Season 42 Play 5 – Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams
Directed by
Cast
John (as a child) – Andrew Kerrigan
Alma Winemiller – Jackie Firth
John Buchanan – Mark Braithwaite
Mrs. Winemiller – Mavis Walsh
Rev. Winemiller – Leslie Poynter
Dr. Buchanan – Leigh Bowman
Rosa Gonzales – Sallyann Hall
Nellie Ewell. – Kate Roberts
Roger Doremus – Andrew Bailey
Mrs. Bassett – Elisabeth Nott
Rosemary – Marilyn Brophy
Vernon. – Shaun Penn
Dusty – Craig Jamieson
Papa Gonzales – Tony Clee
Mr. Kramer – lan Noble
Synopsis
Since childhood Alma has loved John, the boy-next-door who returns from university to become the much-admired, even god-like, town doctor. He does not return her love and instead he falls for one of Alma’s pupils, the youngest and prettiest. Set in small-town America at the turn of the century, this bittersweet tale of unrequited love will make you reach for the Kleenex!
Directors Notes
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, 1911-1983, forms with Arthur Miller the twin pillars of post-war American drama: if Miller is the conscience and intellect of the North, Williams is the soul and spirit of the South. Williams himself was born in Mississippi, and his plays are suffused with the mood and atmosphere of The Delt’ and the river states down from St Louis to New Orleans- indeed, they are so localised in colour that it is initially surprising how they have crossed cultures so successfully and enduringly in performance around the world. But this is because of the universality of his views on the human condition, and of the compassion with which he presents them. He is a playwright concerned not with the extremes of joy or tragedy, but with that large and less tangible state in-between: the essential restlessness of the body and mind, and the search for the calm which enables us to cope with the heights of happiness or the depths of despair which may befall. Summer and Smoke was written in 1948, with an earlier draft entitled Chart of Anatomy (a title which Williams soon changed as too prosaic – a hallmark of all his plays is the evocative resonance of their titles), and although the play may lack the fierceness of impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Streetcar Named Desire it shares with Glass Menagerie an echoing gentleness which makes it one of his finest and most compelling plays. Not entirely without hope or humour it shows that the cure for the ‘restless’ (a description which he applied to himself) is neither permanent nor universal and reveals Tennessee Williams’ poetic fascination with the conflict between the cavalier and the puritan, the temporal and the spiritual, the summer and the smoke.
