The clanging bell of that streetcar can almost be heard in the distance.
Summer And Smoke shows Williams beginning to reshuffle his obsessions — damaged women, simmering desire, the stultifying mores of a small town and above all self-deception — to less and less effect. The melodrama would be produced fitfully over the years, marking a notable artistic triumph for actress Geraldine Page but never really finding an audience. Williams overhauled it completely in 1962, retitling it with the precious name of The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale. No matter.
Classic Stage Company and Transport Group have staged this flawed work with admirable restraint. Anchored by two excellent performances, it avoids the magnolia-scented hysterics Williams can tempt actors with. By underplaying the tragedy, the pain cuts deeper and more realistically. So you can pinpoint both the symmetrical tidiness of the plotting and the more lurid details of the story, all thanks to the lucid direction of Jack Cummings III. They can’t make Summer And Smoke a successful drama, but they do make this production an interesting one.
Classic Stage Company’s space always brings out the best in set designers and that’s true here for Dane Laffrey, who offers up a clean, well-lighted space with minimal props like a picture of a statue and an anatomy chart to indicate a park or doctor’s office. The costumes by Kathryn Howe are also on point, not to mention the lighting (R. Lee Kennedy), sound design (Walter Trarbach, never intrusive) and effective original music by Michael John LaChiusa. It’s a top-notch creative team all around.
Which makes it a shame that lesser roles are handled with less aplomb. I blame the script by Williams and director Cummings. Numerous lurid details litter the story and the less they’re emphasized the better. Alma has a troubled mother and a dour minister father. But in one scene her mother (Barbara Walsh) seems like a woman-child, perhaps the sufferer of a stroke or special needs. In another, she’s a truth-telling harridan, fully in command of her senses. So which is it? Walsh and T. Ryder Smith as the Rev. seem to flounder. The less said about the “exotic” lure of a Mexican temptress and her gangster father the better. But if those scenes couldn’t be trimmed or cut somehow (like Williams I was immediately tempted to fix this show), Cummings might have encouraged a lower key from the actors trapped in those roles. Further, an unnecessary opening scene shows Alma and John as children and the show makes the fatal mistake of “playing” them as children, complete with exaggerated vocal performances. It’s a misstep that takes a good scene or two for the production to recover from.
In contrast, Hannah Elless as Nellie and Tina Johnson (very amusing as a blunt townswoman) are both strong and Jonathan Spivey and Ryan Spahn are good in modest parts. Spivey underplays the sad sack nature of his also-ran love interest and Spahn underplays the potentially lecherous role of the salesman which is all to the best.
Still, that’s a lot of problematic characters and performances that Cummings should have and could have focused better. The marvel is how — despite all this and the essential flaws of the play — that the two leads prove to be memorable. John Buchanan convinces as a scoundrel and ne’er do well, without ever exaggerating his prodigal son nature. He’s lost but not forever, a bad boy but not really bad, not really. Yes, Alma wants to redeem him and he wants to wake her up, but you aren’t forced into Greek tragedy by seeing them spar. Buchanan’s charisma grounds the show as much as the heroine.
Somehow I’ve missed the acclaimed Ireland in all but a few stage productions. She’s marvelous here. You can’t tackle a Williams heroine without some eccentricity, but Ireland never tilts into the grotesque. You’re always on the side of Alma — even if she frustrates, you don’t sit there thinking what on God’s green earth could this man see in her? I’d hate to see Summer And Smoke with two lesser actors in these parts. And I’d hate not to see Ireland in whatever she does next. Her Alma is sinking slowly at the end. The salesman agrees to a trip to the local casino (a den of inequity if ever there was one) and Ireland flings up her arm in a game attempt at high spirits. Yes, it will become sad and sordid all too soon for Alma. But Ireland lets you feel the deluded romantic in her is still alive, still open to the possibility of magic, even in a hotel room, even if for just one night. And for a moment, Summer And Smoke conjures a little magic too. 5.5.18
Scene on Stage, Philip Dorian – Tennessee Williams’ women tend not to fare very well. Blanche Dubois is led away by kind strangers, and Amanda and Laura Wingate are stuck with each other after being twice abandoned. “Summer and Smoke”’s Alma Winemiller might be the most tragic of all, because she is aware of her downfall even as it proceeds. One could say she is even complicit. Not wantonly or defiantly, but still…she’s more aware of her choices than those others.
Blanche’s spirit does haunt Alma. “Streetcar” was written in 1947 and set contemporaneously in New Orleans; “Summer and Smoke,” was written a year later and unfolds between 1900 and 1916 in (fictional) Glorious Hill, Mississippi. In a way, Alma is sequel and prequel in one.
The daughter of a rigid Episcopal minister and a mother who has retreated into a state of “perverse childishness” after a vaguely defined ‘breakdown,’ Alma (Marin Ireland) yearns for Doctor John Buchanan, Jr. (Nathan Darrow), her neighbor and childhood playmate. Their lives frequently intersect, but their clashing values preclude a lasting connection. John is a realist, with hedonist leanings, while Alma is a fragile, spiritual soul. Her very name, she reminds John, means soul in Spanish.
By the time Alma is ready to accept John on his terms, he has abandoned his former ways. Planning to settle down with a younger woman, who had been Alma’s music student (salt in the wound), John rebuffs Alma. “The tables have turned with a vengeance,” Alma laments.
Directed by Jack Cummings III, artistic director of the co-producing (with Classic Stage Company) Transport Group, the production is stripped down to its essential relationships. The only set pieces are a photographic rendition of the fountain in the town square and an anatomy chart in the doctor’s office, both on easels. No props either, except for six chairs carried on and off by the actors as needed. All others are pantomimed. (The one exception, a physical prop in the final scene, is impactful, but miming the others, like John’s stethoscope and Alma’s mother licking an ice cream cone, can be distracting.)
Marin Ireland’s Alma is less of a fluttering southern belle than others I’ve seen. Her veneer of refinement masks Alma’s frustration at her inability to override her ingrained puritanism. She wants to, desperately; her self-denial is heart-breaking to witness. Ireland captures the playwright’s intent. Alma is “prematurely spinsterish,” Williams wrote. “Her true nature is hidden even from herself.” It is a beautiful performance.
Darrow is a laid-back John, Jr., even in the fellow’s reckless stage. It does amplify the ‘opposites attract’ element, but seems to slow the proceedings. Others who impress include T. Ryder Smith as Alma’s overbearing father; Barbara Walsh as her dotty mother; and Hannah Elless as John’s eventual fiancée. As Mrs. Bassett, the town busybody, Tina Johnson nails every laugh, a more than incidental contribution.
The “Summer and Smoke” battle between repression and release is a losing one. Alma surrenders in the final scene where she goes off with a traveling salesman to the Casino where she had earlier rejected John’s advances. Tennessee Williams plays were intended to be staged, of course, but some of his in-script notes on character and setting are exquisite in themselves. That final scene is achingly affecting, as is Williams’ own note on the scene: “The mysteriously sudden intimacy that sometimes occurs between strangers more completely than old friends or lovers moves them both.”
Tell me you’ve never felt that. 5.7.18
Front Mezz Junkies, “Ross” – Summer and Smoke, the lush southern lilt of a Tennessee Williams play currently being performed at the Classic Stage Company theatre takes us to the hot and steamy town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, somewhere around the turn of the century. As visualized by the magical set designer, Dane Laffrey (Broadway’s Fool for Love, Once On This Island) for the Transport Group (the recent recipient of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), the small town’s park and the angelic statue that sits perched above a fountain is a beautifully structured metaphor that opens up the telling of this sweaty southern play. Made up of a wide and bright expanse of white, the space geometrically enclose the inhabitants of this town as tightly as the prim religious rules of that time and place. The environment, which at first feels strangely too abstract and bright for this dark brooding play, starts to settle in to itself, or us into it. The white pulls us directly into the sparks and sputters that fly back and forth between these two hot and bothered neighbors and the wild fires it births beyond. At times, the production leaves almost too much to the imagination; the pantomiming of every little prop, including the often mentioned ice cream cone and even a pocket watch, is more distracting than engaging, taking us out of the moment rather than pulling us in. But the simplicity of the set, the challenging art of lighting by R. Lee Kennedy (TG’s Remember Mama), sound by Walter Trarbach (Spongebob Squarepants), and crisp costumes by the talented Kathryn Rohe (Pearl’s And Away We Go) overall does the trick, focusing our attention back on what is physicalized and electric, driving us deeper into the heat and the humidity of a Mississippi summer’s night.
The romantic and melancholy play, which first premiered on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on October 6, 1948, faltered like an angel with her wings clipped. Much like the young woman struggling at the center of Summer and Smoke. This troubled angel is the highly strung, unmarried minister’s daughter, Alma Winemiller, played to Southern twang perfection by Marin Ireland (Broadway’s reasons to be pretty). The fire that burns and smokes deep inside her, burning a fever into her repressed soul is all due to her simmering attraction to the wild and undisciplined young Dr. John Buchanan Jr., the unmarried and unmoored son of the town doctor who lives next door. She can’t help herself but be drawn in and given the cold shivers by this doctor as he is as devilishly handsome and exciting as he is lost and troubled. Charmingly played by the very talented Nathan Darrow (Old Vic/BAM’s Richard III), he flounders and contradicts himself, fighting the soul that can’t quite seem to stand up or live up to the expectations of his father, the much beloved town physician, Dr. John Buchanan Sr, played roughly and heroically by Phillip Clark (Broadway’s Come Back, Little Sheba), a man who is infinitely better at tak
The townsfolk that stroll in and out of the white rectangle all deliver the goods and the chairs in a beautiful dance of deliberation and exactitude, creating a juxtaposition to the smoldering bonfire that burns inside these two young creatures. Hannah Elless (Broadway’s Bright Star) is delicious as the not-so-innocent Nellie Ewell, and Elena Hurst (Dixon Place’s LULU) is more upfront and blatant, almost to a fault, with her sensuality as the eye-catching Rosa Gonzalez. Ryan Spahn (Primary Stage’s Daniel’s Husband), as the town’s tortured poet and salesman, is sadly underused, but invigorates the final moments of the play. It is in the eyes, words, and body of the town gossip, Mrs. Bassett, perfectly embodied by Tina Johnson (Broadway’s State Fair) that enlighten, and the twisted step-mother creation by Barbara Walsh (Broadway’s Company, Hairspray) that presents the walled-in melancholy where the repressed live. Devilishly taunting and pushing her step-daughter forward with a psychologically detached aggressiveness, the deranged Mrs. Winemiller laps up her ice cream with the only relish she can muster, and pushes away the hands that are offered to her by her religious and arrogant husband, the Reverend Winemiller, played stoically by T. Ryder Smith (Broadway’s Oslo). She yells “fight, fight” loudly, before stumbling onward into the darkness she has been assigned (or resigned) to.
But like the snap and bang of a firecracker thrown across the floor, thrown by John, ignites the spiritual and/or sexual dynamic that resides like dried twigs inside Alma. Like liquid dynamite, desire nearly explodes in on them, crushing their demeanor, asking for all, but preparing itself for nothing. Alma is mystified and amazed by her inner workings, especially surrounding the soulful mysteries that can and can’t be found under the microscope. Alma pushes back, desperate to stay up on her ineffably refined perch, driving a hysterical divide between herself and the man she can’t ignore, using everything she has, especially the gloriously effected way she speaks and laughs. Her poetic good diction and her fancy way of talking seem to hold her together for the most part, but pushes the devilish young doctor to tease and challenge her. Their angry love battle rages on, quietly and politely, within the confines of that devious southern charm that both hinders and keeps the fire burning and smoking. Her name, as Williams likes to make clear throughout the play, means “soul” in Spanish, and by the end, John and Alma have traded their voices and positions sensually and philosophically. In the beautifully sad way that Williams’ poetry flows effortlessly out of the mouth of the impressive Ireland much like the cool mineral water from that hard stone angelic statue, Alma is forced to proclaim that the battle is lost and won, and that she has “suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.”
In that ferocious battle with her soul and with John, it’s the argument he says she wins in the end that unleashes something buried deep inside. Identifying with the Gothic cathedral, Alma tries with all her might to reach “up to something beyond attainment“; but it’s also not the fight she wants to win ultimately. The battles that rage inside John’s heart are less fascinatingly explored in Williams’ play, diluting themselves in Spanish charm and subplots. The fire burns more brightly in Alma, and inside the complicated persona, Ireland gives a powerfully raw performance, almost matched by the more restrained Darrow, edging around the soulless anatomy chart, debating sensuality and modesty, before the whole thing gets smothered in the red coat of smoke and desire. “You were looking at me” says Alma, and all because of director Jack Cummings III (TG’s Queen of the Mist“) majestic work here at the Classic Stage Company, we can’t turn away, but only answer that question with a resounding, “Yes“. 5.4.18
Village Voice, Zac Thompson – The people in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke are caught between anatomy and an angel named Eternity — but then, aren’t we all? Director Jack Cummings III’s gripping revival (a co-production of Classic Stage Company and Transport Group, of which Cummings is the artistic director) represents the play’s poles — body and soul — via a medical chart showing human innards and a blown-up photo of angelic statuary. The latter is meant to stand in for a stone fountain at the center of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, where the action unfolds during the early years of the twentieth century. We’re told that “Eternity” is carved in the base of the fountain. To borrow a phrase from the town’s uncommonly sensitive Alma Winemiller, doesn’t that just “give you cold shivers”?
The anatomy chart and the stone angel are pretty much the only visual aids you get in Dane Laffrey’s spare scenic design. Placed on easels, the figures face off from opposite corners of the set, a white rectangular platform bearing only a few chairs and no walls, with the audience sitting on three sides. This simple yet effective design is not only in keeping with the author’s production notes (Williams wanted more sky than furniture); the starkness of the staging can also fittingly feel, with help from R. Lee Kennedy’s lights, hot and arid one minute, chilly and antiseptic the next.
Mostly, though, the absence of scenery helps to strip away all distractions from the play’s central struggle between the sensual and the spiritual — sex and sensibility — embodied by Alma (an absorbing Marin Ireland) and the object of her fascination, John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow). Miss Alma, as she’s universally known, is the daughter of a severe minister (T. Ryder Smith) and his wife (Barbara Walsh), who cracked up some time back and now behaves like an unruly child. Trapped in the rectory by these circumstances, Alma has grown tightly wound and uptight when it comes to observing proprieties. The only enthusiasms she allows herself are of the hoity-toity variety: art, music, poetry. Other Glorious Hillers view her as a faintly ridiculous spinster with a tendency to put on airs: a true Marian the Librarian type.
But in fact, Miss Alma is burning up. Despite her avowed and seemingly genuine devotion to noble ideals, she is drawn as if by pheromones to John, the hedonistic doctor who lives next door and for whom she has a major case of the hots. Restless and worldly where Alma is hide- and homebound, John spends his nights drinking, gambling, and womanizing in places like the Moon Lake Casino, where he has a casual fling with the owner’s daughter, Rosa (Elena Hurst, whose ability to convey an intelligent seriousness brings a little dignity to a subplot full of unflattering Latino stereotypes).
Like Alma, John is more complicated than he appears, and that complexity is captured with nuance by Darrow. Though effortlessly seductive, Darrow’s physician is no brute like Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (which premiered just before Summer and Smoke’s own Broadway debut in 1948). Sure, John puts the moves on Miss Alma almost as if by compulsion, but it’s her high-mindedness that he admires. As John’s partying slumps into dissipation over the course of the play, Darrow supplies a kind of haunted vulnerability that adds poignancy to the character’s professed self-disgust. “Did anyone ever slide downhill as fast as I have this summer?” he asks. Instead of seeming ashamed or even perversely proud, Darrow recites the line as though bewildered at what he’s capable of.
Alma also lacks self-knowledge, at least at first, but Ireland’s take-charge performance turns her into a scorching presence onstage. That’s a change from Geraldine Page’s canonical take on the role in José Quintero’s storied revival at Circle on the Square Theatre in 1952; you can watch her Alma in the 1961 film adaptation. Judging from the movie, Page went the life-of-quiet-desperation route — all pained smiles and delicate heartbreak — but there’s nothing quiet about Ireland’s Alma. Her hidden passions aren’t repressed so much as redirected into crying jags; a gasping nervous laugh that sounds like she’s being choked; and breathless, runaway speeches in which she seems to be rhapsodizing about soaring Gothic spires, but you get the feeling she’s not just talking about Gothic spires.
Instead of a frozen surface with roiling currents underneath, Ireland’s Alma has the parched and overheated quality of an imminent forest fire, with a thrilling and destructive volatility to match. Her need is more apparent, and her manner more demanding, than in the standard interpretation of the role set by Page, which makes this Alma more exasperating and embarrassing for the people around her. But for the audience, Ireland’s gutsy depiction of what becomes a last-ditch grab for happiness is piercing and raw.
Ultimately, it becomes clear that the play’s showdown between body and soul isn’t happening between the two main characters but within them. In the series of one-on-one scenes with Alma and John that form the story’s core, they both make the case for their habitual stances, but we soon see that each wants to be proven wrong. Alma needs an outlet for her carnal side, while John yearns for a higher purpose beyond all the carousing. That’s what elevates the play above a mere argument, with characters representing unwavering viewpoints as if their heads were untethered from their hearts (and libidos). As is the case in his other great works, Williams’s artistry lies in revealing “those weak and divided people” (Alma’s phrase), who have the base and the divine all mixed up inside them. 5.8.18
The Komisr Scoop, Lucy Komisar – Marin Ireland is compelling in the Transport Group’s minimalist production of Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.” Her lovely slow southern accent is all the decoration the stage needs. Director Jack Cummings III does a fine job in evoking time and place with no accoutrements required.
Ireland’s “Alma,” Spanish for soul as she tells people, wears it on her sleeve for the audience, but bottles it up when she is with John, her neighbor, with whom she has been smitten since a girl. But this is Mississippi, from the turn of the last century to 1916, and that means women’s sensual feelings are suppressed.
John (the excellent Nathan Darrow) is a rake, who likes gambling, and his father, the town doctor and a widower, throws him out then asks him back. John somehow gets through medical school. Alma becomes a music teacher.
Alma’s psychic health isn’t helped by a rigid minister father (T. Ryder Smith). Her mother (the excellent Barbara Walsh) has escaped by having a breakdown, which is expressed by being catatonic except when she demands ice cream.
When Alma tells Dr. John she has nervous heart trouble, he tells her the symptoms means she has doppleganger, which she doesn’t understand means a double. John is a charmer in a white suit. Alma is almost syrupy sweet in a long lacey beige dress.
She is not the woman John needs. He takes up with Rosa, the sexually flaunting daughter of the casino owner, a Mexican who built his wealth from nothing.
Williams includes a bit in this smothering town which must be autobiographical. Alma hosts a reading group, and an insufferable middle-aged Mrs. Bassett (Tina Johnson) refuses to let a young writer (Jonathan Spivey) read his own work.
When John invites Alma to the casino, she runs from where it could lead. Though he will admit she had nothing to fear: “I’m more afraid of your soul than you are of my body.”
Williams wants to tell us how unfulfilled sexual feelings can be suffocating. Except it’s rather disingenuous to suggest that in that time, young women should readily engage in sex. It would have been enough to learn how to express feelings.
But maybe he was talking about a woman as a doppleganger for a repressed homosexual man.
The fine bluesy violin music is by Michael John LaChiusa. 5.9.18
Theatrescene, David Kaufman – When Tennessee Williams started writing Summer and Smoke, his working title for the play was Chart of Anatomy, taken from a poem by Hart Crane. An anatomical chart becomes one of the very few props in the current Classic Stage Company and Transport Group revival of the 1948 play. Under the circumstances, the many players (a dozen in all) are often reduced to charades, as they describe a new gaudy hat, or a jigsaw puzzle, or gloves. For that matter there’s not really a set at all, only a large white platform in the center of the playing area, echoed by a large white rectangle hanging above–a kind of ceiling for the platform–and shortly after the prologue, six chairs, two of which will, at times, serve as a bench or a sofa.
It may be that set designer Dane Laffrey or director Jack Cummings III took his own direction from the dean of theater critics, Harold Clurman, who ended his review of the original Broadway production by saying, “What would be best would be practically no set at all.” Clurman was far from alone in panning the original Summer and Smoke. But years later, Clurman would claim that the play was “saved” by its first Off Broadway production, meaning it was rescued and redeemed, in 1952. But was it? Certainly not, from this Off Broadway production.
It was Geraldine Page who played Alma, the leading character in Summer and Smoke, in both the first Off Broadway production as well as the film version, in 1961. The neurotic, “hysteric,” and even half-crazed Alma is here played by Marin Ireland with appropriately scenery-chewing effects.
The production begins oddly, as Alma arrives. But instead of mounting the platform or stage, she awkwardly walks around it, as she’s talking with John (Nathan Darrow), who also walks around it, rather in the dark. (R. Lee Kennedy is credited with the lighting design.) They’re ostensibly at a water fountain, with a statue of an angel, here indicated not by a genuine statue but by an illustration of one, on a poster on an easel. The angel is named “Trinity,” Alma explains, adding that, “My name is Alma, and that’s Spanish for soul.”
Though you wouldn’t know it from their appearance, Alma and John are supposed to be children during the Prologue, when John is essentially coming on to Alma. After their exchange, the rest of the cast arrive with those chairs, and all in period costumes, designed by Kathryn Rohe. (Summer and Smoke is set at the turn of the last century.)
In addition to Ireland, the best performance of the evening is provided by Tina Johnson as the busy-body, Mrs. Bassett, who when asked if she’s “certain” about the latest bit of gossip she’s relayed, responds, “I’m always certain before I speak.” Also fine is Phillip Clark as John’s stern father, the resident doctor of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, where the play is set. (Though Summer and Smoke is one of Williams’ more “problematic” plays, it still contains the poetry, which circumscribes his writing.)
Essentially about the ongoing conflict between the uptight Alma and the hedonistic John, Summer and Smoke is more character-driven than story-oriented. This may partly explain why the play is often viewed as a failure.
When John returns home from medical school–apparently 16 years after the Prologue, which occurs in 1900–his father tells his “infernal,” reprobate, prodigal son to stay in a hotel, before relenting and inviting him to stay at home. And even though the tables have turned, and Alma would now like to enter into a romantic relationship with John, he is a boozing and lascivious reprobate who prefers and plans to marry the sexy Rosa Gonzalez (Elena Hurst). He even calls Alma a “white-blooded spinster.”
Alma’s equally crazed and neurotic mother is played with winning effects by Barbara Walsh, and her “Reverend” father is T. Ryder Smith. But unlike the first Off Broadway production reviewed by Harold Clurman, the current one never rises above the play’s failure to become something of an accomplished piece. 5.10.18
Stage Left, Robert Russo – There are some actors you drop everything and move mountains to see on stage. For me, Marin Ireland is one of them. And fortunately, one need only trek down to the East Village to catch her giving yet another ravishing performance in a first-rate revival of Tennessee Williams’ rarely seen “Summer and Smoke” at Classic Stage Company.
Easily the best play yet in CSC’s 50th anniversary season, “Summer and Smoke”, which opened Thursday night in a co-production with Transport Group—another non-profit company that stages new works and re-imagines revivals by American writers—was Williams’ third major play to hit Broadway, premiering in 1948 following the colossal success of “The Glass Menagerie” (1944) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947).
This play clearly haunted the writer. In 1976, he produced a revised version re-branded as “Eccentricities of a Nightingale”, which he preferred. That play received a revival off-Broadway in 2008. Otherwise, this play hasn’t been seen in New York since a limited-run Broadway production by Roundabout Theatre Company in 1996—making it ripe for a revisit.
Set in Williams’ fictitious, mythical Glorious Hills, Mississippi in the early decades of the 20th century, Ms. Ireland plays Alma Winemiller, the unmarried daughter of the local preacher (T. Ryder Smith). Perpetually putting on airs with her showy erudition and affected speech, the eccentric Alma is given to fits of anxiety and has nursed a quiet, lifelong yearning for her next door neighbor, Dr. John Buchanan, Jr. (Nathan Darrow), who has now returned to town for summer as she and her father care for her infantile, mentally ill mother (Barbara Walsh). Aloof and lascivious, John is rebelling against the expectations and constraints of the family profession, taking Rosa Gonzalez (Elena Hurst), daughter of the local casino owner, for a lover while Alma’s true feelings simmer beneath the surface.
In less capable hands, it is easy to see how Williams’ heavy handed and melodramatic plot loaded with symbolism might miss the mark. Not so in this spell-binding production directed by Jack Cummings, III. Every performance is finely keyed to invite us to bask in the air of a warm Mississippi summer—an air thick with unresolved sexual tensions and frustrated dreams, accompanied by an original score composed by Michael John LaChiusa.
Dane Laffrey’s arresting set is stark: a white, rectangular platform with the audience on three sides, mirrored by a suspended white, rectangular ceiling. A handful of chairs and two easels complete the scene. No props. Few costume changes. Unfussy and focused, as is his technique, Mr. Cummings allows his actors, and the text, to shine uninhibited, in a space where the audience is never more than a few rows from the action. This vision pays dividends.
Central to the story is Alma and John’s philosophical debate: she striving for purity and moral behavior, guardian of her soul, and he indulging in hedonistic pleasures, rejecting that there is anything more to the body than its need to eat, search for truth, and make love.
An anatomy chart atop one of those aforementioned easels is placed opposite the other easel donning a rendering of a statute of an angel from the public square representing Eternity. The masked sexual attraction and theoretical battle between Alma and John plays out between these opposing forces—the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the spiritual—as the play ultimately questions the very purpose of life and nature of self-conception.
Amid these grander ideas, Williams gives fine treatment to the more grounded and intimate experience of what it is like for two people to have a powerful but inchoate connection never fully expressed. That agony, painfully beautiful, is embodied in Ms. Ireland and Mr. Darrow’s riveting and magnetic performances of this lyrical, low-rent Southern Gothic tragedy. Ms. Ireland’s arc is particularly astonishing and pitiful to observe. The balance of the cast is equally as sharp and entrancing, but she remains the main event—breathtakingly captivating in her richly layered performance.
This production of “Summer and Smoke” is a revelatory triumph and a fitting tribute to the enduring power and beauty of Tennessee Williams’ writing. Given the overlapping missions of both producing companies—Classic Stage and Transport Group—to revive and re-imagine classic works for new audiences, I’d say: mission accomplished.
Bottom Line: Marin Ireland gives a ravishing performance in a first-rate revival of Tennessee Williams’ rarely seen “Summer and Smoke”, jointly produced by Classic Stage Company and Transport Group. This lyrical, low-rent Southern Gothic tragedy is stripped to its bones by director Jack Cummings, III, allowing the actors to shine uninhibited and deliver riveting and magnetic performances. This play is a highlight of the spring season in New York, and should not be missed. 5.6.18
StageBuzz, Judd Hollander – One can’t be helped out of a bad situation unless they are first willing to help themselves. A tenet for anyone suffering from substance abuse, and also when it comes to matters of the heart. The latter point brilliantly made clear in Tennessee Williams’ 1948 drama, Summer and Smoke. Presented by Classic Stage Company and Transport Group, the work shows how fine a line there can be between sympathy and pity.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, Alma Winemiller (Marin Ireland) is the somewhat repressed daughter of the town reverend (T. Ryder Smith). She teaches music, hosts weekly literary gatherings and generally tries to set a proper example for others. She also refuses to condemn one person for the actions of another. Such as her friendship with Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless), daughter of a woman who personally welcomes many of the traveling salesmen who pass through town. Alma has also been forced to sacrifice much of her childhood to take care of her mother (Barbara Walsh). A woman who, since having a nervous breakdown, can be quite verbally abusive.
One Fourth of July, Alma has a chance encounter with John Buchanan (Nathan Darrow), the ne’er-do-well son of the town physician (Phillip Clark). John however, has no intention of following in his father’s footsteps. He preferring a life of liquor, gambling and female companionship. He’s also often seen in the company of Rosa Gonzalez (Elena Hurst). A woman whose uncle owns the Moon Lake Casino; a place which offers the very pursuits John enjoys
When Alma and John meet, there’s an instant attraction. One not only filled with sexual tension, but also a meeting of kindred souls. Both people possessing an inner torment, and each fighting a future that has been seemingly predetermined. John seeing in Alma a woman who can save him from his inner demons, yet mostly content to admire her from afar. Alma meanwhile, seeks someone to show her the passion and beauty she has never experienced first-hand, but can only watch helplessly as John continuously fails to measure up to the man she wants him to be.Williams’ strongest plays deal with human nature, and Summer and Smoke is no exception. The story makes it clear that Alma and John are not so much in love as looking for a lifeline. Yet one can’t help but feel that should these two actually get together, it will end in tragedy. Each desperately seeking an idealized version of what they believe a happy existence should entail.
Ireland and Darrow are brilliant together, each deftly bringing their character’s pain vividly to life. Ireland is the standout, a woman simply worn out from coping with the stress at home and the pressure of who she’s supposed to be. Alma must also often deal with the latest news from the town gossips; John frequently the subject of their revelations.
Darrow is fine as John, the harder role to pull off. He having to present a totally cynical worldview, yet still make his character sympathetic to the audience. John can be best described as someone searching for, and hiding from, himself in any way possible.
The rest of the cast is quite good. Elless is fine as Nellie, a musical student with no talent whatsoever, but who eventually finds her own place in the scheme of things. Smith is okay, if a little stereotypical, as Reverend Winemiller. Walsh does an excellent job as Alma’s tormented and hurtful mother. Someone who just may have a bit more sense of awareness than she lets on.
John Doyle’s direction is sure-handed, allowing the various characters, and particularly the two leads, to play off each other perfectly. He mixing in several pregnant pauses when the two are together, while helping to bring forth the inner feelings of each. Probably the most lasting impression of all is the air of defeat and resignation Alma and John often carry with them.
While this production has all the makings of a perfect offering, there is one glaring misstep. That being the quite minimalist (and almost non-existent) sets by Dane Laffrey. It’s a practice that can work in many instances, (such as CSC’s excellent revival of Pacific Overtures last summer), but not in this case. Summer and Smoke is set in a specific era and screams for the proper atmosphere. One projecting an aura of a faded Southern gentility in conflict with the changing times. Grounding the production thus would have made the work feel so much more immediate. Even the name of the town suggests a place slowly cracking under the weight of its own history; and just having a painting to indicate a statue, or making a reference to a veil which isn’t there, only serves to abruptly pull the audience out of a specific moment rather than immersing them in it.
Kathryn Rohe’s costumes are well done, especially the well-tailored suits Darrow wears. R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting works nicely, as does Walter Trabach’s sound design. The latter often used in an attempt to counter the minuscule offerings of the set.
Summer and Smoke is a compelling tale of two lonely people. The CSC/Transport Group’s production of which is quite good indeed. However, if it did not suffer from the problem mentioned above, the show could have been so much better. 5.12.18
Reclining Standards blog, David Fox – Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke has always been a puzzler. It arrived only 10 months after the premiere of Streetcar, so hopes must have been high. But the original reviews were mixed, resulting in a disappointing run of 102 performances. A 1952 Off-Broadway production was more successful, making a star of Geraldine Page. New York Times’ critic Brooks Atkinson, who had championed the play on Broadway, was even more enthusiastic about the revival, pointing out that it’s better served in an intimate space.
Still, Summer and Smoke has never really become canonical, certainly not in the way that Streetcar or even Night of the Iguana has. The playwright himself seems to have been dissatisfied; in 1964, he reworked it as Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
It’s easy to see why. Summer and Smoke is a fascinating but often maddening immersion into the best and worst of Williams. In his first review, Atkinson wrote that the playwright “is a poet of the theatre. Summer and Smoke is no literary exercise but a theatre piece charged with passion and anguish.” The passion and anguish are there for sure… but like a few other Williams’ plays (Iguana is another), I wonder if it would have worked better as a short story.
The central theme—female sexuality and frustrated desire—is familiar territory. Alma Winemiller is a small-town singing teacher whose arch, grand manner (mostly a pose to cover her awkwardness) is a source of snide local gossip. Alma is helplessly drawn to John Buchanan, a handsome but weak young doctor. Though John occasionally reciprocates her affections, we sense from the start that the cause is hopeless. In a particularly Williams-y touch, she’s often called “Miss Alma,” emphasizing her spinsterhood.
But while the subject is very much in Williams’ wheelhouse, Summer and Smoke’s historical setting (beginning around the turn of the century) is an oddity that doesn’t really suit his authorial voice. The fictional Mississippi town here is called “Glorious Hill,” one of many strokes of mock-grandiosity that leave me wondering exactly what tone Williams is trying to conjure.
Something about the Madonna/Whore parallel (Alma’s chief rival is Rosa Gonzalez, a gangster’s vamp-ish daughter) suggests humor. So too do the town’s prudish citizens, as when the respectable Mrs. Bassett chides the local book club members for considering William Blake: “Insane! Insane! The man is a mad fanatic!” There’s more than a whiff of camp to Summer and Smoke, yet it’s clearly meant to be poignant. The handkerchief that Alma hands to John early in the play resonates with Der Rosenkavalier—flirtation now, tears later.
What, I wonder, would Atkinson, who favored a small-scale Summer and Smoke, make of director Jack Cummings III’s production for the Transport Group, in collaboration with Classic Stage Company?
To call it pared-down would be an understatement; apart from a few pieces of furniture and a framed image of the angel sculpture in the town square, the stage is a brilliantly white, empty space. Cummings mines the humor of Summer and Smoke; but even more, he focuses on the sexual chemistry.
He’s got the right pair of leading actors, that’s for sure. Marin Ireland is an off-beat choice for Alma. Her sometimes sardonic presence and cool blonde beauty initially seem ill-suited to the pitying way the character is described by the locals; she looks more like a Blanche DuBois or Maggie the Cat. But though she’s far from the buttoned-up, repressed Alma of tradition, Ireland is a vividly detailed actress, alive to every moment of the text, and particularly good at the hairpin emotional turns.
She and Nathan Darrow (John Buchanan) are knock-out couple, generating the kind of electricity that pulls us in but also feels dangerous. Darrow is sensational throughout, capturing not only John’s allure but also his weakness. (How I wish I’d seen him a few years ago in Long Day’s Journey into Night at Arena Stage!)
Barbara Walsh is effectively weird as Mrs. Winemiller, Alma’s flighty mother, and T. Ryder Smith suitably forbidding as Alma’s minister father. The rest generally do well, though Elena Hurst (Rosa Gonzalez) registers more as a startling physical presence than a multi-dimensional character. (That’s Williams’ fault as much as Hurst’s—he’s written Rosa as a stereotypical Latin spitfire.)
I don’t know whether the minimalist approach here is dictated by circumstance (it’s a very small stage, with no fly or wing space), artistic vision, or both. Whatever led to it, there’s a palpable sense of sweeping away the cobwebs in Cummings’ production, which holds our attention.
But the sense of locale and community mostly disappears, and that’s a loss. Williams gives Glorious Hill considerable metaphoric weight, including that angel sculpture that casts a shadow. It’s a typical Southern town of its era, with band concerts in the square—but also its share of tight-knit church groups full of narrow, judgmental minds. Mostly it’s a comfortable place, although Alma’s mother—a combative, compulsive “truth-teller” who may or may not be mentally ill—functions as a seer of what lies beneath and a disruption to the smug sense of respectability.
In stripping the stage nearly bare and removing so much context, we lose the sense of how much Alma is a product of her environment. Here, she seems very neurotic indeed—and as I’ve opined many times before, Williams’ heroines need compassion, not further pathologizing. 6.29.18
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