Suddenly, it's summer
Some updates from me + a look at one of Tennessee Williams' most shocking plays
Every year, the arrival of summer—which I always associate with Memorial Day weekend—takes me by surprise. January through April feels like such a long, cold, wet slog where I’m just wishing for the giant trees outside my little office window in my apartment to become green and leafy again. The first warm day feels like a hug until you have the first slightly too warm day where your shoulders get pink and you remember everything about the summertime is designed to personally destroy you, a very pale white woman. Then, you have a few more days of overcast, wet, chilly weather until…
Suddenly, it’s summer.
I’ve been gone from this space for a bit, because I’ve been working on some time-consuming projects the last couple of months that required all my extra creative energy and brain power I’d normally expend a bit of on this newsletter.
First:
About a month before my wedding last fall, I started working on a new play, because I just couldn’t get this idea out of my head. The timing was, of course, very bad/completely deranged given I was also getting married. I was also rehearsing and performing in a contemporary dance show at Ailey, because getting married and writing a new play were clearly not stressful and exhausting enough for me! Anyway, I did eventually set the play aside as the wedding got closer, but I picked it back up over the holidays. In April, I joined the Dramatists Guild and decided to do their #EndofPlay initiative (which is like the playwrights’ version of National Novel Writing Month #NaNoWriMo) to push myself to actually finish the first draft of my first full-length play. Which I did…a full week before the month was over. So yeah, I finished the first draft of an 80+ page play and felt almost exactly like Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread where he’s so exhausted after a creative project, he basically becomes a helpless baby for a few days.
Second:
Finishing the first draft of the full-length play was actually step one of the process of applying to grad school for playwriting. Once my wedding was over and all the space being taken up by flower choices and place settings emptied again, I suddenly had time to process feelings I’d been having before the wedding about what I felt like was next for me. I’ve never thought seriously about grad school until recently, but the more I explored my options, the more it felt like the right time and right thing for me. And if I get into one of the low-residency MFA programs I’ve spent the entire month of May applying to, I’ll still be one of the youngest students even though I’m 35. God bless! Love that for me!
Anyway, applying to an MFA writing program is a lot of work. Which, like, I know grad school is also a lot of work, and a writing program will be even more work, but I haven’t applied to college in almost 20 (!) years so it’s been a rude reminder. It’s kind of the equivalent of being asked to attach your resume and also being forced to manually fill in your previous experience on a job application but several times for the same place. There’s your playwriting sample, a personal statement, letters of recommendation, the actual application itself, plus maybe an additional writing sample.
All this to say, I’ve decided to share one of the essays I wrote for one of my applications, because I’ve been away from here for so long, it’s summer time, and the summer heat always makes me feel like one of Tennessee Williams’ southern belles who are slowly losing their minds.
Rather than choosing one of his more popular/famous plays, I opted to write about Suddenly Last Summer, which, like his more popular/famous plays, was also adapted for the big screen. The movie version—which stars Elizabeth Taylor (who’s also in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift—is slightly different from its theatrical source material but is currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel. I do recommend checking it out for Katharine Hepburn’s performance alone; it’s the only time she performed in one of Williams’ Southern Gothic works to which she, as a Connecticut Yankee, is curiously suited. The play, however, is a fascinating little chamber piece that is the closest thing to horror Williams’ ever wrote.
Spoilers lay ahead, so reader beware.
In Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee Williams’ lurid one-act from the middle of his long career, desire turns people into ravenous, cruel animals. Love is transactional rather than transcendent. As Catharine, the villainized niece of Mrs. Venable, attempts to explain to a psychiatric doctor what happened to her cousin Sebastian last summer, Williams paints a barbaric and chilling picture of humanity.
While many of his more famous Southern Gothic plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof contain glimpses of the violent underbelly of human nature, this play forebodingly builds toward perhaps the most shocking act of violence in all of his work: cannibalism. Williams plants the seeds of this revelation in the very first lines of the play. Mrs. Venable describes how her son, Sebastian, used to care for his Venus flytrap by providing it with “fruit flies flown in at great expense,” symbolizing Sebastian’s own expensive, voracious sexual appetites. Later, she tells a story about the two of them visiting the “terrible Encantadas” (the Galapagos Islands) where they witnessed a flock of “black, flesh-eating birds” descend on newly hatched sea turtles, “tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.” This image parallels Catharine’s story later detailing how the same dark, adolescent beggar boys Sebastian had taken advantage of in Cabeza de Lobo descend upon him, tearing apart and eating his flesh.
Building on these natural themes, Williams’ explicit use of jungle sound effects written throughout the play adds an additional layer of tension for the audience. This combined with the imagery contained within the play’s long monologues lends Suddenly Last Summer both a lyrical and nightmarish quality. It exists within a claustrophobic, heightened reality.
Unfortunately, these more obvious theatrical elements tend to overshadow some other deeply fascinating ones that support Williams’ bleak view of humanity where people devour each other. While Sebastian suffers the most literal version of this kind of predatory violence, his cousin Catharine is a survivor of another prevalent though metaphorical kind: sexual assault. After being raped at a Mardi Gras debutante ball by a married man who had “kindly” offered to drive her home, she “makes a scene” on the ballroom floor, beating him in the face and chest. The play suggests Catharine is so traumatized by this event, she begins dissociating by referring to herself in third person in her diary, slipping into a depression, and equating what happened to her as a death. “If you’re still alive after dying,” she explains to Doctor Sugar of her decision to join Sebastian on his summer trip, “well, then you’re obedient.”
This “obedience” makes Catharine a perfect honeypot for Sebastian, who, under the guise of pity for her situation, uses her emotional fragility and striking physical beauty to lure attractive men for his increasingly insatiable sexual appetite. By having Sebastian force Catharine to wear a white bathing suit that makes her look naked when it gets wet, Williams is perversely echoing both Catharine’s rape and the debutante balls of the South where young women wearing white signal they’re available to eligible bachelors. Once again, cruelty is masked by “kindness.” Catharine is a victim of it three times in the play; the last time being Mrs. Venable’s request to have her lobotomized to make her “peaceful again,” which, in essence, restores not only Catharine’s “purity” but Sebastian’s as well.
This presents another complex, thorny element in the play: Williams’ portrayal of homosexual desire as predatory, taboo, and impure. Certainly queerness was taboo in 1957 when the play premiered, and Williams’ own homosexuality was an open secret. While modern society has mostly dispelled with the pervasive, negative stereotype of the “predatory gay man,” Williams leans into it in Suddenly Last Summer. However, through the character of Sebastian, Williams seems to be wrestling more with himself and his own mixed feelings about his desires versus his Episcopalian upbringing rather than necessarily making a comment on queer people as a whole. Mrs. Venable mentions her poet son was “looking for God” in the violence of the Encantadas because “all we ever really see and hear of Him” is a “savage face.” In Williams’ and thus Sebastian’s view, God only presents Himself through violent means, which in itself is a kind of purity. Catharine tells the Doctor she tried to save Sebastian from “completing an image he had of himself as a sacrifice to a terrible, cruel God.” From this viewpoint, the “famished” Sebastian–and Williams himself–is not just allowing himself to be fed to the adolescent beggar boys of Cabeza de Lobo but also to God as atonement for his own perceived sins or impurities. Like Catharine at her debutante ball, Sebastian too dies while wearing white. While it may seem like Williams is equating homosexuality with cannibalism as interchangeably repulsive to society, it can be read as more of a commentary on man tragically becoming a victim of his own insatiable desires.
“We all use each other, and that’s what we think of as love,” Catharine cynically tells the Doctor. Suddenly Last Summer is a horror story where the victims are monsters and the monsters are victims. Everyone is starved for something–attention, sex, money, power, God–and they’ll take increasingly drastic, violent measures to get it. As Shakespeare put it in Romeo & Juliet, “these violent delights have violent ends.” In Tennessee Williams’ play, there’s no greater act of savagery than “love.”
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