Suddenly Last Summer

Suddenly Last Summer
First edition cover (New Directions)
Written by	Tennessee Williams
Characters	Violet Venable Sebastian Venable Catharine Holly Mrs Holly George Holly Dr Cukrowicz Miss Foxhill Sister Felicity
Date premiered	January 7, 1958
Place premiered	York Playhouse New York City, New York
Original language	English
Subject	Aging, greed, hypocrisy, sexual repression
Genre	Drama
Setting	room and garden of Mrs Venable's mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans

Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It opened off Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of a double bill with another of Williams' one-acts, Something Unspoken (written in 1958). The presentation of the two plays was given the overall title Garden District, but Suddenly Last Summer is now more often performed alone. Williams said he thought the play "perhaps the most poetic" he had written, and Harold Bloom ranks it among the best examples of the playwright's lyricism.

1936, in the Garden District of New Orleans. Mrs. Venable, an elderly widow from a prominent local family, has invited a doctor to her home. She talks nostalgically about her son Sebastian, a poet who died under mysterious circumstances in Spain the previous summer. During the course of their conversation, she offers to make a generous donation to support the doctor’s psychiatric research if he will perform a lobotomy on Catharine, her niece, who has been confined to a private mental asylum at her expense since returning to America. Mrs. Venable is eager to “shut her up” once and for all, as she continues to “babble” about Sebastian’s violent death and “smash” her son’s reputation by hinting at his homosexuality.

Catharine arrives, followed by her impecunious mother and brother. They are also eager to suppress her version of events, since Mrs. Venable is threatening to keep Sebastian’s will in probate until she is satisfied. But the doctor injects Catharine with a truth serum and she proceeds to give a scandalous account of Sebastian’s moral dissolution and the events leading up to his death, how he used her to “procure” young men for his sexual exploitation, and how he was set upon, mutilated and partially “devoured” by a mob of starving children in the street. Mrs. Venable launches herself at Catharine but she is prevented from striking her and taken off stage, screaming “cut this hideous story from her brain!” Far from being convinced of her insanity, however, the doctor believes her story could in fact be true.

From its first page, the script is rich in symbolic detail open to many interpretations. The “mansion of Victorian Gothic style” immediately connects the play with the literature of Southern Gothic, with which it shares many characteristics. Sebastian's “jungle-garden”, with its “violent” colours and noises of “beasts, serpents, and birds ... of savage nature” introduces the images of predation that punctuate much of the play's dialogue. These have been interpreted variously as implying the violence latent in Sebastian himself; depicting modernity's vain attempts to "contain" its attavistic impulses; and standing for a bleak "Darwinian" vision of the world, equating "the primeval past and the ostensibly civilised present".