Summer and Smoke

The show is now a long while over, so I’ll describe a moment.

A father is shot. It is jarring with the rest of the production, it is a character we are not sure we really care about, a character who has only appeared briefly and always holding a stick in one hand – we assume to demarcate him from the other father he plays – and about two thirds of the way through the play, unexpectedly (inexplicably) he is shot. It might serve only to drive forward the drama and you can imagine this in a production less sure of itself where the show would falter, where the actor would reel on the ground and you would wish they had the budget for more blood maybe, or no blood at all, or you would be reminded of that moment in a conversation where someone told you that people who are shot in the stomach generally lose blood very slowly – in another production, this would be a flaw. But inexplicably, here, having been shot, he doesn’t start screaming, he doesn’t bleed, he starts to sing in a piercing countertenor voice that feels like it comes from somewhere else in the actor’s body, like there is another body speaking through him and that body is lighter, more ethereal, more haunting than the body we can now see onstage: the stage is haunted by a voice that is at once of the actor and of the character. He holds his staff, his son comes over, takes it from his hand, and like that he is no longer alive. The gesture is deft, archly theatrical, and deeply disturbing.

I’ve thought about this a lot since seeing Summer and Smoke. I’ve thought about Summer and Smoke a lot, really. Because I often think about seriousness and I often think about why theatre exists and then I think maybe I should pop outside and look at a tree and think about why I’m looking at a tree and then it’s four o’clock and I’m outside looking at a tree again. But this show – the best I’ve seen this year and the best single piece of direction I can remember seeing ever – reminds me of how seriously I think theatre can and should be taken. How much gravity it has and how it clings to those who take it seriously and have the sincerity to allow it to work on them.

I’m not really reviewing here, I’m sort of more reflecting – something I often find a little cloying in other bloggers but, well, I think there is some value in feeling and thinking and I think that this is a very feeling production. It left me fairly breathless and I’m reminded there of lovely Meg Vaughan talking about the way that Suzy Storck hurt more after than in the moment – this show was a succession of moments that really hurt and that hurt during and hurt afterwards. And it persuaded me, after all that, that Tennessee Williams, who I often think of as visceral (and, I have to admit, not normally in a good way – too loose, too hot, and too American) here worked on me in exactly the way I’ve had his work described as effecting other less, I suppose, cynical people. It felt raw and emotional and like it was grasping for something, like it really wanted some sense to come out of – which unifies it with a quality that I love in contemporary work and was something that I never believed I would feel.

I loved it. I’m sad I only saw it once. I really really hope it goes somewhere else, so everyone can experience it.

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