SUMMER AND SMOKE
**¾
((c)1996 David Lefkowitz. Reviewed 1996 on Broadway. This review was first published as part of my recurring This Month ON BROADWAY section of This Month ON STAGE.)
For an avowed homosexual, Tennessee Williams had an almost obsessive need to deflower — emotionally, if not physically, as well — a host of frail, prudish Southern ladies. Blanche DuBois’s struggle between flesh and spirit leads to her downfall, lonely Myrtle has to choose between her effete, bloodless husband and his macho brother; virginal Hannah Jelkes steps out of the battleground altogether rather than get mortally wounded. Terrified of sex, Alma Winemiller, of Summer and Smoke, can’t even look at an anatomy chart — especially the one that hangs in the office of John Buchanan, the handsome doctor next door.
Rakish, dissipated, yet sparked by a kernel of decency, Dr. John pursues Alma, seeing in her the same purity The Night of the Iguana’s Rev. Shannon so desired from Hannah. But Alma and John’s astrological charts never quite mesh, so instead of a romance, they suffer a tragedy and — even worse in Williams’s world — a missed connection.
With its episodic second act and intrusive minor characters, the two hour and forty-five minute play simply takes too long to reach its ironic finale. Mary McDonnell makes Alma an interesting, even pitiable figure, but not a gripping or majestic one. Other critics have called Harry Hamlin wooden and not up to the play’s demands, but I find his doctor convincing when he broods and irresistible when he woos (he’s tremendously handsome — more so than television has been able to capture).
Derek McLane’s set, all blue clouds and white sky with a rising and descending angel (every 1990s play must have one — that’s the law) offers a nice change from spending three hours in Williams’s usual seedy milieu.
*
(Staged by and at the Roundabout Theater by David Warren, Summer and Smoke ran Sept. 5-Oct. 20, 1996 at Broadway’s Criterion Center Stage Right.)
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The Collected Writings of... David Lefkowitz 