Customer Reviews

Suddenly Last Summer.

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This play of Williams' (originally presented with the one-act "Something Unspoken" as "Garden District") pulls together a number of themes that ran through his earlier works -- violence, sexual exploitation, cannibalism, alienation -- and combines them in a work that is both powerful visceral and hypnotically dream-like. The story concerns Catherine Holly and the strange story she has to tell about her cousin Sebastian. Her tale wreaks havoc within her family, particularly with her Aunt Violet, who places the girl in an asylum and wants her subjected to a lobotomy. However, the action of the play is negligible; where Williams places the chills are in the various stories told by all the characters, filling in a portrait of the bizarre, sinister Sebastian Venable. The effect is all the more disturbing for the fact that we see the events in our imaginations rather than onstage. An true original from an American genius.

Love the movie and wanted to read the story in the play form. It is a complex story with many twists and turns.
You wonder about the many references to food. " Her eyes are a delicious color" and such.
After reading the play version you can relate to how the movie was embelished upon to make the story even more complex.

Great!

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

"Suddenly Last Summer is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character Sebastian seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her "genius" son from the world even after his `untimely' death ......last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian's beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian's appetites is to be permanently taken out of the picture in order to keep this world beautiful. Nobody believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the `hope' that there may actually be someone to believe the girl's story before she becomes one more sacrifice to `beauty' in the world.

As a play, this is all talk and no action. Of course, the action could not have been presented on the stage in any case, especially not back in those days. Assuming that my memory is not playing tricks on me, I went with a friend to see the movie version very shortly after it dawned on me that my admiration for a handsome boy in my math class meant that I was one of "those" people. This hit me like a bombshell, all the more so because I was 15 and this was the first and only available movie on the subject. I had access to no information at all, and didn't know any better. So I went to see the movie and was informed by it that people like me are lurid and sinister weirdos whose faces are never shown (on the screen), who have odd names like Sebastian, and who invariably end up being eaten alive by delinquents upon whom one has been preying with the aid of female bait. Needless to say, I left the theater devastated, looking forward to a hellish life and a strange death. I am now 68 years old and have not yet met with such a death. Not yet.

It's an unusual story, but I don't find it nearly as moving as Streetcar or Night of the Iguana.

Loved the movie and wanted to read the book version. Was disappointed when I received the book and it was the "play" version. Buyer beware.