The Life of a Poet
“Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.”
-Elia Kazan, of Tennessee Williams
“The work of a poet is the life of a poet and – vice versa, the life of a poet is the
work of a poet…you can’t separate them.”
-Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in
Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911 into a family that
would inspire and be seen in his writing for his entire life. His
mother, Edwina, was an aggressive (and at times oppressive)
woman, obsessed with memories of her days as a young
Southern debutante. His father, Cornelius, was a traveling
salesman from a prestigious Tennessee family (from which
Williams earned his nickname) who tended to be both distant
and abusive. His younger brother, Dakin, was his father’s
favorite and bonded little with young Tom. His older sister
Rose, however, was in early years his confidant and friend
and later became one of his primary inspirations for poetic characters in his plays.
As one might guess, Williams’ family life was full of tension and despair. His parents often
engaged in violent arguments that frightened his older sister, Rose. Cornelius’ bouts with
drinking and gambling (habits that later ailed Tennessee) sent rumors about the family throughout
the towns in which they lived. In 1931 Williams entered the University of Missouri where, after
seeing a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, he decided to study playwriting. He would not graduate
there, however, instead transferring to Washington University after a brief stint of forced
employment at his father’s shoe company, and then transferred again in 1937 to the University of
Iowa. It was while he was attending this institution that one of the most pivotal events in
Tennessee’s life and work occurred.
Williams and his sister Rose had been inseparable when they were young. Later in life, when
Rose was crippled with fear and depression caused by increasing tensions in the Williams
household, Tennessee remained her best friend and her greatest admirer. The extent of her
emotional and mental illnesses, which had kept her in private sanatoriums for years, was so
severe that her parents finally took the advice of doctors who were suggesting a new and radical
procedure. In 1937, Rose was given one of the first frontal lobotomies ever performed. The
doctors who had suggested the operation – in which nerve endings in her brain would be severed
– believed it could do nothing but help Rose’s state. In fact, Rose no longer felt physical or
emotional distress but also lost any vitality left in her soul. Though the operation was free to the
family, the effects were costly in the eyes of Tennessee. Twenty years after the operation, the
effects were still so keenly felt that Williams used them as impetus for Suddenly Last Summer.
Still reeling from Rose’s tragic operation, Williams graduated from the University of Iowa in
1938. After looking for – and failing to find – work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans where
he changed his name from Tom to Tennessee and launched his career as a writer. His first major
success was 1945’s The Glass Menagerie. By 1947 his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, hit
the stage. In 1955, after winning the Donaldson Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar, Tennessee Williams produced another commercial
success, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
His momentum seemed to slow at that point, and in 1957, depressed by the poor reception
received for his play Orpheus Descending, Williams began psychoanalysis for problems
including his feelings of failure, his rocky relationship with his partner Frank Merlo, the death of
his father, and his dependencies on alcohol and drugs. It was at this time that, most likely still
plagued by the notion that he might be afflicted with the same mental and emotional problems as
his sister had been, Tennessee began writing Suddenly Last Summer. The play was produced
together with another short play – Something Unspoken – under the title Garden District, named
after the New Orleans location in which both plays took place. The production was a critical
success, and ran for 216 performances at the Off-Broadway York Theatre.
In 1979, Williams returned to Florida, where he had previously spent time in Key West and St.
Augustine relaxing and collecting ideas for his work. This time, Williams served as Artist-InResidence at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville where audiences saw the world
premier of Tiger Tail - his stage adaptation of the film Baby Doll.
Tennessee Williams died tragically On February 23, 1983. He had written about 30 full-length
plays, numerous short plays, two volumes of poetry, and five volumes of essays and short stories,
all of which were filled with large doses of southern culture and the conflicts between sexuality,
society, and Christianity that had been so much a part of his own life. 25 years after his death,
Williams’s legacy of poetic drama is still alive and well.
Character Breakdown
Costume Designs by Marilyn Wall
Mrs. Violet Venable: The old, proud, and fierce mother of the dead
Sebastian.
Doctor Cukrowicz (Dr. Sugar):
The well-meaning doctor of Lion’s View,
a mental health facility and center of new,
radical surgical procedures including lobotomies.
Catharine:
Sebastian’s cousin and niece to Mrs. Venable. A failed Southern debutante
who accompanied Sebastian abroad and is the only witness to his gruesome
death.
Mrs. Holly:
Catharine’s mother, a softer Southern matriarch
Miss Foxhill: Mrs. Venable’s assistant.
George:
Catharine’s money-hungry brother.
Sister Felicity:
Catharine’s strict guardian from Saint Mary’s, the mental health
facility where Catharine is being kept.
A Setting For The Grotesque
“We – still lived in a – world of light and shadow… But the shadow was almost as luminous
as the light.”
Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer
In 1764, Horace Walpole published his novel The Castle of Otranto, giving birth to Gothic
literature, a genre that spanned the 18th and 19th centuries and was known for spooky, often
haunted castles ruins, extreme landscapes, passion-driven heroes and villains, and horrifying
events. When Tennessee Williams began writing Suddenly Last Summer in 1957, almost 200
years later, a new genre inspired by Gothic fiction had become popular. This was Southern
Gothic, a style that adopted the gloom, mystery, suspense, and the grotesque of Gothic writing
and relocated it from medieval castles to the mansions of the post-Civil War south, replacing
abandoned turrets with overgrown plantations, and damsels in distress with failed Southern
belles. Placed against this backdrop, writers were able to use dark tone and sensationalism not
merely for suspense, but to explore the culture and social issues of the American South. Southern
Gothic literature was, as Williams himself described it, a style that captured "an intuition, of an
underlying dreadfulness in modern experience," and then presented it for all to see.
The American South provided an obvious setting for such a genre. After the Civil War, the oncegreat plantations of the confederacy were little more than abandoned farms. They became
symbols of the end of an era and synonymous with the decay of a culture. The Garden District of
New Orleans, Louisiana was just such a place. When it first began development in 1832, it
consisted of plantations with huge mansions surrounded by lush gardens and owned by wealthy
Americans who didn’t want to deal with the tight quarters and ethnic diversity of the French
Quarter. When the Civil War ravaged the Southern way of life, New Orleans was forced to adapt,
becoming more urban, and the plantations of the Garden District were subdivided to
accommodate the growing population. As smaller homes were built around the mansions, the
area became a monument to the Antebellum south and the way that the decay of that culture was
essentially being hidden, not destroyed.
What better place could there be to set a story about the destruction of an aristocratic family at the
hand of violence and depravity than the stark, stately remains of a lost society? Sebastian’s wild
jungle-garden finds a comfortable home among old cast-iron balconies and echoing Victorian
mansions. In the Garden District, Tennessee Williams found a fitting backdrop for his tragic tale
in the remains of a culture with a tragic history.
Designing Suddenly Last Summer
Images, metaphors and allegorical speeches fill the melodramatic dialogue in Suddenly Last
Summer. Tennessee Williams places this play in the outdoor patio of a gothic victorian mansion
in the New Orleans Garden District, adjacent to a fantastic garden from which bird cries emanate.
In this setting one of his most violent and sexually explicit plays unfolds, in it we are confronted
with great themes: good versus evil, sacred versus secular, nature versus man, truth versus lie,
contentment versus greed and the artistic versus the mundane. Great conflicting themes, indeed,
that are revealed more through the use of poetic language than that of visual action. Lauren
Caldwell, the director, wanted to shift and balance that equation. Earlier on, we decided that the
audience would have a view into this garden (Sebastian's garden) in which fantastic plants
threaten to take over.
All this conflict I wanted to represent the moment one walks into the theatre. Architecture against
nature is what first strike us. Here we see the back of the house which makes a stately, cool and
serene statement. Its interior all white (Sebastian's favorite color) while the opposite is true in the
garden where fantastic, colorful greenery has bold, vivid and violent colors, two worlds that are
diametrically opposed. On top of this, tension is enhanced by the use of strong diagonals in the
patio that accentuate the play's emotional struggles. In the small thrust stage of the Hippodrome
we see how the garden encroaches on the characters surroundings as well as the audience. In
this environment I set a fountain, this way all of the elements are represented in the play: earth,
air, fire and water.
The furnishings become minimal in this setting. A patio wicker table and chairs placed mid-stage
left, a cast iron bench under an oversize banyan tree upstage right and the fountain downstage
right that can be used as a sitting area where characters can retreat. And ultimately, the
foreboding tone is reinforced by overhead tree branches with hanging spanish moss.
-Carlos Asse
Historical Timeline
Historical Events related to Suddenly Last Summer.
*287 Saint Sebastian, said to be an inspiration for Suddenly Last Summer’s Sebastian, dies at the
hands of Roman soldiers, becoming a Christian martyr.
*1535 Galapagos Islands (or the Encantadas) are discovered by Dominican Fray Tomás de
Berlanga, the fourth Bishop of Panama.
*1832 The Garden District of New Orleans begins to be developed. The area begins as one big
plantation, but by 1900 grows into one of the wealthiest areas of New Orleans.
*1846 The Donner Party, a group of families emigrating from Illinois and Iowa get trapped in an
October snowstorm in California and are forced into one of the most famous acts of cannibalism
in history.
*1854 Herman Melville writes “The Encantadas, or the Enchanted Islands” for Putnam’s
Magazine, as a series of short travel sketches. It is later published as part of Piazza Tales.
*1909 Rose Isabel Williams is born
*1911 Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams is born
*1918 The Williams family moves to St. Louis
*1926 Hart Crane’s My Grandmother’s Love Letters is published, a poem that later inspired
Suddenly Last Summer
*1931 Tom Williams enrolls at University of Missouri
*1932 Cornelius Williams withdraws Tom from college and forces him to work at the
International Shoe Company
*1935(?) Tom enrolls at Washington University in St. Louis
*1936 Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz develops a technique for
destroying the tissue connecting the frontal lobes of the brain. This predecessor to the Lobotomy
earns him a Nobel Prize in 1949.
*1936 Drs.Walter Freeman and James Watts perform the first lobotomy in September.
*1937 Tom leaves WU and enters the University of Iowa
*1938 Without Tom’s knowledge, Rose is given a frontal lobotomy
*1939 Tom signs on with agent Audrey Wood. Also in that year, Tom takes up residence for a
short time in New Orleans, Louisiana and changes his name from Tom to Tennessee.
*1944 The Glass Menagerie debuts in Chicago on December 26th.
*1945 Dr. Freeman invents the “ice-pick lobotomy”, in which an ice pick inserted through the
eye socket is tapped with a hammer into the prefrontal lobe.
*1947 A Streetcar Named Desire is first produced
*1955 Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is first produced.
*1957 Orpheus Descending opens to poor reviews. Williams enters psychoanalysis. Soon after,
he begins writing Suddenly Last Summer
*1958 on January 7, Suddenly Last Summer debuts at the York Playhouse in New York with
Something Unspoken under the title Garden District.
*1959 The film adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth
Taylor, and Montgomery Clift, is released. Both Hepburn and Taylor are nominated for the Best
Actress Academy Award for their performances.
*1983 Tennessee Williams dies at the age of 71 after accidentally choking on the cap from a
bottle of pills.
*1995 Suddenly Last Summer finally makes its Broadway debut, again produced with Something
Unspoken.
Discussion Questions
Much has been written about the common themes running through all of Williams’
works, including violence, overt sexuality, madness, alienation, and dysfunctional
families. In Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee seems to draw from several major
catalysts in his own life. Not the least among them being the lobotomy imposed on his
own beloved sister, Rose. How many of these do you think are universal themes
throughout contemporary playwrighting and how many do you think are unique to
Williams’ own life experience?
The character of Catharine says, “We all use each other and that’s what we think of as
love.” Is this a universal truth? How is the statement applicable to the relationships in
Suddenly Last Summer?
Tennessee Williams is famous for his use of symbolism. How do you interpret some of
the more fierce symbolism in Suddenly Last Summer? For example, the carrion birds
frenzied feeding on the sea turtles. What is Tennessee Williams trying to express through
the story of the carnivorous birds? Is it merely foreshadowing or a broader judgment on
the world? Is it Sebastian’s definition of God? Williams’?
Compare the use of religious imagery and metaphors throughout the play. What is
William’s implying about the character of Sebastian? Was he a sinner or a saint? Is it
reasonable to view Catharine’s persecution like a saint’s?
What characters in Suddenly Last Summer can be seen as outcasts? Are they social
outcasts? Religious? Sexual? How did their position affect their relationship with their
family? With their world? With society in general?
Williams presents the physical aspect of cannibalism through the birds and children, but
what other forms of cannibalism exist in the play? Think in terms of relationship
between the characters – who is feeding off of whom? Who is a predator? Who is the
prey?
Foreshadowing is a literary device used to indicate upcoming events before they occur.
What and how does Tennessee Williams foreshadow events in Suddenly Last Summer?
The statement “This is a true story of our time” is possibly one of the most haunting lines
in the play. Given the sort of fantastic setting and story what do you think Catharine
means by this utterance? Does it hold true for contemporary audiences? What, if
anything, makes Suddenly Last Summer “a true story of our time?”
Resources:
http://www.etsu.edu/haleyd/twbio.html
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/williams_tennessee/
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-southern-gothic-movement-in-literature.htm
http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/southern-gothic-literature
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/gothic.html
http://www.progressive.com/driving-destinations/southern-gothic-road-trip.aspx
http://www.questia.com/library/encyclopedia/gothic_architecture_and_art.jsp
http://www.answers.com/topic/gothic-fiction
http://www.inetours.com/New_Orleans/Garden_District.html
http://bandb.about.com/cs/neworleans/a/no_garden_dist.htm
http://www.trinityrep.com/DownloadDocs/Suddenly_Last_Summer.SG.pdf