Theatre 2026: Summer and Smoke @ Crow's Theatre

Summer and Smoke is Tennessee Williams’ lesser-known play that he wrote in 1948 following his two previous smash hits, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Glass Menagerie (1944).  Set in Mississippi in 1916, it deals with Alma Winemiller and John Buchanan Jr., who have known each other their whole lives, growing up together as next-door neighbours.  Now both in their late 20s, they are drawn to each other but cannot find common ground to be together despite their mutual attraction, due to opposing ideological views on life and love.

John chafes against the pressures to live up to the standards of his namesake father, a respected doctor, and the expectations to eventually take over John Sr.’s medical practice. Perhaps in rebellion, John lives a hedonistic lifestyle, seeking pleasure in drink, gambling and loose women. For him, the expression of love is physical, carnal and full of passion.

As the puritanical preacher’s daughter whose religious upbringing has instilled in her a sense of moral righteousness and propriety, Alma views love as a spiritual meeting of souls. Even her name is Spanish for “soul”.  Saddled early in life with the duties of caring for her demented, childlike mother who lacks self control, Alma has grown up as a repressed, high-strung young woman who suffers from anxiety and heart palpitations. Although she inwardly desires John, she cannot outwardly show it.

These fundamental differences keep them apart, leading John to satisfy his needs with the lusty Rosa Gonzales, daughter of the wealthy owner of a gambling casino. While she pines for John, Alma spends her time giving singing lessons. One of her pupils is the youthful Nellie Ewell, whose mother is the town trollop, looked down upon for hanging around the train station trying to pick up traveling salesmen. Nellie also has a crush on “Dr. Johnny” which becomes an important plot point at the end of the play.

Things come to a head when the unexpected death of John Sr. leads to an ironic role reversal between Alma and John. Alma finally embraces her sensuality and releases what John called the “doppelganger” inside of her, freeing her to physically demonstrate her love for him. But it is too late as John has also changed and now accepts their relationship as just a “spiritual bond”. The tragic events have shocked him into maturity and he has moved on with his life, taking over the medical practice and becoming engaged to the now grown-up Nellie. Devastated by this reveal and John’s rejection of her, Alma heads down to the train station and picks up a traveling shoe salesman, leading to the final irony of the play. While Nellie has attained respectability she craved by marrying John, Alma actions hark back to those taken by Nellie’s mother.

We watched a version of Summer and Smoke that is a co-production between Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre, directed by Paolo Santalucia, recently named Artistic Director of Soulpepper.  It was held at Crow’s Theatre’s Guloien stage, set in the round with four rows of seats on each side. There are pros and cons to staging in “the round”.  On the plus side, every audience member is close to the action, creating a more intimate setting.  The disadvantages are related to sightlines and audibility.

At any time, the actors have their backs turned to at least one side of the audience. This makes it difficult both to see what is being performed as well as hear what is being said. In a well-staged show, the actors are constantly turning to provide adequate accessibility to all sides of the audience. Unfortunately, in this production, the blocking could have been improved. There were long periods of time when we were looking at the performers’ backs, making it difficult to comprehend the dialogue (the heavy southern drawls, rapid speech and occasional shouting didn’t help!) and obscuring important actions from our view. Adding points of action to the four corners “off stage” also didn’t help. We were luckily seated in the best side of the stage, so we could see characters approaching or disappearing in an aisle to our left behind the people seated on that side, who had no way to see this. In the far-right corner, we could see allusions to gambling, cock fights, flamenco dancing and later on, a pivotal fight and death scene. The people sitting directly across from us had no exposure to this.

There were elements of stagecraft that were extremely well done, as we have come to expect from a Crow’s Theatre production. In the play, Alma and John debate the dichotomy between the spiritual versus the physical aspects of love and humanity. In his text, Williams added the props of a stone angel statue that sits at a public fountain and an anatomy chart in the doctor’s office as the physical and visual manifestations of these two concepts. Santalucia enhanced these two symbolic visuals by hanging a statue of the angel bathed in an ethereal icy blue light in the middle of the stage.  The stone angel is prominent during scenes in the square and rises to the rafters but always slightly in view otherwise. He contrasted this with an anatomical medical model of a human’s innards to provide two strong physical images of the conflicting ideas.  Once again, because of our seats, we had a wonderful view of the front of the angel including its elegant wings. The people on the other side stared at its butt for the entire show.

Santalucia also tapped into the symbolism of “Summer” (representing the intense heat of vibrant passion) vs “Smoke” (a wispy emittance that dissipates, representing fleeting emotions that fade like mist). He emphasized these concepts with the use of theatrical haze and the smell of tobacco smoke that emanated in several scenes where characters smoked herbal cigarettes.

There is other symbolism built into the props and costumes used in Summer and Smoke.  Alma wears a ring that she constantly twists, representing her nervousness and emotional turmoil. She is dressed in white in Act I, representing her purity and saintliness. By the second act, she is dressed in bright red and wears a plumed hat to symbolize her released desires.  The plumed hat is a repeated image, as Rosa wears it in her first appearance which catches John’s eye, Alma’s mother impulsively purchases one, demonstrating her lack of restraint, and Nellie wears one in the final scenes.  Throughout the play, Alma’s mother tries to finish a jigsaw puzzle, frustrated that the “pieces don’t fit”. The puzzle represents the mental confusion in her life and later in a moment of stress, Alma repeats those words.

The ultimate tragedy of Summer and Smoke is that both Alma and John come to an understanding of each other’s points of view, just not at the same time. It is thought that this play was not as popular as Tennessee William’s other works because the characters are not as fleshed out, but rather act more as archetypes for his overarching themes. Williams seems to have imbedded elements of his own life and experiences in this (and other?) plays. As a gay man in the 1940s and 50s, he was well aware of and often wrote about loneliness, repression and societal constraints on sexuality. It is also interesting to note that his father was a traveling shoe salesman, a specificity that he gives to Alma’s final encounter.