Review: SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER at Sorry Studios

In a small, intimate office space near Queen and Dufferin, Riot King’s production of one of Tennessee Williams’ lesser-performed plays, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, feels like you’ve been invited into someone’s living room.

To be precise, it’s the Southern Gothic, New Orleans living room of elderly Violet Venable (Elaine Lindo), whose last name, a mixture of venal and venerable, describes her exactly. Violet waxes poetic about her trips with her adult son Sebastian to Dr. Cukrowicz (Ryan Iwanicki), a psychiatrist she’s brought in to pass judgment on her niece Catharine’s (Lindsey Middleton) mental stability. Catharine was with Sebastian on one of his lavish vacations when he died: violently, unexpectedly, suddenly. Now, she’s saying things about the incident that seem to cast aspersions on her beloved noble poet of a child, and Violet’s had her temporarily institutionalized.

Violet believes that Catharine is a kind of usurper, replacing her in Sebastian’s life: younger, more malleable and marketable, she will also eventually inherit some of the family fortune. That’s the only interest Catharine’s grasping mother (Carling Tedesco) and whining, disaffected brother (Brendan Kinnon) seem to take in her situation and care. They pressure the traumatized Catharine to control herself, while Violet implores “Doctor Sugar” (his last name, in Polish) to take a more permanent, surgical solution to the problem.

While the melodramatic one-act play, which relies on such devices as truth serums, doesn’t quite reach the heights of his more famous work, mid-tier Williams is still rich with symbolism and dripping with poisoned-honey language. The play is a meditation on how people use and consume each other for their own ends, and its themes, though preserved in the trappings of the 1930s, are extremely relevant today.

It’s hard not to draw parallels between the encounter between the impoverished, naked children and Catharine and Sebastian on Cabeza de Lobo (a word that evokes both the starving wolf and the lobotomy that Violet desires for Catharine) and the tourists who currently refuse to leave Maui bars near the destroyed homes of Lahaina. Director Kathleen Welch’s production treats these themes with seriousness and care.

The small playing space is sparsely appointed, yet manages to evoke the feeling of a larger manor, particularly by the use of plants both inside and outside, seen through a large glass door. Bird sounds feel at once restful and disruptive, and the greenhouse-like setting induces the lazy sense of a cloud of sticky heat, even if the playing space is relatively temperate.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER is largely a two-hander showcase between Violet and Catharine, with the doctor providing the fulcrum between them. As such, its success rests on the balance between the two, and the gradual, slow shifts in the power balance between them. Lindo and Middleton deliver on this, particularly Middleton, whose nervous, twitchy Catharine belies the impact of not only surviving a traumatic experience, but of being disbelieved and silenced after its occurrence.

Middleton is constantly in motion, and compellingly tells her story even though it feels it is being dragged out of her. Lindo takes longer to warm up, but is effectively chilling when she turns crocodilian on a dime, turning from flattering the doctor to more than insinuating that any further funding depends on her getting the result she wants.

Dr. Cukrowicz has moments of outrage, but for all his character faces a terrible moral choice, he is underwritten, and is therefore hard to get a read on without clear direction. Here, he winds up coming across as rather passive even when directing the action, as though he has hypnotized himself.

He does feel more tethered to the proceedings than the rest, though; the minor characters feel like they are in a different play from the main pairing, which is not an issue of skill, but of tone. The choice to have Violet’s frightened maid (Shadan Rahbari) shriek her dialogue like a bird, for example, is a strong one tied thematically to the sound design; however, it shatters the atmosphere and therefore the spell of the show each time.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER is a difficult play to pull off on a small budget, and, despite some missteps, Riot King does an admirable job of capturing its compelling strangeness. While the story’s resolution may not sit comfortably for some, with its seeming confirmation that The Other is something savage to be feared, this is not meant to be a comfortable or moral story; it’s pure Gothic horror, a deadly orchid with a Venus flytrap underneath.

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Test and expand your Broadway knowledge with our new game - The Broadway Match-Up! How well do you know your Broadway casting trivia?	Play the Daily Game, explore current shows, and delve into past decades like the 2000s, 80s, and the Golden Age. Challenge your friends and see where you rank!
How well do you know your Tony Awards history? Take our never-ending quiz of nominations and winner history and challenge your friends.	Can you beat your friends? Play today’s daily Broadway word game, featuring a new theatrically inspired word or phrase every day!