Summer and Smoke

Coming after the megahits The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke was seen as something of a disappointment for Tennessee Williams, running only 102 performances in 1948. A revival in 1952 off-Broadway (one of the first plays to establish a vibrant off-Broadway theater) starring Geraldine Page was a success, and the play has since been considered in the upper tier of Williams' work.

I have never seen a stage or film adaptation of the play, but I did read it last night. It has certain familiar Williams themes, such a vulnerable female lead character who is sexually frustrated. The play also trades heavily on the clash between spirituality and science.

The main character is Alma Winemiller. She has long had an attraction for Johnny Buchanan--the play opens with a prologue when they are ten-year-old children in which he is angry with her for giving him a box of handkerchiefs. She only wanted him to help him; he was embarrassed. Sixteen years later, in the year 1916, Alma is a spinster living with her minister father and her crazy mother, while Johnny has followed his father's footsteps and become a doctor, but is known around town (Glorious Hills, Mississippi) for being a drunkard and womanizer.

Alma is attracted to him, but is not willing to sleep with him. They have a night out at a casino on the lake and when he offers to get a room she is angry with him. He keeps time with a loose woman (and a Mexican woman, to boot) and Alma is torn between disgust and attraction. She keeps telling him "Alma" is Spanish for "soul," but he asks to look at the anatomy chart in his office and point out where the soul is. (The working title of the play was "The Chart of Anatomy").

He tells her she has a doppelganger--a duplicate--somewhere roaming around, and eventually the two swap positions. She becomes more sexually aggressive, but is stunned when he tells her he didn't really want to sleep with her the night at the casino. Instead he gets engaged to a teen-aged girl and is ready to settle into a life of respectability. The play ends with Alma throwing herself at a traveling salesman, presumably for a one-night stand.

Summer and Smoke is full of the vagaries of Southern society, but I found Williams was quite hard on Alma. She's a put-upon character, what with her daffy mother (who has a penchant for stealing hats) and her dueling emotions towards Johnny. There's also a bit of gun play that seems unnecessary. But the play, for 1948, is pretty frank about the sex and the human body, and I would like to see it performed. It's not up to the level of the two plays that came before it, but it's fascinating none-the-less.

Williams revised it in the 1960s under the title The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, which I'll get around to reading and comparing sometime later this year.