Roundabout's new production of Suddenly Last Summer, at the Laura Pels Theatre, showcases Tennessee Williams' most lyrical–and lurid–tendencies.

Suddenly Last Summer is suffused with the aching irony and pitch-perfect symbolism audiences had come to expect of the playwright at his elegiac best.

History tells us that Williams made a wise decision: almost instantaneously Garden District earned him the critical acclaim he sought. Suddenly Last Summer in particular turned out to be one of the most unforgettably penetrating and profoundly psychological scripts of Williams' career. “As usual the TV notices came in first,” he dryly noted in his autobiography, “and as usual they were disparaging. I flew into my usual opening night hysteria. I remember saying, 'If the theatre doesn't need me, I don't need it!' –and various other wild assertions of ego at bay.” But then the reviews came in from the Times and other newspapers “and they were raves.”

Mildly put. Far too often in the theatre, critics fail to fully appreciate the gravity of important new work until a significant period has passed, but in this case, the critics seemed viscerally attuned to the depth, complexity, and haunting dramatic beauty of Suddenly Last Summer. In his Times review, critic Brooks Atkinson offered a bull's eye:

Tennessee Williams

Suddenly Last Summer is an exercise in the necromancy of writing. Out of words set down with lyrical facility, Mr. Williams constructs an infected world. He draws character out of words–even the character who died before the play opens. He creates moods, colors, shadows, manners, odors, relationships out of words. He even creates motion out of words. For once it gets going the recollected story of Suddenly Last Summer moves with a mad, headlong pace toward damnation, which it reaches with an explosion of words. As an exercise that is both literary and dramatic, this brief, withering play is a superb achievement.

More praise was yet to come; for as Garden District settled into its run, the new idea of Off-Broadway experimentalism combined with the audacious themes of Suddenly Last Summer to become something of a cause célÈbre–so much so that Atkinson, then approaching the end of his career as a critic, took up his pen once more just two weeks after publishing his review to trumpet the “triumphant piece of dramatic literature” that Williams had wrought. Writing in a lavishly glowing style, Atkinson fervently declared that Williams was at “the peak of his talent as the poet of the damned,” having created “his most devastating statement about corruption in the world, and his most decisive denial of the values by which most people try to live.”

Not bad for a Gothic drama about an aging Southern belle named Mrs. Venable, bent on lobotomizing her niece, Catharine, so that the girl will not remember having witnessed Sebastian, Mrs. Venable's gay poet son, being murdered and cannibalized on an exotic, mystical beach in Spain. Indeed, Mrs. Venable even offers a bribe to the physician, Dr. Cukrowiez, to perform the procedure. Of course, the doctor has other ideas.

Merrill Lynch Sponsors Roundabout's Student Matinees When Roundabout first started working in the New York City public schools, the goal was to teach students about theatre. Over time, however, Roundabout has come to understand that, perhaps more importantly, theatre can be used to help students learn. Turning its theatres into classrooms and the classrooms of New York City public schools into theatres is Roundabout's contribution to the education of approximately 5,000 students and teachers each year. At the heart of Roundabout's educational programs is a commitment to giving students access to transformative theatre experiences. Past shows such as 1776 and Twelve Angry Men have been great opportunities for teachers to expose their students to the theatre and its larger life lessons. Last season alone, Roundabout distributed more than 6,000 tickets for students to see A Touch of the Poet, The Threepenny Opera, and The Pajama Game. This autumn, students from schools throughout the five boroughs and tri-state area will attend student matinees of Heartbreak House, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Apple Tree. Students will receive a copy of Roundabout's comprehensive study guide, Upstage, which includes interviews with the production's actors, designers and director; informative articles on the time period in which the play takes place; and suggested activities for students to think about before, during and after the performance. Students will also have the opportunity to ask cast members questions at talk-backs following the all-student matinees. Teaching artists facilitate these discussions, which engage students in an analysis of the themes and artistic choices made by the director, actors and design teams. A strong supporter of Roundabout's educational programs, Merrill Lynch is the proud sponsor of Roundabout's student matinee program. “By working with Roundabout, we are confident that young people are getting the exposure and developing the necessary skills for life success,” says Eddy Bayardelle, President of the Merrill Lynch Foundation. “This is consistent with our philanthropic goal of increasing educational access for children of all backgrounds.” In 2005, more than half of Merrill Lynch's giving supported education through philanthropic programs that leverage the company's people, expertise and capital to transform lives and communities around the world. Roundabout is truly grateful for its partnership with Merrill Lynch, which allows the theatre to realize its own educational goals.

If the theme of Suddenly Last Summer was shocking for the vanilla Eisenhower era, Williams' instinct to unveil the piece in the woodlands of Off-Broadway was a downright prescient move. A gossip-item writer at the Times took note: “By going Off-Broadway with his brand new Garden District, Tennessee Williams may have started a trend that could be only for good in the American theatre... the choice was a mark of showmanship and, even more, a testament to shrewdness.” By the time the sunny 1958 spring was in bloom, The Village Voice had voted to bestow one of its earliest Obie awards to Anne Meacham, the actress who originated the role of Catharine. In relatively short order, for the first time, Williams remembered, “I made a movie deal myself,” selling the film rights to Suddenly Last Summer to producer Sam Spiegel for $50,000, plus 20 percent of the profits.

In light of all this, perhaps it goes without saying that one of the primary achievements of Suddenly Last Summer was the confident and disarming manner by which Williams reexamined many of the character archetypes that had typified his plays from the very beginning of his career. Mrs. Venable–the outwardly indomitable monster-mother figure whose towering strength serves as mere veneer for extreme psychological fragility–is another variation on The Glass Menagerie's delirious and denial-ridden Amanda Wingfield. Catharine–the inwardly looking young girl whose secrets and struggles, as articulated through the slow disintegration of her language–is a variation on the disconnected dreamscape found in Camino Real and reminiscent of Laura Wingfield in Menagerie. At first, Dr. Cukrowiez seems like another retread of the idealized masculinity that Williams had faithfully explored in the past–his stage directions costume him “all in white, glacially brilliant, very, very good looking,” with “icy charm,” and there are echoes of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, even John Buchanan Jr. in Summer and Smoke. The Doctor, in the end, is more than that–he is the palliative needed to unlock the dark and horrifying forces at work in the play.

His sources were also deeply personal. Williams' sister, Rose, received a lobotomy with the consent of their mother, Edwina, a fact well chronicled by the playwright's biographers as well as by Williams himself in his Memoirs. He clearly understood the moral and physiological stakes at hand.

Suddenly Last Summer, however, is also suffused with the aching irony and vividly pitch-perfect symbolism audiences had come to expect of the playwright at his elegiac best. Williams blithely dubbed the fictional beach on which Sebastian met his fate “Cabeza de Lobo,” which translates into “Wolf's Head.” The name of the Doctor–Cukrowiez–is the word for sugar in Polish. And there's the formidable-sounding surname Venable, which by suggesting another word–venerable–offers a sardonic commentary on a mother figure willing to do, say, or pay anything to sustain her illusions about her dead child.

Academics continue to critically analyze the rich layers of Suddenly Last Summer. One element that gives the play a special allure is the pace of the play and the fact that so little in the way of action occurs–for as Atkinson observed, it's the “motion out of words” that carries us along. In 1990, Steven Bruhm, an English professor in Nova Scotia, noted how Williams wrote the play for an audience that “paid to hear a story about paying not to hear a story.” He also notes how Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are each “indictments of the social structures that regulate homosexual behavior.” Other comparisons exist between Suddenly Last Summer and Williams' short story Desire and the Black Masseur, for in both works, writes David Savran of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, there are “moments of complete abjection...scripted as moments of intense bliss.”

Few monologues are as intense as the one Williams apparently added to Suddenly Last Summer for Mrs. Venable as preproduction began. In it, the domineering mother remembers how one summer Sebastian read Herman Melville's description of the Encantadas–the Galapagos Islands–to her and how they once visited there. On a beach, she said, newborn sea turtles must quickly hasten to the water while “flesh-eating birds” circle overhead. The resonance between this speech and the grotesquerie that surrounded Sebastian's death is unmistakable, remarkable, unthinkable. Everywhere you look, it seems, Suddenly Last Summer offers us new ways to envision life and death.

Leonard Jacobs is the national theatre editor of Backstage and a frequent contributor to the New York Press and other publications.

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