'Summer and Smoke' (CSC)

I’m not a full-fledged authority on Tennessee Williams, but I do know good deal about him and some of his plays as the result of several years of work with and for some scholars who are TW experts.   (For a number of years back in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, I did research for pay and my principal clients ended up being a passel of Williams scholars who lived out of town and needed someone in New York City who could track down information and documents here.   That led me to doing several Williams-related projects of my own—some of which have been republished on Rick On Theater—and thus, I gathered a lot of biographical, literary, and theatrical information about the great playwright.) 

In particular, I did a great deal of work on two of Williams’s connected plays: Summer and Smoke (première 1947, Broadway 1948) and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (written 1961, première 1964, Broadway 1976), his  reconsideration of the earlier play.   One of the Williams scholars, Philip C.  Kolin, asked me to contribute the chapter on the two plays to Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood Press, 1998), which he was editing.   That eventually led to “The Lost Premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale” for The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (Spring 1999) and ultimately to “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (2002).   (The latter was posted in ROT on 20 March 2010 and the former on 9 May 2015.   I also wrote two original pieces for this blog: “Getting from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities,” 26 February 2015, which, as the title suggests, relates how Williams reimagined Summer and Smoke as Eccentricities, and “‘The Pieces Don’t Fit!,’” 13 March 2015, which was suggested by a line spoken in the first act of Summer and Smoke and echoed in the second.)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll also note that I appeared in a production of Eccentricities of a Nightingale in New Jersey in 1979—my first union show, from which I got my Actors Equity card.   (I played Roger Doremus, Alma’s nebbishy wannabe suitor.)

So, as I said, I know a bit about Summer and Smoke, currently running at the Classic Stage Company (for the next couple of days, anyway).   I also have strong feelings about the play, somewhat proprietary in a way, which will necessarily inform my report on the production.   

Summer and Smoke was the second of his major plays Williams wrote but the third to be staged on Broadway.   He began composing it in 1945 (as Chart of Anatomy) and it was first produced (as Summer and Smoke) in Dallas by Margo Jones at her esteemed regional company, Theatre ‘47, premièring on 8 July 1947.   Because A Streetcar Named Desire, written after Summer and Smoke, opened in December, the Broadway transfer of Summer to the Music Box Theatre was delayed until 6 October 1948.  (The Glass Menagerie had opened on Broadway on 31 March 1945 and ran until 3 August 1946.)  Compared unfavorably to both Menagerie and Streeetcar, Summer ran only until 1 January 1949, 102 performances.  (Menagerie and Streetcar had original runs of 563 and 855 performances, respectively—very long for that time.)  The play was considered a flop and nearly derailed the nascent playwright’s career.   

Directed by Jones in both Dallas and New York with Tod Andrews as John and Katherine Balfour as Alma in the world première and then Andrews and Margaret Phillips on Broadway.   On Broadway, Mrs.  Winemiller was played by Marga Ann Deighton, Reverend Winemiller by Raymond Van Sickle, Dr.  Buchanan by Ralph Theadore; Anne Jackson appeared as Nellie Ewell and the wonderful Ray Walston had the near-cameo role of the salesman Archie Kramer.   The Broadway set and lighting were designed by Jo Mielziner and the costumes by Rose Bogdanoff; Williams’s friend Paul Bowles wrote original incidental music for the production.  Mielziner’s scenic design was highly praised in the 1948 reviews and I’ll have something to say about this aspect of the CSC production shortly.

In 1950, a tour of Summer and Smoke starring Dorothy McGuire and John Ireland covered the western United States.   On 22 November 1951, the London premiere, directed by Peter Glenville, opened with William Sylvester and Margaret Johnston as the would-be lovers.  (Foreign-language premières opened all over the globe from 1950 to 1994.)  Then, on 24 April 1952, Off-Broadway was born when Circle in the Square restaged Summer and Smoke starring Lee Richardson and Geraldine Page.   Running for 356 performances, the revival was directed by José Quintero.   The production established Off-Broadway as an important venue for serious theater, revived the reputations of the play and the author, and made names for Quintero (who went on to become a renowned interpreter of Williams’s work) and Page.   

Two years later, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage produced a popular Summer (9 February-21 March 1954) directed by Alan Schneider with George Grizzard and Dorothea Jackson, with Frances Sternhagen as Mrs.  Winemiller.   In 1975, Gene Feist staged an Off-Broadway revival for New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company in its Chelsea home with Michael Storm as John and Debra Mooney as Alma.   In July 1986, Christopher Reeve and Laila Robins portrayed the central couple at the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theatre Festival and two years later, Marshall Mason directed Reeve for the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles, opposite Christine Lahti (11 February-1 April 1988).  Roundabout revived Summer and Smoke on Broadway in 1996 with Harry Hamlin and Mary McDonnell as John and Alma under the direction of David Warren.   

Paramount produced the film adaptation of Summer and Smoke, with a screenplay by James Poe and Meade Roberts, in 1961.   Geraldine Page, nominated for an Academy Award, repeated her Off-Broadway stage success as Alma opposite Laurence Harvey under the direction of Peter Glenville (director of the London stage production).   On 23 January 1972, a television adaptation of Summer and Smoke was aired in the British Broadcasting Company’s “Play of the Month” series.   Never broadcast in the United States, the program starred American actors David Hedison and Lee Remick.

Summer and Smoke is the only major Williams play to have been set to music in his lifetime (not counting the 1952 Streetcar ballet).   Composed by Lee Hoiby with a libretto by Lanford Wilson, the opera debuted on 19 June 1971 by the St.  Paul Opera Association with John Reardon singing John and Mary Beth Peil, Alma, under the conductor Igor Buketoff.   

The current Off-Broadway revival, co-produced with the Transport Group Theatre Company and directed by its artistic director and co-founder, Jack Cummings III, began previews at CSC’s East Village home on 11 April 2018 and opened on 3 May.  The production, extended from a 20 May closing, is now scheduled to end on 25 May; I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 11 May.

The Transport Group Theatre Company is a non-profit, Off-Broadway theater troupe in New York City.  Founded in 2001 by now-artistic director Cummings and actress Robyn Hussa, Transport stages new plays and musicals and revivals with a focus on American stories told in a visually progressive way.  The company, which currently performs in various venues around New York, also commissions new works by American writers, including re-imagined revivals.  Since 2007, Cummings has been artistic director and Lori Fineman, executive director.  Through its first eight years, Transport Group was a resident theatre company at the Connelly Theatre; an Off-Broadway venue in Manhattan’s East Village.  Transport’s produced several environmental productions including the OBIE Award-winning The Boys in the Band (2010), which seated the audience in chairs around the play’s living room set in a Chelsea penthouse, and the first New York revival of Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again (2011), in which round banquet tables doubled as both the audience seating and the actors’ playing space. 

In 2007, Transport Group received a special Drama Desk Award for its “breadth of vision and presentation of challenging productions” and in 2018 the company won a Drama Critics’ Circle Award Special Citation.  Transport Group has been nominated for 31 Drama Desk Awards, five Outer Critics Circle Awards, five Drama League Awards, three Off-Broadway Alliance, and two Lucille Lortel Awards, among others.  In 2011, Transport Group’s production of the Douglas Carter Beane-Lewis Flinn musical Lysistrata Jones transferred to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award.   The American Theatre Wing awarded Transport Group a National Theatre Company Grant in 2011.

In 1967, director Christopher Martin founded the Classic Stage Company Repertory in a 100-seat theater at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s West 73rd Street as a theater committed to reimagining classic plays for contemporary audiences.  In 1973, after a period of peripatetic existence, the theater moved into its present home on East 13th Street, formerly an East Village carriage house.  Martin left the company in 1985 and was succeeded as artistic director by Craig Kinzer and Producing Director Carol Ostrow (until 1987), Carol Perloff (1987-92), David Esbjornson (1992-98), Barry Edelstein (1998-2003), Brian Kulick (2003-16), and John Doyle (2016-present).  In the 50 years since its founding, CSC has become a leading Off-Broadway theater that is a home for new and established artists, as well audiences seeking epic stories intimately told.  (The troupe’s performance space, a thrust configuration with seating on three sides of a floor-level acting area, holds only 199 spectators.)  CSC Productions have been cited by all major Off-Broadway theater awards including the OBIE, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work.  Summer and Smoke is Tennessee Williams’s debut production at CSC.

Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius Coffin (C. C.) Williams (1879-1957), a traveling shoe salesman, and the former Edwina Dakin (1884-1980), who like many of her son’s heroines thought of herself as a Southern belle; the couple married in 1907. (Tom Williams became Tennessee in 1939.  Through his father, Tom was a descendant of John Sevier, 1745-1815, the first governor of Tennessee from 1796 to 1801, and 1803 to 1809.)  Edwina was the daughter of the Reverend Walter Dakin (1857-1955), an Episcopal priest, and Rosina (Rose) Otte Dakin (1863-1944), who taught music and singing to some of her husband’s parishioners.  Because of his father’s peripatetic work, Williams and his mother, sister  Rose Isabel Williams (1909-96), and brother Walter Dakin Williams (known as Dakin; 1919–2008) lived with his maternal grandparents in the parsonages where Williams’s beloved grandfather was pastor. 

In 1915, Reverend Dakin, a fixer for troubled parishes, was assigned to St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a small river port in the Mississippi Delta area. The Dakins and the Williamses lived in Clarksdale until 1918 (and Tom returned there from 1920 to ’21 to finish elementary school), so the dramatist lived there for a large chunk of the period in which Summer and Smoke is set.  It’s generally accepted that Clarksdale became several towns of Tennessee Williams plays, including the Glorious Hill of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale. 

(From 1902 to 1905, Reverend Dakin served as Episcopal minister in Port Gibson, Mississippi, 175 miles south along the Mississippi from Clarksdale.  This town has a famous landmark: the First Presbyterian Church whose steeple is topped by “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven,” as Alma describes her father’s Glorious Hill Episcopal church in Eccentricities.  The description doesn’t appear in Summer and Smoke, however.) 

Williams is far too well known (and his life much too full) to summarize here; he’s easy to look up in any number of sources.  This brief snippet, however, provides many clues to the origins and conception of the playwright’s second major play.  In all his plays, Williams was a compulsive recycler of bits of his biography and experiences.  In Summer and Smoke, like Reverend Dakin, for instance, Reverend Winemiller was the Episcopal minister of the town and like “The Nightingale of the Delta,” Williams grew up at the rectory.  (Williams once insisted, “I’m Alma.”)  Reverend Dakin’s father had been a small-town doctor like the Drs. Buchanan and Rose Dakin had taught piano and voice like Alma.  C. C. Williams was a drummer for a shoe company, just as is Archie Kramer, the young man Alma picks up in the play’s last scene.  (The salesman’s last name comes from Tennessee Williams’s first girlfriend, Hazel Kramer, the only woman to whom he proposed marriage when he was 18.)

Both Mrs. Winemiller and Alma manifest characteristics of Williams’s sister, Rose, and mother.  The older woman is drawn from the later, clearly schizophrenic Rose, but Edwina Williams’s depiction of her daughter’s overreaction to illness echoes Alma’s.  (Rose Williams began exhibiting symptoms of her illness at 14 and was diagnosed in 1937, when she was institutionalized.  Rose was lobotomized in 1943 and Tennessee looked after her all of his life.)  Much of Alma is also drawn from Edwina Williams, the small-town minister’s daughter with a streak of Puritanism who had been called a nightingale. 

The egocentric hedonist of Summer and Smoke, John, is a portrait of Williams’s father, who preferred carousing to domesticity.  C. C. Williams lost part of his ear in a fight over a card game; John is knifed in a drunken fight while gambling at Moon Lake. (Moon Lake is a real recreation area just 18 miles north of Clarksdale and Lyon, where Dr. Buchanan, Sr.’s fever clinic is, is a tiny town about two miles northeast of Clarksdale.).  The elder Dr. Buchanan, a remote, cold, and censorious father, depicts another aspect of C. C. Williams, who denigrated his son and called him “Miss Nancy.”  The Reverend Winemiller is inspired by (but not a portrait of) Rev. Walter Dakin, whom Williams adored all his life.. 

The foundation of Summer and Smoke (and Eccentricities) is Edwina Williams’s tales of her youth in Port Gibson and Natchez, Mississippi, that she told her children (and which were published in her memoir, Remember Me To Tom [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963]).  Both plays had their origins in a short story, “Bobo,” which Williams wrote in 1941, then revised into “The Yellow Bird” in 1946; published in 1947, “Yellow Bird” centered on a preacher‘s daughter named Alma Tutwiler.  (There were Tutwilers in Clarksdale; the name Winemiller came from another story, “One Arm.”) 

Like most of Williams’s plays, Summer and Smoke exists in two versions, a “literary” or “reading” text and an “acting” text.  The longer, “literary” version was the play as Williams wrote it, successfully produced in Dallas, but trimmed during Jones’s rehearsals in New York.  The shorter version is the text sold by Dramatists Play Service, the agent for all non-professional productions and publisher of the official “acting version.”  The “literary” text is published in hardcover volumes (including anthologies such as The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams from the Library of America) and trade paperbacks (New Directions’ The Theatre of Tennessee Williams).  The historic Quintero revival in 1952 was based on the longer version, with the Prologue of Alma and John as children meeting by the stone angel, the iconic image of the play, and so is the CSC mounting.

Set in the fictional town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, in “the first few years of” the 20th century to 1916, Summer and Smoke—the title comes from a line in the poem “Emblems of Conduct” (c. 1924, pub. 1926) by Hart Crane (1899-1932), an important emotional influence on Williams—opens at “dusk of an evening in May” in the town square.  There we meet Alma Winemiller, the daughter of Glorious Hill’s Episcopal minister, as a ten-year-old (played at CSC by the same actress who plays the part as an adult, Marin Ireland), standing in front of the stone statue of an angel—which in Cummings’s mounting is represented by a framed tinted photograph on an easel. 

As Alma leans down to drink from the statue’s fountain, young John Buchanan, Jr., son of the town doctor (Nathan Darrow, also the adult actor for the later character), sneaks into the square and startles Alma.  They are schoolmates and clearly well acquainted with one another as Alma has given Johnny a box of handkerchiefs because he has a runny nose, and he knows exactly how to tease her.  As they banter, Alma tells John that the stone angel has a name: Eternity.  In fact, the two Buchanans and the Winemillers are neighbors, for the church’s rectory and the doctor’s office and home are next door to one another.

This Prologue, omitted from the “acting” version of the text, prefigures Alma and John’s relationship as adults.  We see her as a sensitive, possibly even hyper-sensitive, girl with religious tendencies (“My name is Alma and Alma is Spanish for soul,” she tells Johnny) and an almost maternal concern for John’s well-being and demeanor.  John, on the other hand, reveals the beginnings of his carelessness, apparent callowness, and rebelliousness at the same time as he’s obviously drawn to Alma—though not in a particularly spiritual way.  As young adults, both will manifest these characteristics to a more (over-)developed degree.  In Cummings’s production, the Prologue isn’t Williams’s foreshadowing of things to come, however, but Alma’s memory of the way things were before life happened.  In this conception, the adult actors portraying their characters’ younger selves works well.

After the Prologue, the scene jumps to July 4th a few years before the U.S. entry into World War I.  Reverend and Mrs. Winemiller (Jay Russell, taking the place at this performance of T.  Ryder Smith, and Barbara Walsh) arrive just as Alma finishes singing in the town’s Independence Day band concert.  (In the “literary” version, there’s a short scene that Cummings didn’t use of townspeople gathering in the square for the entertainment.  It seems that the Transport Group director reverts to the shorter script at this point.)  It’s apparent that Mrs. Winemiller is, as we used to say, not a well woman, having suffered a breakdown years earlier.  She slipped “into a state of perverse childishness,” Williams states, and Reverend Winemiller and his daughter refer to her as their “cross to bear.”  

After the elder Winemillers depart, John, who’s just returned home after studying medicine in Baltimore, approaches Alma, who is waiting to meet Roger Doremus (Jonathan Spivey), Alma’s would-be gentleman caller who plays French horn in the town band.  To attract her attention, John tosses a firecracker toward her when she isn’t looking.  Also passing through the square, as Alma and John banter somewhat tentatively, are Rosa Gonzales (Elena Hurst), whose father (Gerardo Rodriguez) owns the Moon Lake Casino, and Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless), a 16-year-old voice pupil of Alma’s; we learn a few details about both women (who both represent figures in Williams’s pantheon of women). 

From this point on, the scenes mostly alternate between the rectory and the doctor’s office, with occasional visits to the fountain and one trip out to Moon Lake.  This rotation starts in Dr. Buchanan’s office, which is visually distinguished by a wall chart of human anatomy (represented in Dane Laffrey’s minimalist CSC set by a framed chart on another easel).  Each scene emphasizes the differences between Alma’s and John’s outlooks on life, reflected in the “triptych” set that Williams conceived for the play: the rectory (soul) on one side of the stage, the doctor’s office (body) on the other, and the stone angel (“eternity”) between them.  Cummings, however, has conceived a non-set that dispenses with all visual representations of the themes except a photo of the stone angel and Dr. Buchanan’s anatomy chart.  (All hand props, from Mrs. Winemiller’s picture puzzle to the telephones in the rectory and the doctor’s office to the firecrackers, are mimed.  Kathryn Rohe designed period costumes, but they don’t change from scene to scene.)

The rest of the acting environment is a white platform with a half dozen plain wooden chairs, moved by the actors to create seating arrangements for each location, and a hanging “ceiling” of a framed opaque white fabric which, from my seat’s perspective (fourth row up in the center section of CSC’s three-sided audience), made the space that is Glorious Hill seem all the more claustrophobic and closed-in than the text alone ordinarily would.  (Jesse Green likened the set to a “coffin” in his New York Times review.)  According to Cummings, in a program note, his purpose here is to “return the focus back on the actor and the writing.”  In Williams’s script, he indicates the scene shifts with lighting cross-fades, but R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting design, which is essentially continual muted white light covering the whole acting platform, doesn’t accommodate this technique.

Alma, who reminds us several times that her name means ‘soul,’ is Williams’s embodiment of piety, exaggerated and exclusive of all other human impulses, and the young Dr. Buchanan, who lives to use “his senses to get all he can in the way of—satisfaction,” represents a life devoted entirely to physical experience in pretty much all its forms.  But the playwright doesn’t advocate for either position, and Alma and John essentially switch philosophies at the end of the play.  The actual struggle between these two impulses isn’t between Alma and John, however; it’s really within each of them.  Alma comes off the worse in the end, as she goes from one extreme to the other.  In the last scene of Summer and Smoke, Alma picks up a traveling shoe salesman, Archie Kramer (Ryan Spahn), following in the path of Nellie’s mother, who’s known as Glorious Hill’s “merry widow” because she meets all the trains coming into town to pick up drummers.

Other characters exhibit a range of other positions on the continuum, as well as other attitudes Williams diagnosed in American society.  Both fathers are remote and disapproving men, valuing public opinion and social reputation above all other attributes, but they are both leading representatives of the establishment (the church and business community).  Alma’s “little group . . . of young people with—intellectual interests” (Roger; Rosemary, the town librarian played by Glenna Brucken; and Mrs. Bassett, a gossipy widow portrayed by Tina Johnson) are the social rejects, along with Alma, Nellie Ewell (ostracized because of her mother’s reputation by everyone in Glorious Hill except Alma), and Rosa (the young Mexican good-time girl with whom John takes up), who are marginalized by the likes of Reverend Winemiller and the elder Dr. Buchanan (Phillip Clark).  The men, who are both images of Williams’s own father, don’t see that all the outcasts are products of their unrelenting censoriousness. 

Rosa is essentially a female counterpart of John, but she is also a manifestation of Williams’s view, now seen as an unflattering stereotype, of Latins as “elemental” people (South Americans and Mexicans, Spaniards, and Italians often appear in this guise in Williams’s plays and stories), while Nellie is the character who has found the healthy balance between her sensual and physical nature and her spiritual side—and is largely responsible for John’s salvation in the end when he turns from Rosa and a life of pleasure (in South America, notably) to marriage to the wholesome and rounded Nellie.  (Nellie Ewell isn’t a large role in Summer and Smoke, but the character is significant and dramatically pivotal.  Some top actresses, some before they became known, took the part.  In the Broadway première, it was Anne Jackson, who married Eli Wallach the year the play was presented in New York and became one of our leading actors of the 20th century; Pamela Tiffin played Nellie in the 1961 film.)

Summer and Smoke is filled with symbols and symbolism.  Some critics have complained that there’s too much of that, but Williams wove it into the play.  Cummings’s stripped-down mise-en-scène left me somewhat bereft because I felt the lack of the visualization of Williams philosophical and dramatic themes.  (I refer readers to my blog article on plastic theater, mentioned earlier, for a discussion of Williams’s notion that playwrights should construct their texts to include the physical environment they conceive as integral aspects of the play and not abandon that element of dramaturgy to directors and designers.) 

Very possibly, a viewer who doesn’t know as much about Summer and Smoke as I do now won’t have missed the triptych and the imposing omnipresence of the stone angel, and I had no serious problem with the mimed hand props or the imaginary fireworks (which all have symbolic significance in Williams’s concept, such as the plumed hat), but the total absence of any visual reinforcement of Williams’s ideas weakens the play in my estimation and interfered with my reception of the performance.  (A note: Cummings’s physical reinterpretation was not nearly as detrimental to Summer and Smoke as Sam Gold’s of The Glass Menagerie was to that production; see my report on 8 April 2017.)

The actors, however, do fine jobs in this bare-minimum production.  Among Williams’s principal strengths as a playwright were always his lyric dialogue, rising to the level of prose poetry in his best plays, and his characters, especially his women.  Cummings’s cast gives straightforward characterizations, strongly focused and beautifully delivered (including Jay Russell, who took the part of Reverend Winemiller at the performance I saw).

The CSC-Transport presentation of Summer and Smoke is an ensemble show, a strong one, though the portrayals are a bit bland for such a melodramatic property.  One exquisite performance, however, does stand out—that of Marin Ireland as Alma.  I gather that she has a reputation for fine acting, especially in contemporary roles, but I’m unfamiliar with her work.  I can’t compare her Alma with past work, but I can state that her embodiment of this ephemeral and conflicted woman is sensitive and emotionally gripping, and a lovely rendering of the heart of the production.  Alma, like all of Summer and Smoke’s characters, is, at most, two-dimensional, but Ireland keeps her alive and engaging; unfortunately, her John, in the hands of Nathan Darrow, is no match for her on this score.

For a guy who for most of the 2½ hours of this Summer and Smoke (there’s one ten-minute intermission) is a thoroughgoing hedonist, in the interpretation of Darrow, another actor with whom I have no experience, John Buchanan, Jr., is surprisingly tame.  Oh, sure, the script takes care of a number of depravations—he’s stabbed in a bar brawl over gambling, he hooks up with a hot Latina and a teenager, he drives fast—but Darrow’s persona is unthreatening. He fits the John of Eccentricities better than he does the John of Summer and Smoke.

The rest of the company, including Reverend and Mrs. Winemiller and Dr. Buchanan, Sr., do what they have to more than adequately but not excitingly.  This is  yeoman’s ensemble.  Only Hannah Elless’s Nellie Ewell comes close to sparkling—and much of that is accounted for by Williams’s writing.  They were like Laffrey’s set—utilitarian without being extraordinary.  (I will add that Elena Hurst brought a measure of earnest intelligence to her portrayal of Rosa which helped greatly to diminish the negative Latino caricature.)

On the basis of 34 reviews, the website Show-Score gave Cummings’s Summer and Smoke an average rating of 76, a somewhat middling score.  Positive notices made up 71% of the total, 26% were mixed, and 3% were negative.  The highest scoring review was 90, accounting for eight outlets, including BroadwayWorld, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine/Vulture, backed by a single 88 (the website BSonArts); the site’s lowest score was TheaterScene.net’s 45.  I surveyed 15 reviews for my round-up.

In the New York Times, Jesse Green singled out the performance of Marin Ireland for extensive praise.  Calling her “one of the great drama queens of the New York stage,” Green found her “a fascinating if counterintuitive choice” for Alma.  But the Timesman asserted that “the choice pays off; Ms. Ireland is riveting.”  Otherwise, the reviewer lamented, CSC’s revival of Summer and Smoke was “lackluster.”  Cummings “is known for minimalist, or essentialist, stagings,” observed Green; however, “this ‘Summer and Smoke’ has been scraped too close to the bone.”  By way of illustration, he wrote:

Dane Laffrey’s big white shoe box, or coffin, of a set conveys all too well Alma’s empty prospects but offers nothing to suggest either the suffocating trap of her Victorian circumstances or the richness and romance of her imagination.  Her statue of Eternity is not even stone; it’s a framed photograph.

I’m sorry if I seem to be beating a dead horse, but Green appears to feel the same way I do about the physical production at CSC.  He continued:

Williams specified minimalism—no doors or windows—but he meant something more poetic by it. In his production notes he refers to de Chirico and Renaissance paintings as a way of suggesting the natural world Alma must finally embrace.  . . . .  But it mustn’t play out its bleakness too soon or there’s nothing to lose, and thus no drama.

“Ms. Ireland’s imagination is so well calibrated that she manages, almost single-handedly, to correct for that distortion,” Green insisted.  If the production doesn’t fulfill Williams’s full intentions, the Times reviewer felt, “I don’t blame the cast.”  “No,” he insisted, “it’s the parsimony of the production that’s at fault, offering little that’s lovely.” 

Calling Cummings’s production “gripping” in the Village Voice, Zac Thompson contended that Laffrey’s “simple yet effective design is not only in keeping with the author’s production notes” (about which you know now I disagree strenuously).  Thompson felt that “the absence of scenery helps to strip away all distractions from the play’s central struggle between the sensual and the spiritual.”  Like most other reviewers, he heaped praise on Ireland, whose “gutsy depiction of what becomes a last-ditch grab for happiness is piercing and raw,” but the Voice reviewer also found Darrow’s “haunted vulnerability . . . adds poignancy to the character’s professed self-disgust.”

Sara Holdren of New York magazine/Vulture (one of the 90’s) labeled Cummings’s Summer and Smoke “a spare, intelligent, deeply affecting production” in which the director’s “light, exacting touch both lifts and elucidates the text.”  Holdren, too, lauded “the stellar Marin Ireland” whose performance “is an exquisite study in awakening.”  Darrow, she noted, “is delivering a tough, vulnerable performance” as John and the “riveting” Barbara Walsh makes Mrs. Winemiller “one of this Summer and Smoke’s brilliant surprises.”  The New York review-writer was pleased that Cummings and Laffrey didn’t pay any attention to the playwright’s detailed suggestions about the physical design of Summer and Smoke, providing only “a wall-less box that evokes both spartan purity and, despite its open sides, claustrophobia.”  She affirmed that “Cummings knows how little fuss-and-stuff a richly layered piece of writing needs to work on stage,” finding that “the play’s elegant staging is a lesson in trimming the fat.” 

In Time Out New York (another 90), Helen Shaw exclaimed, “Transport Group and Classic Stage Company's exquisite version is strong enough to power a rocket into orbit—and that’s without mentioning the gigantic performance at its center.”  That performance, of course, is Ireland’s and she “plays Alma Winemiller as though the part had been written for her, and as though it had been written yesterday; her Alma is at once radiant and frightening, as heart-stopping as a painting that looks up and catches your eye.”  Shaw declared Darrow “superb” and asserted, “The show is a painful dance between the two.”  She described designer Laffrey’s “cantilevered white roof-and-floor set” as “a tomb with the lid lowering into place” and felt that director Cummings “has taken away the heavy stuff of production so we can focus on—and have our hearts broken by—all those invisible shimmering things.”  The TONY reviewer left us with the thought that “the show does cling to you, hanging around you like a haze even once you’re blocks away.”

Pronouncing this Summer and Smoke revival “sultry and sensitive” (and “far superior” to all other recent revivals), Broadway World’s Michael Dale loaded his notice (yet another 90) with praise of Ireland, declaring her “one of the absolute best actors to regularly grace New York stages during this century.”  Dale proclaimed that Ireland is “so good” as Alma that “she just might have you leaving the theatre thinking that SUMMER AND SMOKE should be regarded right up there with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE as one of the playwright’s master works.”  Darrow, the BWW review-writer said, gives a “nicely underplayed performance” and the ensemble is “fine.”  The director “creates a minimalist production that effectively focuses on Williams’ words and the captivating performances.” 

On New York Stage Review (still another 90), David Finkle dubbed Cummings’s production of Summer and Smoke a “first-rate, top-drawer, A-number-one revival” with the “treamwork” of “nothing less than the best tandem performance currently available on a New York City stage” as the center of the production.  All this was an excuse for Finkle to say (surprise!) that Ireland has “quietly announced herself as one of the City’s most astonishing players—maybe the best.  As the nervous, uncertain, giddy to the verge of frequent hysteria Alma, she gives her best performance yet.”  Finkle asserted, “Distinguished by an inner glow, she inhabits Alma,” but added, “Just as astonishing is Darrow as” John.  Eliciting “courageous performances” from his cast, Cummings, insisted Finkle, “works . . . at the height of his substantial powers.”

Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania characterized the CSC Summer and Smoke as a “scorching revival” that “smolders with unsatisfied longing thanks to powerful performances and a handsomely pared-down staging by” director Cummings.  Ireland is “commanding” and Darrow exudes the “languid confidence of one who knows he doesn't have to try very hard to be adored.” “A drama of unexpected richness,” Stewart concluded, “Summer and Smoke reaches full bloom in this glorious production” which the TM reviewer observed Cummings “stages . . . with brutal simplicity.”

“Under Jack Cummings III’s careful direction, the cast captures the essence of” Summer and Smoke, said David Roberts of Theatre Reviews Limited.  “Each member of the ensemble cast develops her or his character with sensitivity,” found Roberts, “and each delivers an authentic and believable performance.”  In sum, this Summer and Smoke “is given a captivating interpretation in this well thought out production.”  Fern Siegel of TheaterScene.com dubbed Cummings’s interpretation of Williams’s play “an interesting, stripped-down” production in which Ireland “delivers a standout performance,” though Darrow “does not equal Ireland’s nuanced efforts.”  Cummings’s direction is “minimalist,” but “compelling scenes and a capable ensemble grip our attention.”  Siegel ends by stating that “it is a calibrated Ireland who deserves the shout out this round.”

Jonathan Mandell labels Summer and Smoke at CSC “a minimalist” production “which feels neither classic nor transporting” on New York Theater.  Taking exception to Cummings program statement that he wants to “return the focus back on the actor and the writing,” Mandell contended that “ironically the staging has the opposite effect.”  He argued, “The writing and the acting would certainly be more affecting in the CSC/Transport production, however, if it weren’t for the distraction of the staging.”  Laffrey’s set, the New York Theater writer reported, “looks like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie about life in a spaceship.”  Miming the props didn’t work for Mandell for several reasons.  In “a fine 12-member cast,” however, Ireland is the “clear standout.” 

JK Clarke of Theater Pizzazz found that Cummings’s “hyper-minimalist approach diminishes” the “inspired” performances of several of the cast.  Clarke also wondered why, with the “beautiful and impressive period costumes (Kathryn Rohe), the stark ecru-and cream rectangular set looks like the ladies footwear department at Bloomingdales, circa 1979.”  The TP reviewer also found the miming of the props “on the whole is [more] distracting than instructive, and doesn’t seem to augment the story in any way.”  Ireland, Clarke felt, “inhabits Alma beautifully, but the strange, austere production design distracts from her character’s development.”  Quoting Mrs. Winemiller’s line “The pieces don’t fit!” Clarke pointed out, “They don’t.” 

The “superb Marin Ireland” gives “a performance of heartbreaking intensity and meticulous desperation” in Summer and Smoke, “joined by Nathan Darrow who . . ., too, is sensational in an almost impossible role,” proclaimed David Hurst on Talkin’ Broadway.  “It's a shame Cumming[s]’s oddly directly production isn’t as electrifying as its stars and their game supporting cast.”  Hurst complained that the director’s “stark concept for this revival” is bereft of “the traditional elements of any Summer and Smoke production.”  He also objected to the miming of the props.  Like so many other reviewers, Hurst lavished praise on Ireland, but in the end he had this to sat about the production overall:

In addition to lots of clumsy blocking, it’s a shame so many distractions of Cumming[s]’s making pull the audience out of the action and away from the story.  Why isn’t the cast using props?  I can forgive the spartan set (though it does nothing to help the story), and all the white lighting, but why have detailed, period costumes with no props.  Can you give John a stethoscope and, for goodness sake, let Alma have a pair of gloves?  And can Mrs. Winemiller please have a hat with a plume?  What does such a decision serve.  It’s bad enough they’re performing in a white cube of sterility and colorlessness, but then you force them to do all this crazy pantomiming.  It’s a testament to how wonderful the cast is that Summer and Smoke remains as affecting and moving as Williams no doubt hoped it would be. 

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer, who admitted she’s admired Cummings “for years,” labeled this Summer and Smoke “sluggish” and “disappointing” and complained that “minimalism . . . can distract as is the case here by keeping the audience so focused on trying to figure out what’s happening and where we are.”  Nonetheless, Sommer found the “performances at CSC . . . seemed to be in good hands” with a “solidly cast” ensemble and (once again) singled out Ireland, who “has the acting chops to be [a] riveting Alma.”  (Sommer was also peeved because CSC has started an “annoying custom of not handing out programs until after the show.”  I couldn’t agree more!)  The review-writer concluded by observing, “Even in a disappointing production like this, Williams’s language still gives Ireland’s Alma an opportunity to break our hearts.”

Of Cummings’s production of Summer and Smoke, Samuel L. Leiter declared on Theatre’s Leiter Side, “It’s very likely . . . that, if Summer and Smoke’s lugubrious current Off-Broadway revival . . . were its premiere, it would suffer a fate worse than that of the original.”  Cummings, Leiter observed, follows an aesthetic of “paring shows down to their minimum” claiming that “the point of his sometimes daringly reconceiving familiar plays is to highlight the actors’ work.”  The TLS blogger proclaimed, “In Summer and Smoke, though, he seriously misfires.”  Leiter complained, “Removing all traces of traditional investiture and treating the play as if it were a cousin of the noh theatre completely deprives it of all-important atmosphere . . . and specificity of locale.”  (Leiter is an expert on Japanese theater, including Noh, and had published several books on the subject.)  One of the few reviewers who was displeased with Ireland’s performance, Leiter stated: “As Alma, the usually exciting Marin Ireland does a lot of acting, with numerous emotional transitions, but fails to conjure up the image of a wounded, soulful woman devolving into a creature of the flesh.”  The blogger finished by lamenting, “The uneven supporting cast is mildly satisfactory but, hampered by Cummings’s approach and the lack of a compelling Alma and John, it’s simply not strong enough to sustain interest in this doleful revival.”

In Show-Score’s lowest-rated notice (45), David Kaufman of TheaterScene.net (not to be confused with TheaterScene.com, quoted above) posited that Cummings’s Summer and Smoke “never rises above the play’s failure [in 1948] to become something of an accomplished piece.”  Kaufman complained about the lack of a set and that “the many players (a dozen in all) are often reduced to charades, as they describe a new gaudy hat, or a jigsaw puzzle, or gloves.”  He complimented Ireland somewhat wanly when he observed that “Alma is here played by Marin Ireland with appropriately scenery-chewing effects.” 

[I want to add two comments that don’t really fit in the report above.  One’s a simple complaint (already stated by reviewer Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp: I found that policy of not handing out programs until after the performance annoying and arrogant.  I like to read the program before the show and I like to be able to consult it at intermission.  That’s especially true if, like the CSC program for Summer and Smoke, there are informative essays or articles about the play or production.  But even if all there is are the credits, I still like to look them over to see if there are any actors or other artists whose work I know from before—or new artists about whom I know little.  I usually take my seat in the auditorium several minutes before the performance starts so I can look through the program.  It’s arrogant of the theater’s leadership to take that traditional activity away from me on spurious grounds that programs are some kind of distraction!

[The other note I want to make is about the plumed hat mentioned both in the play and in my report.  This is an interesting little bit of symbolism relating to Tennessee Williams view of himself and his family heritage.  Williams saw the two branches of his family, the Dakins (his mother’s side) and the Williamses (his father’s side) as descendents of the Puritans on the one hand and Cavaliers on the other.  He believed that his own nature was torn by a conflict between these two sides of his personality—represented in Summer and Smoke by Alma (Puritan) and John (Cavalier).  “Roughly there was a combination of puritan and Cavalier strains in my blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write about,” the playwright wrote in 1952.  The hat with a plume is a symbol of the Cavalier side of Tennessee Williams’s nature; that’s why it’s in the play at all.  By the way, this isn’t a comment on the CSC production.  I just find it a fascinating little fillip and I wanted to share it.]

Getting from 'Summer and Smoke' to 'Eccentricities'

I suppose most people, especially anyone reading an ostensibly theater blog, knows that Tennessee Williams’s mid-century plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are related texts.  If you read my blog post “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale” (20 March 2010), you certainly know this.  That article recounts some of the process by which Williams developed Summer and Smoke and then transformed it into Eccentricities.  There’s a good deal more to that progression, however, and it’s much more complex and intricate than a superficial account suggests.  From my research on the two plays, which resulted in the chapter on them in Phillip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood Press, 1998) and “The Lost Première” (Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Spring 1999), I’ve pieced together the story of that nearly unique circumstance.

Tennessee Williams was a habitual rewriter and recycler.  Many of his plays were developed through several versions and forms.  Quite a number started out as short stories (the 1961 play Night of the Iguana was adapted from a 1948 story of the same title), others as one-acts (1952’s The Enemy: Time became Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959, and the 1953 full-length Camino Real started as the one-act Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in 1949), and one famously began life as a screenplay (The Gentleman Caller for MGM in 1943 was the basis for The Glass Menagerie in 1944).  Almost all of Williams’s plays exist in two or more variations, usually considered an "acting" version for production and a literary version for reading (Summer and Smoke is one of these; the Broadway première in 1948 generated the shorter text, but José Quintero’s long-running Off-Broadway revival in 1952 was produced from the longer, “reading” edition); however, a few even rendered two separate scripts with different titles after the playwright revised and rewrote them, often after initial productions.  Seventeen years after Battle of Angles, Williams’s first professionally produced play, closed on opening night in Boston in 1940, his revised “new play based on an old one,” Orpheus Descending, opened on Broadway.  (I’m not even counting here the plays Williams used as the bases for films such as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, 1946, which the dramatist redeveloped for the movie Baby Doll in 1956, or The Fugitive Kind, Williams’s 1959 film adaptation of Orpheus Descending—using a title he borrowed from a 1937 play of his with a completely different plot.) 

Williams authority Nancy Tischler wrote that the playwright “does not abandon an unsuccessful or incomplete work”: “I revise continually, because I’m never quite satisfied,” the dramatist himself attested.  “Finishing a play, you know, is like completing a marriage or a love affair,” he once said.  “You feel very forsaken by that, that’s why I love revising and revising, because it delays the moment when there is this separation between you and the work.”  In his introduction to Williams’s Collected Stories (1985), many of whose pieces had been reworked a dozen times or more over many years, Gore Vidal asserted: “I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published.  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘rewrite what’s already in print?’  He looked at me, vaguely, then said, ‘Well, obviously it’s not finished.’”  He was such an inveterate reworker that one of his friends dubbed him “Tenacity” Williams. 

But no other of Williams’s plays resulted in two independent scripts that generated such impassioned comparisons and which are still today seen as competing texts for the attention and admiration of theater professionals and audiences than Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  In fact, the one-act predecessors of the full-length plays we know are almost never staged (Ten Blocks is performed in schools as if it were a cut-down version of Camino Real) and Battle of Angels, the early version of the better-known Orpheus Descending, is not in many theaters’ repertoires since it failed the first time around.  Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities, however, are both fairly frequently produced and there’s a rigorous debate every time one is staged about which play is better and which one people like more.  (In Williams’s estimation, Eccentricities “is less conventional and melodramatic,” but which is “better” is pretty much a toss-up, depending entirely on taste and personal interest.  Even Williams vacillated.)  Among Tennessee Williams’s works, that only occurs with regard to these two plays, and the wonderful things is—both scripts are readily available for production or reading.  (When I did a production of The Wood Demon, Anton Chekhov’s early version of Uncle Vanya, in 1976, we had to use a photocopy of the translation prepared for the Actors’ Company’s U.K. revival because the published text was long out of print.  Even the Russian-language version, which I consulted, was hard to locate.)  A few other playwrights have multiple versions of related plays in print, such as William Inge, who rewrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1957) into the more obscure Summer Brave (1962; produced 1975), which was actually an early version of the better-known script that Inge resuscitated (if you can follow that), but even here the second in the pair is seldom done and little known. 

All this makes the pairing of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale all the more fascinating to examine.  Not just why did Williams go from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities—a simple (and incomplete) answer to that would be that Summer failed in its first Broadway outing—but how did he get from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities?  The explanation, in my analysis, has as much, if not more, to do with the great writer’s personality as it does with circumstances and professional considerations.

In order to lay out the transformation as I perceive it, I have to recover some of the ground I reported superficially in “The Lost Première.”  Bear with me if you’ve already read this; it all links up in the end.

Williams developed Summer and Smoke from a short story, “The Yellow Bird,” published in 1947, which introduces Alma Tutwiler (the name Winemiller first appears in the short story “One Arm,” published in 1948) as an incipient spinster and daughter of a small-town Southern minister.  Aside from literary recycling, most of Williams’s writing also contains elements of his life and the lives of his family and neighbors, but next to the specifically autobiographical Glass Menagerie, none of the dramatist’s major plays are as tied to his private history as are the two Alma Winemiller plays.  The character of Alma, for instance, contains elements of both Williams’s mother, Edwina, who in her youth had been called a nightingale, and his cherished sister, Rose; the egocentric hedonist of Summer and Smoke, John, is a portrait of Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, the traveling salesman who preferred carousing to domesticity, and at the same time, the elder Dr. Buchanan, a remote and cold father, depicts another aspect of C. C. Williams.  The Reverend Winemiller is inspired by (but not a portrait of) Williams’s beloved grandfather, Rev. Walter Dakin.  (Port Gibson, Mississippi, where Reverend Dakin served as Episcopal minister from 1902-05, had a famous landmark: the steeple of the Presbyterian church was topped by “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven,” as Alma describes her father’s Glorious Hill Episcopal church in Eccentricities.)  The foundation of Summer and Smoke, in fact, are the tales of Edwina Williams about her youth in Port Gibson and Natchez, Mississippi.

In 1916, the year in which the play is set, the Williamses were living with Edwina’s parents, Walter and Rose Otte Dakin, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the town which became Glorious Hill.  Like Reverend Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, Reverend Dakin was the Episcopal minister of the town and like “The Nightingale of the Delta,” Williams grew up at the rectory.  Reverend Dakin’s father had been a small-town doctor like the Drs. Buchanan and Rose Dakin had taught piano and voice like Alma.  There were Tutwilers in Clarksdale, and other names from Williams’s life appear in the play: Williams’s own first love was Hazel Kramer and the salesman in Summer and Smoke is Archie Kramer (who, like the playwright’s father, is a commercial drummer for a shoe company); Rosa Gonzales shares her first name with Williams’s sister and grandmother; and Williams, himself, had a hot-tempered lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez (the inspiration for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire), in the 1940’s. 

Williams began composing Summer and Smoke, originally entitled A Chart of Anatomy, in St. Louis as early as February or March 1944.  As was his habit, he continued to work on the script—in 1945 in Mexico, where he went to recuperate from a cataract operation, and in Texas, where he met with Margo Jones in Dallas; in New Orleans; in Taos, New Mexico; on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in 1946, where he shared a cottage with Carson McCullers while she dramatized her novel The Member of the Wedding; and on until well after its successful Dallas première in 1947.  (A typescript of Summer and Smoke in the theater archive of New York Public Library is labeled “Rome Version (March 1948)” and hand-annotated “Produced by Margo Jones at the Music Box Theatre, 6 October, 1948.”)

Summer and Smoke’s world première was presented by Jones and her Theatre ’47 at the Gulf Oil Theatre in Dallas on 8 July 1947. The original cast included Katherine Balfour as Alma and Tod Andrews as John, with the appearance of Jack Warden as the waiter at the Moon Lake Casino.  It was a significant success, garnering even a laudatory review in the New York Times and extending its scheduled run, but because Streetcar had already opened on Broadway that December, the transfer of Summer and Smoke to New York’s Music Box Theatre was delayed until 6 October 1948, when nearly every critic unfavorably compared it not only to Streetcar but also to The Glass Menagerie.  Though they praised Jo Mielziner’s set and the performance of Margaret Phillips, who replaced Balfour as Alma, the production closed on 1 January 1949 after 100 performances.  (The production marked an early appearance of Anne Jackson, who played Nellie Ewell.)

Most critics condemned Williams for re-covering in Summer and Smoke the ground he previously covered more movingly and magically in Menagerie and more dynamically and powerfully in Streetcar.  Alma was seen as a wan successor to Laura and a pale precursor to Blanche, and some reviews felt that Williams had overlooked the characters in favor of a theme which becomes unclear because the characters don’t actually represent the ideas Williams intended to place in opposition.  The overall point was often deemed too obvious, with schematic characters representing superficial traits making a simplistic statement.  Several critics remarked that Summer and Smoke’s short scenes don’t cohere into a whole drama.  The play’s too symmetrical and too pat, they said, and the reversals too neat; Williams, some charged, had composed an elementary psychology lecture, not a play, because the text is larded with such obvious symbols. 

Having sailed for Gibraltar in December 1948 with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo (the basis for Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo), and his friend, writer-composer Paul Bowles (who composed the music for Summer and Smoke), Williams was in Fez, Morocco, when he received the telegram announcing the closing.  He was depressed, according to his brother Dakin, but the character of Alma Winemiller was indelibly imprinted on his soul.  Indeed, Alma means ‘soul’ in Spanish, as Williams points out in the script, and the character was, indeed, the writer’s soulmate.  She “seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” he wrote, and later, during rehearsals for the Broadway premiere of Eccentricities, Williams candidly acknowledged, “Look, I’m Alma.”  As Williams explained, “You’re totally absorbed in the play or the novel or the piece of writing” so that it becomes “the center of your life.”  Williams confessed once that “I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”  That suggests that once having conceived of this desire, it was hard, even perhaps impossible to let it go.  I don’t know which character in Summer and Smoke would have attracted the playwright physically—perhaps John Buchanan, Jr.—but Williams frequently acknowledged that his emotional connection to this story was the Nightingale of the Delta, and that relationship was likely just as compelling for the writer as physical attraction.  Numerous critics have asserted that Alma was Williams’s favorite character of all those he created, including Blanche, Laura, and Maggie the Cat.  Even Williams himself admitted, “Alma is my favorite—because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle.”  He could not let her go.

Ronald Hastings, theatre correspondent of London’s Daily Telegraph in the 1960s and ’70s, reported that Williams “did not, eventually, like his play, but he liked the characters and decided to write another play for them.”  So, while on one of his frequent retreats to Rome in the summer of 1951, the dramatist continued to rework Summer and Smoke.  Correspondence from Williams to producer Cheryl Crawford and his agent Audrey Wood between January and September 1951 affirm that he’d completed a new version of the script. 

Around New Years 1951, Williams wrote Crawford, who was producing The Rose Tattoo on Broadway at the time, “I am still working on the new ‘Summer’.  It has turned into a totally new play, even the conception of the characters is different,” and in June, he wrote: “I am doing a completely new version, even changing the title as it now takes place in winter, and I think I have a straight, clean dramatic line for the first time, without the cloudy metaphysics and the melodrama that spoiled the original production.”  By August, Williams was writing to Wood that he’d completed a draft of the new script, which he was still calling Summer and Smoke, and by September, he must have finished the revision because he wrote Crawford that he didn’t know which version the London company would present, “the new or old one.” 

Producer H. M. Tennant’s London première of Summer on 22 November was already in preparation by this time, but Williams rushed off with his new version of the play.  His friend Maria Britneva, who was playing Rosemary at the Lyric Theatre, met the writer at the airport but he arrived too late to substitute the new script for the one Britneva explained was “already deep into rehearsals” under the direction of Peter Glenville (who, ten years later, would direct the film version).  “Crestfallen,” as Williams described himself at the bad timing, the playwright recounts that his friend told him, “Give me the new play and I’ll put it safely away . . . .”  That script, which Williams says he didn’t see again for “10 or 15 years,” the dramatist insists was The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  

I found no archival evidence that Williams focused on Eccentricities, under either its old or new title, between 1951 and 1961, so apparently Britneva, a model for Maggie the Cat of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, did keep the script hidden away during the intervening decade.  There doesn’t seem to be any existing typescript of the revised Summer and Smoke dated 1951 or 1952 in any archive I could search; the latest Summer and Smoke script of which I know is the 1948 “Rome Version” and the earliest Eccentricities edition is a 1961 text in the NYPL and New Directions archives.  So Williams appears to have returned to his new Alma play in about 1961.  A typescript of Eccentricities in the NYPL is dated 20 June 1961, and letters in 1963 and 1964 to Robert MacGregor and Jay Laughlin at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, state that he was working again on the play he now called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  Except for a subtitle—The Sun That Warms the Dark (A very odd little play)—the typescript is nearly identical to the published 1964 text.  A duplicate typescript is in the New Directions archive, but it was marked for typesetting.  One change from the NYPL copy is that the subtitle had been crossed out, indicating that it never again appeared on any version of the play—which, with one exception, it didn’t.

In any event, Williams reworked the new play between at least 1961 and its première in 1964.  (Even though by this time, the play was officially entitled Eccentricities of a Nightingale, many people still referred to it as Summer and Smoke.)  New Directions announced in June 1964 the publication of a single volume to comprise the texts of both Alma plays and the New York Times’ report of the forthcoming publication noted that the new play would receive its première later in the month.  The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premiered at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York, on 25 June 1964 under the direction of George Keathley.  Edie Adams, star of TV variety shows and Broadway musicals, was cast as Alma and Alan Mixon played John.  Because of an early-morning backstage fire at the theater, however, the play’s scheduled Broadway try-out of 10 days was truncated after the Friday night performance on 26 June.  Eccentricities of a Nightingale got a world première of two performances.

There wasn’t a lot of critical coverage for the début.  The only New York City paper which reviewed the Tappan Zee Playhouse opening of a new play by one of America’s most renowned and respected playwrights was the New York World-Telegram and Sun.  Review-writer Norman Nadel complained that “‘Summer and Smoke’ never looked better than it does in comparison with this revision” and that Williams “has made Alma and the play more, rather than less melodramatic.”  Nyack’s own Rockland County Journal-News touted the “excitement” of seeing “variations on a familiar theme” in Williams’s new version of Summer and Smoke with the “added fillip” of “a new play, still in try-out.”  Reviewer Mariruth Campbell, citing part of the subtitle in the production’s program, confirmed that Eccentricities was, indeed, “a very odd little play”—the Nyack production was, in fact, the only one that ever carried the subtitle as it appears on the title page of the NYPL collection’s typescript.  Campbell objected that the play was “over-long” and noted that the cast “[a]ll worked valiantly to breathe life” into the play. 

Nevertheless, the new Alma play was launched, and publication followed in February 1965.  Over the rest of the decade, there were revivals and regional premières of Williams’s new play, and the British début was staged on 10 October 1967 at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, Surrey, directed by Philip Wiseman with Sian Phillips as Alma and Kevin Colson as John.  Then on 16 June 1976, the play’s profile was considerably raised when it was aired on PBS for Great Performances’ Theatre in America, in collaboration with San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, starring Blythe Danner as Alma and Frank Langella as John, directed by Glenn Jordan.  Following that broadcast, which Williams himself pronounced his “most successful” television adaptation, a staging at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre starring Betsy Palmer as Alma and David Selby as John was transferred to Broadway’s Morosco Theatre for a long-awaited New York City première on 23 November 1976.  Directed by Edwin Sherin, who’d staged a Long Island revival eight years earlier, the play was not well received in New York despite a successful run in Buffalo, with evaluations ranging from “a pleasing, small play” to “a pale outline of a play” whose “production was in every way substandard.”  Clive Barnes, on the other hand, wrote in the New York Times that while he’d expected Eccentricities just to be “a rewrite of Summer and Smoke,” he was surprised to find “a different play with different characters and even a different theme.”  Williams “new work effectively knocks Summer and Smoke off the map,” Barnes declared, “except as a literary curiosity.”  The Times reviewer concluded, “This is a warm, rich play full of that compassion and understanding and that simple poetry of the heart that is Mr. Williams at his shining, gentle best.  It may be an eccentric nightingale but its tune is still sweet.”  Brother Dakin recalls that Williams felt good about Barnes’s response: “It was the best Broadway reaction he had received in a long time.”  Nevertheless, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale on Broadway closed on 12 December after eight previews and only 12 regular performances. 

Among the differences between Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, possibly the most discussed are the changes Alma and John undergo.  Alma, it has been observed, evolves from hyper-conventional and old-fashioned but essentially normal to truly eccentric.  John, on the other hand, mellows from a rebellious, hedonistic egocentric to a decent, if somewhat dull, young man.  The other significant alteration is the replacement of John’s father in Summer and Smoke with his mother in Eccentricities. 

We have seen that both John and his father are, in part, depictions of Williams’s own father, the man who called him “Miss Nancy” and lost part of an ear in a fight over a card game.  Shortly before C. C. Williams’s death in 1957, Williams acknowledged, he stopped hating him and began to understand, even love him.  This adjustment, Williams has confessed, resulted from treatment by Lawrence Kubie, a Freudian psychoanalyst he began seeing in 1957.  As a consequence of his treatment, Williams asserted, “I felt like a great load was lifted from my mind.”

Williams saw Kubie every weekday for nearly a year, and, according to Williams biographer Ronald Hayman, Kubie even telephoned his patient on Saturdays and Sundays to check on him.  During the time of this treatment, the writer also began to become estranged from his mother, whom he had adored as a child just as he had hated his father.  He described the shift in a 1961 radio interview with writer Studs Terkel: “My homelife was dominated by a very wonderful but rather puritanical mother, who was in conflict with a very wonderful but rather profligate father. . . .  First I sided with the mother’s side and then after my father’s death, for some strange reason, I began to see his point of view better.”  Under analysis, Williams came to see that his very survival had depended on his father’s fighting spirit, inherited, according to family lore, from 18th-century East Tennessee Indian fighters like John Sevier (Revolutionary War officer and first governor of the State of Tennessee), and the playwright himself later wrote of C. C. Williams: “I wonder if he knew, and I suspect that he did, that he left me something far more important [than inherited money], which was his blood in my veins?  And of course I wonder, too, of there wasn’t more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.”

As for Williams’s feelings toward his mother, he came to blame Edwina for allowing his beloved sister’s lobotomy, which left Rose a hopeless invalid, surviving in what Dakin Williams said his brother “considered . . . a kind of living death.”  Williams also felt that Edwina, whom the playwright called in his 1975 Memoirs “a little Prussian officer in drag,” had alienated him from his father and “that my mother had made me a sissy.”  Under analysis, his affections shifted as did the personas of the parental villains in the Alma plays, from the remote and absent father in Summer and Smoke to the imperious and controlling mother in Eccentricities of a Nightingale.  A similarly striking change for the worse takes place between the Mrs. Winemiller of Summer and Smoke, whom critic Felicia Londré characterizes as “a querulous and perverse child,” and the Mrs. Winemiller of Eccentricities, who’s become “a social liability.”   

As Williams biographer Lyle Leverich asserts:

Although Tom’s mother and grandmother were giving him the concrete support he needed, paradoxically it was not so much their inspiration as his rage against his father that inflamed his burning desire to write.  Tennessee Williams’s career could be called an act of revenge, until at length he entered analysis, understood his sublimated love for his deceased father, and turned his anger on his mother, thus changing the character of his plays.

It seems clear that Kubie’s influence on Williams’s feelings for his parents are reflected in the shifts in character manifested in the reworking of Summer and Smoke into Eccentricities.  I contend that though he may have begun the new play in 1951, he certainly continued to work on it during the years he underwent psychoanalysis or just afterwards when he was still under the psychoanalyst’s Freudian influence, and the completed script illustrates the new-found Freudian outlook.  Indeed, Williams acknowledged that his plays “reflect somehow the particular psychological turmoil I was going through when I wrote them.”  Without a copy of the earlier revision from 1951 or ’52, it’s impossible to know for sure if that’s so, but that’s my sense of Williams’s process. 

Rather than a cold and distant father, for instance, John now has a dominating, controlling mother, the “heavy” that theater historian W. David Sievers pointed to in his psychoanalysis of the American stage as a Freudian figure.  John’s relationship with Mrs. Buchanan in Eccentricities  is nearly classic Oedipalism, a distinctly Freudian concept.  (It is also significant that Mrs. Winemiller transforms from a childlike personality to a potentially destructive one.  Compare, also, the pre-analysis mother, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, 1944, with the post-analysis Eccentricities mothers.  The most salient manifestation of this attitude change is Violet Venable, Sebastian’s dragon-lady mother in Suddenly, Last Summer, 1958.)  Sievers also identifies as Freudian developments “the dethroning of motherhood and the liberation of children from possessive parents,” both of which appear in Eccentricities but not so much in Summer and Smoke.  John, himself, is no longer the undisciplined savage that was Williams’s other image of his father.  Together, Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale are a study of a shifting parent-child relationship, a depiction of Williams’s own vacillating allegiance.

With the elimination of the fiery Gonzaleses, furthermore, the violence of Summer and Smoke is also eliminated in Eccentricities .  (The Daily Telegraph announcement of the British première of Eccentricities was even entitled “Unviolent Williams.”)  There’s no longer, for instance, a stabbing or shooting, and the Moon Lake Casino episode has been replaced with a visit to a cheap hotel.  The excision of the violence of Summer and Smoke, a hallmark of Williams writing since the beginning, from Eccentricities  was almost certainly also a direct response to Williams’s treatment under Kubie.  “If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people and violent material,” Williams acknowledged in a 1958 interview in the New York Herald Tribune.  (This outcome of the psychoanalysis didn’t last long, as Williams returned to writing about violence in later plays like Suddenly, Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth.  In 1959, after the playwright had stopped seeing Kubie, he wrote that in the previous 19 years, “I have only produced five plays that are not violent: The Glass Menagerie, You Touched Me, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo and, recently in Florida, a serious comedy called Period of Adjustment, which is still being worked on.”  Most critics would argue with his appraisal of Summer and Smoke—unless, of course, the playwright meant the “new” Summer and Smoke  which was actually Eccentricities of a Nightingale and which had been stashed away by this time for eight years.)

Another shift that takes place between Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities is the one from a summer setting to a winter one.  It’s less clear that Kubie’s therapy had an effect on this change, especially since Williams noted that it had already taken place in the 1951 script on which he was working in Rome that June.  Nevertheless, it reflects a change in the writer’s psychological adjustment—as well as the manifestation of his lifelong bugaboo, the destructiveness of “life’s destroyer, time.”  As Williams said to New York Post writer Robert Rice in 1958: “It haunts me, the passage of time. . . .  I think time is a merciless thing.  I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.”  (Remember that his one-act precursor to Sweet Bird was entitled The Enemy: Time.)  Summer and winter echo the two aspects of Alma: fire and ice, and the passage from one to the other accompanies Alma’s passing from “brief bloom to . . . decay.”

With the change from a summer setting to a winter one came also the title change.  With that was also the elimination of a focus, almost an obsession, in which Williams engaged in Summer and Smoke: the life, and particularly the death by suicide, of poet Hart Crane.  The title of Summer and Smoke is adapted from a line from Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” and Crane, a homosexual like Williams, drowned himself on 27 April 1932 in a moment of deep despair by throwing himself overboard while aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico.  (The line, “By that time summer and smoke were past,” is from a stanza that seems to predict the poet’s own death.)  Williams viewed Crane’s struggle to confront a hostile and indifferent world as a reflection of his own and even left instructions, which were ignored, that his body should be buried at sea near where Crane is believed to have drowned.  In the 1937 one-act play Escape (presented under the title Summer at the Lake for its 2004 New York première; see my report, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” 5 March 2011), Williams depicts a young man who swims out into the sea to his death, a clear reference to Crane’s suicide, an act with which Williams was preoccupied.  All this is gone from Eccentricities and I suspect that Kubie’s treatment had something to do with why Williams deemphasized the poet’s watery death—perhaps because he’d come to know himself better. 

Williams consistently identified two conflicting strains in his nature: the Puritan, representing the gentler, poetic side of his character, inherited, he felt, from the Dakin line of his family, as embodied by his mother, versus the Cavalier, vital, dynamic, even violent, side passed down through the Sevier-Lanier-Williams line, personified by his father.  One reason, I think, that Summer and Smoke  and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale were such important works for Williams, plays for which he had such a constant and irrepressible commitment, is that though this internal war plays out in most of his dramas (Blanche Du Bois-Stanley Kowalski; Lady Torrance-Val Xavier, Princess Kosmonopolis-Chance Wayne), in no texts other than the Alma plays is this conflict so front-and-center—dramatically, thematically, scenically, symbolically.  Dakin Williams even asserts that the Alma plays “would haunt him all his life.”  None of Williams other plays, including the autobiographical Glass Menagerie, is the dramatization of the playwright’s own inner struggle.  Kubie’s psychoanalysis may have shifted Williams’ allegiances to one side of his nature or the other, but the fundamental focus on the conflict remained from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities.  Alma Winemiller may have been Williams alter ego, his soulmate, but the plays were, quite literally, about the writer’s own soul.  No wonder he couldn’t let them go.