Creepy and Strange, As It Should Be

You can’t beat "Suddenly Last Summer" — Tennessee Williams’ peculiar play about a linen-suited poet who writes one poem a year, like giving birth, his possessive mother, and his crazed cousin, both of whom he uses to procure young men — you can’t beat it for high-voltage melodrama.

But in spite of its absurdly cruel people, a great deal of talk (it’s a long 90 minutes), a central character who’s dead before the curtain rises and a spectacularly lurid finish, this TheatreWorks production is strong and rightly strange.

Oh well. Williams had a knack for bewitching audiences. He did it more exquisitely in "Glass Menagerie" and more conventionally in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." But "Suddenly Last Summer," a play with a lot of language and not much happening, has its own fascination: the actors. It’s all up to them.

Well, the actors and the designer, in this case Bill Hughes. The play’s set is "a well-groomed jungle," Dr. Cukrowicz (Jeremiah Maestas) observes, garlands of Spanish moss, a plant that eats meat, hooty bird sounds and a cupid fountain with water pouring from its eyes. Yep. Its eyes. It made the audience oooh as the stage lit up.

Maintaining all this creepy and ancient flora in a conservatory in New Orleans is Violet Venable (Noel Desiato). She is telling the doctor about the flesh-eating birds she saw with her son Sebastian in the Galapagos Islands, how they savaged the turtles escaping to the sea after laying their eggs in the sand.

And we learn, in Williams’ own good time, that Violet is set on having the doctor lobotomize Catharine, Sebastian’s cousin. Not only did Catharine take Violet’s place as the poet’s traveling companion (after a stroke rendered Violet less capable of drawing young men into their company), but Catharine returns after his death on a beach in Spain with ghastly stories of what happened.

Desiato, a seductive and regal Violet, demands not just the doctor’s attention, but ours, too. We can’t take our eyes from her. We are stunned by her power over people.

And we expect she will have no more difficulty in getting the doctor to lobotomize Catharine than she has in getting him to open her "reticule" and light her cigarette.

But the doctor, who can expect a large contribution to his clinic from Violet if he excises Catharine’s will, wants, nonetheless, to hear the young woman out.

Which is where this production runs into trouble. Casting Keilly Gillen McQuail as the wild, seductive maverick Catharine, is like turning Cleopatra into Tweety Bird. McQuail is a charming and unique actor. But she’s no Catharine, yet (nor is any actor who claims in her bio that she’s "psyched" to be playing this role).

So the finish of this production is a little lame, depending as it does on Catharine’s telling monologue.

But to watch Desiato is a treat; to watch Desiato with Maestas is another.