Suddenly Last Summer

I continue my march through the work of Tennessee Williams, now into its third year,with 1958's Suddenly Last Summer, a short play that was combined with another in an evening called Garden District. I previously reviewed the film version, and seem to have added a comma that isn't there, but should be.

The film is much more elaborate than the play, but the skeleton is the same: a vituperative and rich old lady, Violet Venable, is pumping lots of money into a mental institution that is experimenting with lobotomies. The doctor in charge visits to hear the "confession" of Violet's niece, Catherine, who knows the truth of Violet's son Sebastian's death in Spain. No words are minced as Violet tells the doctor that she wants him to cut the lurid story out of Catherine's brain.

What is that lurid story? Well, homosexual cannibalism. It seems that Sebastian, who Violet insists was chaste, was a gay man with a thing for Spanish boys. Something went wrong and those boys turned on him, and ate part of him. We don't know this until the very end of the play, but the reputation of the work now precedes it.

This is Williams turned up to 11, a Southern Gothic with all the trimmings. While the dialogue of the play is full of purple prose, I find that his stage directions are the most interesting reading, which is ironic since the theater-goer doesn't experience them. His description of the set, or of the garden that resides behind it, is typical: "The set may be as unrealistic as the decor of a dramatic ballet. It represents part of a mansion of Victorian Gothic style in the Garden District of New Orleans on a late afternoon, between late summer and early fall. The interior is blended with a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin." Now here is a playwright full of himself--just what is between "late summer and early fall?"

Early on Mrs. Venable speaks of Venus flytraps, and certainly she is one, just as she is the birds that feed on the baby turtles as they make their way from hatching in the sand to the safety of the ocean. Catherine, institutionalized in a fancy place with nuns, is a kind of angelic idiot, perhaps doped out of her mind because of what she saw.

As I said in the review of the film, this is a kind of self-loathing homosexuality. Sebastian, never seen, is described by his mother as a saintly poet, but when Catharine tells her story, the veneer peels away, and it's like everything the Westboro Baptist Church believes that gays are up to. It's also a tale of smothering mother, which is found elsewhere in Williams--Violet Venable could be seen as Amanda Wingfield on steroids.

The play is more of a curiosity that anything else, and I'd like to see just for the fern jungle, but it's lesser Williams.