by Howard Jensen

[In late spring, as he prepared for the initial production conferences for Suddently Last Summer, Howard Jensen shared the following notes with his designers. Since that time, a number of things have changed: through the dialogue with the designers, the work with the actors and staff, our Suddenly Last Summerhas evolved into something different and new. But these notes stand as the production's genesis, the basis for the first discussions and designs, and many of these concepts are still at the production's foundation.]

Main Dramatic Idea
We tell lies to sustain our fictions about ourselves and others. When the truth is so horrible, we must consider it a lie.

Through-line of Action
To uncover the truth.

Supporting Statements
The play is divided into three distinct parts. The first is Scene I in which Mrs. Venable gives her version of the truth to Dr. Cukrowicz and denies Catharine's version of the truth. The second part consists of Scenes II and III in which first Sister Felicity and then Mrs. Holly and George tell Catharine not to tell the truth. The third part is Scene IV in which Catharine and Mrs. Venable battle to tell their different versions of the truth.

"I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl's story could be true . . . . " The last line of the play is both hopeful and cause for concern. Williams has led us to believe Catharine, but the Doctor is still reflecting on whether Catharine is to be believed. That he refers to "the girl’s story" makes for an unsettling curtain.

Suddenly Last Summer is "about how people each other in an allegorical sense." - Tennessee Williams in Conversations with Tennessee Williams, edited by Albert J. Devlin.

"Yes, we all use each other and that's what we think of as love." (p. 30)

In the Encantadas, Sebastian saw the face of God, and God's face was a cruel face. "All poets look for God, all good poets do." (p.9) In this play both God and truth are cruel. Sebastian, exulting in his own depravity, created God not in man's image but in his own, and it is this "God" that controls the action of the play.

Something about Sebastian's death:

CATHARINE. . . . I tried to save him, Doctor.

DOCTOR. From what? Save him from what?

CATHARINE. Completing, a sort of, image he had of himself as a sort of, sacrifice to a, terrible sort of a...

DOCTOR. God?

CATHARINE. Yes, a cruel one, Doctor! (30)

Like Anthony Burns's death in Williams's Desire and the Black Masseur, Sebastian's is the result of a search for atonement, this atonement being "the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one's self of his guilt." (p.206) This is Williams at his most pagan extreme.

Design

Locale: The Garden District of New Orleans.

Time: Late afternoon in early summer, 1936.

What is needed is a civilized savagery.

What is needed is Southern warmth and psychic chill.

The "color" I see most at this time is a dirty white, and we need to investigate white very carefully. Especially as the play increases its momentum, white plays a vivid and predominant role in the dialogue. The one-piece swimsuit is white. The day is white. Sebastian is white: "He had on a spotless white shantung suit and a white silk tie and a white panama and white shoes, white lizard skin pumps!" (p. 39) White beach. White pills. White everywhere. "As if a huge white bone had caught fire in the sky and blazed so bright it was white and turned the sky and everything under the sky white with it." (p. 39) Etc. We need to investigate white as a symbol of evil and horror. More and more I agree with John Satterfield who writes in Markham Review, "The dark Melville of The Encantadas is replaced by the brilliant Melville of Moby Dick, and the big whale with his paradoxically glorious, horrid whiteness snaps his jaws on the craft of Suddenly Last Summer to clinch its symbolic unity." Williams' plays usually operate on both a realistic and a symbolic level. This is one possible way.

Music and Sound. At this time I must admit I go back and forth from thinking we need extensive music and sound design to none whatever. I am open to suggestion. [Note: We decided on a minimal sound design with only three sound cues in the production.]