Play: Suddenly Last Summer
Mar. 3rd, 2003 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI saw Suddenly Last Summer last night at the Berkeley Rep Theatre. It's a play by Tennessee Williams, set in the late 1930s, but written and released in the late 1950s.
Textually, the play is about repressed homosexuality and what exactly happened to Sebastian, the aforementioned repressed, middle-aged dilettante, who died the previous summer during his trip to Europe.
Subtextually, however, the play is really about the control of the truth, which has been a running theme this year at the Berkeley Rep Theatre (and, quite appropriately so, given how the Bush administration engages in more doublethink than we've ever seen outside of George Orwell, trying to convince us that we're fighting for justice not oil, that it's the terrorists who have destroyed our economy not the corporations and their lap-dog Republicans, and that up is down).
Suddenly Last Summer is arranged quite artfully into a diptych. The front half of the play centers around Sebastian's mother's recollections of her son, and the back half centers around the recollections of Cathy, Sebastian's cousin who went with him to Europe that year. Though an artful arrangement, it fades at least a little bit in the BRT production because the actress playing the mother didn't have the stage presence that the actress playing the cousin did, and so the diptych is heavily weighted.
Though I did appreciate the structure of the play and also its subtlety--it was one of those plays where you had to stop afterward and connect the dots to figure out the real motives behind the actions seen or described on stage--the actual content of the play was a bit pedestrian.
The slow revelation of Sebastian's homosexuality, of his using female relatives as "bait", and of how his aging causes him to lower his standards for partners with disastrous consequences, might have been scandalous to an audience in 1958, and perhaps still would be in the deep South, but in 2003 in Berkeley ... it wasn't.
BRT has been reviving some old plays this year, and this isn't the first time I've had a similar comment on the outdatedness of some of the productions, but perhaps the Rep is trying to clearly state that repression and manipulation of the truth are timeless problems which must be fought in every generation.
Textually, the play is about repressed homosexuality and what exactly happened to Sebastian, the aforementioned repressed, middle-aged dilettante, who died the previous summer during his trip to Europe.
Subtextually, however, the play is really about the control of the truth, which has been a running theme this year at the Berkeley Rep Theatre (and, quite appropriately so, given how the Bush administration engages in more doublethink than we've ever seen outside of George Orwell, trying to convince us that we're fighting for justice not oil, that it's the terrorists who have destroyed our economy not the corporations and their lap-dog Republicans, and that up is down).
Suddenly Last Summer is arranged quite artfully into a diptych. The front half of the play centers around Sebastian's mother's recollections of her son, and the back half centers around the recollections of Cathy, Sebastian's cousin who went with him to Europe that year. Though an artful arrangement, it fades at least a little bit in the BRT production because the actress playing the mother didn't have the stage presence that the actress playing the cousin did, and so the diptych is heavily weighted.
Though I did appreciate the structure of the play and also its subtlety--it was one of those plays where you had to stop afterward and connect the dots to figure out the real motives behind the actions seen or described on stage--the actual content of the play was a bit pedestrian.
The slow revelation of Sebastian's homosexuality, of his using female relatives as "bait", and of how his aging causes him to lower his standards for partners with disastrous consequences, might have been scandalous to an audience in 1958, and perhaps still would be in the deep South, but in 2003 in Berkeley ... it wasn't.
BRT has been reviving some old plays this year, and this isn't the first time I've had a similar comment on the outdatedness of some of the productions, but perhaps the Rep is trying to clearly state that repression and manipulation of the truth are timeless problems which must be fought in every generation.
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Huh
Date: 2003-03-06 05:50 am (UTC)Re: Huh
Date: 2003-03-06 03:41 pm (UTC)I didn't have any doubt from the text of the play that Sebastian was gay. In fact I was pretty stunned that this was released something like 15 years before Williams came out, because it seemed a pretty clear statement to me. In any case, Williams had to use language that was acceptable in the late 1950s, and thus it was all a bit more opaque than, say, Tales of the City.