Istvan Dugalin

Dan Mousseau & bahia watson in Summer and Smoke | Photo by Dahlia Katz

“Life is full of little mercies like that, not big mercies but comfortable little mercies. And so we go on…”

That simmers there in your imagination too, I imagine, as you reflect on the ordinary blessings that sustain you through your time here. It’s one of many achingly beautiful sentiments expressed in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, presented in a thoroughly enchanting co-production from Crow’s Theatre, Soulpepper and Birdland Theatre. Like the gothic cathedral conjured in another of my favourite passages, director Paolo Santalucia’s lush staging is reaching upwards, as are the yearning characters, towards an unattainable ideal, and out towards us. 

And I fell eagerly into its embrace.

This is a sad and sultry love story, one that never quite blossoms, between the refined, passionate yet repressed Alma Winemiller (bahia watson) and John Buchanan Jr. (Dan Mousseau), a young doctor with a rebellious, carnal streak, returning to the quaint Southern town of Glorious Hill and his father’s local practice. As he did when they were children, he teases her relentlessly, but not out of maliciousness; he’s drawn to her, compelled to coax out an admission of her own animalistic urges. She, on the other hand, is concerned with his soul, and her own, hoping to uplift and entwine them.

Alma’s eccentric laugh and lofty chatter concerns her overly protective preacher father (empathetically rendered by Beau Dixon) and draws mockery from local women. Her affected speech and mannerisms, almost a caricature of a chaste and loquacious Southern belle, is genuinely amusing, though watson’s disarming and insistent portrayal reveals such desperate, unguarded sincerity and fierce purpose, the laughter she inspires feels acutely disrespectful.

In the most persuasive performance I’ve seen from Mousseau since his outrageously abject spectacle in Prodigal, I was wholly charmed by him here. As John playfully tests the boundary between Alma’s sensuality and self-restraint, he also indulges in a drunken, torrid entanglement with the libidinous Rosa Gonzales (urgently played by Bella Reyes) and goads his respectable father (an affable yet dignified Stuart Hughes). Mousseau allows us to see, beneath the confident exterior, the despair that drives his reckless provocations.

As this poetic melodrama plays out in a series of giddy, awkward, anguished episodes between them and invested onlookers, their attitudes gradually invert. This self-actualization is empowering for both of them, but in a pathetic twist of fate, their new trajectories only intensify the romantic distance between them, just as they are finally understanding each other.

Lorenzo Savoini’s minimalist set evokes both the American South, with its motif of hanging Spanish moss, and Williams’ key thematic symbolism—a stone angel, looming above our fragile humans, and an anatomical dummy, a corporeal fixture of the Buchanan household. John and Alma’s debate—the desires of the body versus the aspirations of the soul—is ancient and intimate and resonant. William’s lyrical text does a lot of heavy lifting, of course, but these poignant performances bring it onto the stage with visceral intensity. 

The lighting (also by Savoini) suggests the gloriously oppressive mugginess that surrounds and exacerbates the drama. In a thrilling flourish, bursts of colour explode across the venue’s high walls in an early scene—a vivid representation of fireworks, enhanced by Thomas Ryder Payne’s ambient sound design. Ming Wong’s period costumes, drenched in early twentieth-century Southern elegance, completes the sumptuous aesthetic. 

My favourite aspect of Santalucia’s kinetic and sensual vision is the nuanced and well-integrated musicality that echoes Williams’ lyricism. On both traditional and repurposed instruments, the ensemble, hidden in the murky recesses of this in-the-round staging, provide a haunting soundscape. Especially resonant is the percussive representation of Alma’s heartbeat when John places a stethoscope to her chest.

The supporting players, in multiple roles, fill in the textures of the life that surround Alma and John. In additional to Dixon, Rayes and Hughes, Amy Rutherford is simultaneously exasperating and pitiable as Alma’s traumatized and broken mother. Having regressed to a state of perpetual childlike impulse, her churlish outbursts could easily be cartoonish, but Rutherford grounds it with a discomfiting authenticity. Kaleb Horn is adorably nebbish as Alma’s intended beau (a member of her quirky little band of nerdy outcasts) and is entirely swoon-worthy as an idyllically boyish travelling salesmen who figures into the final scene—a wistful Williams’ trademark.

Santalucia closes this out with an ethereal (and moist) bit of theatrical punctuation that is so utterly perfect I all but gasped.

Summer and Smoke
February 3 to March 8, 2026
Streetcar Crowsnest, Guloien Theatre
(345 Carlaw Avenue)
2 hours, 45 minutes (including intermission)

Kaleb Horn & bahia watson in Summer and Smoke | Photo by Dahlia Katz