Jobina Sitoh and Lindsey Middleton in ‘Suddenly Last Summer’, Photo by Danielle Thorn
Tennessee Williams’ self-proclaimed “most poetic play” has had a very special place in my psyche since my late teens. As the play is 65 years old, I feel no guilt spoiling the outrageous horror story at its core. It is worth debating, though, which is more horrific—the memory of a gory and scandalous incident or a delusional matriarch’s cruel response to it. Regardless, Riot King’s rich rendering of Suddenly Last Summer does full justice to the sensuality, dark comedy and simmering tension of Williams’ one-act.
We are taken back to the New Orleans of 1935. The venue, a small studio nestled in a quiet residential street in Parkdale, is an ideal found space. The back door and window overlooking a lush garden add striking authenticity to the set. Designer Brendan Kinnon extends the foliage into the interior and adds pockets of garish red light to suggest carnivorous intentions.
As the aging southern aristocrat, Violet Venable, Elaine Lindo is a delicate portrait of poise and practiced charm. Playing up her cane and wheelchair, her eyes darting strategically about, her frailty seems uncomfortably affected—not false, exactly, but certainly measured. Her demeanour with the handsome and soft-spoken Dr. Cukrowicz (Ryan Iwanicki) is both flirtatious and predatory. She has designs on him, but it isn’t romance that’s on her mind.
To protect the family name, she intends to quash the rumours about her dead son, Sebastian Venable. When their fierce attachment to each other had been threatened by a debilitating stroke, her niece had taken over as his travelling companion. This young woman, Catherine Holly (Lindsey Middleton), witnesses his grisly death at the hands and hungry mouths of some destitute boys in a coastal Spanish village. Rather than admit any truth in her ghastly account or allow herself to intuit her son’s intentions with these boys, Mrs. Venable pulls her socialite strings in a bid to get her niece lobotomized.
Just before the macabre incident is revealed, Williams’ play treats us to some family melodrama as Catherine’s mother, Mrs. Holly (Carling Tedesco) and her brother, George (Kinnon)—in financial desperation—try to convince her to change her story in the hopes that the late Sebastian’s will, which they stand to benefit from, will be taken out of probate.
Mrs. Venable holds all the cards and takes great pleasure in reminding them. As the Holly clan plead their case, Catherine is drugged and hypnotized into telling the whole sordid tale of Sebastian’s fate. Middleton’s manic, impassioned portrayal here is truly astonishing. The intense intimacy of the space puts us in close proximity to her flamboyant and abject delirium and the experience is quite stunning.
There is an acute sadness that pervades all of the outlandish, shrill hysteria. Nobody in the fraught situation gets what they want or finds any sort of peace during this awful night of damaged reputations and frustrated desires. Through it all, the imagined figure of Sebastian Venable haunts the scene—a distinctly exploitative, middle-aged aesthete who, despite his pretensions, evokes a tragic spirituality and forbearance.
I have many conflicted feelings towards the mythic figure of Sebastian Venable. And to all of the key players here. Williams was a master of troubling character studies framed with aching lyricism. Director Kathleen Welch’s resonant production captures all that smoldering complexity with carefully considered mise en scène.
Jobina Sitoh as Catherine’s hospital escort, Sister Felicity, and Shadan Rahbari as Mrs. Venable’s hired help, Miss Foxhill, fill out the cast. Rahbari’s portrayal is a stylistic outlier, though, and rather baffling. She’s been directed to cower and scamper about cartoonishly, her eyes wide and her voice an absurd squeak. It’s intended for comic effect, I guess, but it’s a distracting flourish. The only other drawback is the use of cigarettes; in the small venue, it’s so glaringly obvious that the actors are only pretending to light and smoke them.
Some foibles aside, the production is ultimately riveting.