Theatre in Review: Summer and Smoke (Classic Stage Company/Transport Group)

	Nathan Darrow, Marin Ireland. Photo: Carol Rosegg

In many ways, Dane Laffrey's set for this new production of Summer and Smoke tells the tale: The designer has devised a white deck with a matching white dropped ceiling. Furniture is kept to a minimum, aside from half a dozen or so chairs. The fountain with a statue of an angel, a signature architectural feature of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, is a photo placed on an easel. The anatomical poster depicting the inner workings of the body, which also features in the action, will sit on another easel on the opposite end of the stage. It is, in many ways, a fine arena for the battle between the spirit and the body that constitutes the play's main event.

Of course, virtually every work by Tennessee Williams, our most Manichean playwright, is based on a such conflict, but, in Summer and Smoke, the division may be starker than usual, even if the drama is a tad muted. The contestants are a young man and woman who have known each other all their lives, and who are on a collision course that will transform them both. Alma Winemiller -- her first name is Spanish for "soul" -- is a minister's daughter drifting into spinsterhood. (If, in the South, circa 1916, a young lady reached her middle twenties without what used to be known as "prospects," life as an aging maiden was a foregone conclusion.) Marin Ireland, in a dress that consists of white layered over pale pink, looks as if she is fading into a sepia-tone image of herself, a photo of someone who is destined to be forgotten. She is, to all intents and purposes, a caged animal, tending the household and acting as her father's consort, because her mother, a malicious mental case, can't be trusted in public.

If Alma has chosen a life of duty, her body is fighting her all the way. Her self-consciously "elegant" accent and artificial manners mask her lonely, yet passionate, nature; she is prone to bouts of breathlessness and insomnia, and she frets that her heart is destined to give out. All her airs and graces -- her little, unconscious bouts of laughter, her watery glances, her little panics about being asked to sing in public -- are really signs of distress from a woman who understands that everything she desires is passing her by.

It is Alma's strange luck that her lifelong love object has been John Buchanan, Jr., the young man next door. Haunted by the memory of his mother's slow, horrible death, raised by a father whose every expression of disappointment is another laceration, and forced to follow in the old man's footsteps and get a medical degree, he drowns himself in dissolution, boozing, and chasing women at the notorious casino just outside of town. He is aware of Alma's attraction to him -- he sees her staring out the window as he passes by -- and he isn't shy about calling out her mannerisms, needlessly causing pain with a story about guests at a party doing imitations of her. But Alma gets under his skin, too, and he looks upon her with a certain fascination.

Unlike, say, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke lacks a certain urgency; at times, it seems more like leaves from an antique photo album. Alma and John circle each other, coming close and quickly backing away, as if in fear of what they might find. But there's something compelling in the knot of attraction and revulsion that keeps them oddly connected. At CSC, where this co-production with the Transport Group is playing, the characters are vividly realized by Marin Ireland and Nathan Darrow. Ireland, who has often excelled at portraying iron-willed women, might seem a strange choice, but she captures something essential about Alma. She is an unstable element, leaning this way now and that way a little later, trying on different fancies and attitudes to see if anything fits. But there's a piercing intelligence underneath the chatter, and when she turns on her mother, venting her frustration, we see how much her assumption of virtue has cost her. It's a richly complex characterization. Darrow's good looks make him a natural choice for John, but there's much more at work here -- a wounded look in his eyes and a palpable sense of self-disgust over the whoring and drinking he can't give up. (So little does he care for himself that he is willing to be blackmailed into marriage by the casino manager, who has a daughter he is trying to move on the marriage market.) John clearly has no idea how to act around Alma -- just watch him offering her a sip from his flask of brandy -- but he studies her like a scientist who has discovered a new species of animal life. And when he turns on her -- angrily insisting that she is made up of "nothing but hand-me-down notions! Attitudes! Poses!" -- it seems clear that his deepest scorn is reserved for himself.

The director, Jack Cummings III handles both his stars with assurance, carefully orchestrating their mutual ensnarement. He provides a striking opening image of Alma, standing in darkness, posed against the illuminated angel statute. And he finds welcome humor in a meeting of the town's local culture group, whose woebegone members keep voting to postpone the reading of a verse drama by one of their own. The supporting cast is generally strong. Hannah Elless is striking as a young lady from sordid circumstances with an eye on the future -- and, quite possibly, John. Tina Johnson amuses as a local matron who violently disapproves of William Blake (about whom she knows nothing). T. Ryder Smith makes the most of his few appearances as Alma's duty-ridden father. Jonathan Spivey has fine comic timing as Alma's dull-witted, mother-dominated suitor. Ryan Spahn offers a sharply etched cameo as a traveling salesman who represents Alma's bleak post-John future.

Nevertheless, there are moments when this sleek, emotionally acute production runs aground. The extremely spare staging works much of the time, but Cummings' aversion to props proves unhelpful. There are at least half a dozen objects -- a plumed hat, a flask, a packet of sleeping pills, the script of that verse drama -- that should be present; without them, the actors are forced into awkwardly realized bits of mime that prove distracting. Even more strangely, when Alma's mother is supposed to be working a jigsaw puzzle, Barbara Walsh is forced to kneel on the floor and pretend to move around pieces on the seat of a chair. One wonders if this ungainly staging has something to do with the actress' apparent awkwardness in the role. Kathryn Rohe's costumes are uneven, many of them lacking a period feel. (One wonders why, in this production, Alma, an avatar of propriety, goes everywhere with her hair down; it strikes a casual note that seems entirely foreign to the character.) The staging of the prologue -- in which Ireland and Darrow, playing Alma and John as children, wander around the perimeter of the set in semi-darkness, faces down -- makes for a weak, off-putting introduction to these characters; I can understand the impulse not to hire child actors, but this isn't a better solution. And the director can't do much with the scenes featuring Rosa, John's Mexican lover, and her casino-owner father; the depiction of sexy, amoral rascals from south of the border seems, by today's standards, risible at best and racist at worst.

Then again, Michael John LaChiusa's lovely, melancholy original music -- sensitively delivered by Walter Trarbach's sound design, strikes exactly the right tone, and the ceiling of Laffrey's set acts as a diffuser for R. Lee Kennedy's lighting, casting a soft glow around the action.

Williams imagined a kind of ironic role-switch for his two lead characters that, to my mind, isn't entirely believable, but it's hard not to be moved by the sight of Alma, alone in winter, once again seated near the fountain, sadly reaching out to a total stranger, unconcerned where she will end up that evening. It has been twenty-two years since the last major New York revival of Summer and Smoke. Even if this is a sometimes flawed production of a play that is second-rank Williams, the poetry is there, and, thanks to the fine leads, it's an opportunity that anyone interested in this great American playwright would be foolish to miss. -- David Barbour