Suddenly, Last Summer

Suddenly Last Summer (1958) is a one-act play by American playwright Tennessee Williams. It was originally staged with another Williams drama (Something Unspoken) in a double bill known as Garden District and met with mixed reviews upon its Broadway premiere. This may have been due to the content of the play, which includes pedophilia, cannibalism, and relationships between men (considered scandalous at the time). Indeed, Williams reportedly modeled Suddenly Last Summer and its two-monologue structure partly on Euripides’s The Bacchae, whose macabre climax (the frenzied murder and mutilation of a young man) his own play closely mirrors (Morra, Irene. “Maenads and Metatheatre: Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer as Euripidean Myth.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, no. 14, 2014, pp. 3-21). Suddenly Last Summer’s poetic, parable-like narrative, which incorporates numerous symbols, religious and mythological allusions, and layers of meaning, sets it stylistically apart from its author’s best-known works (The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, etc.), but it has since been critically reevaluated and has taken its place among Williams’s masterworks. Like his other works, it explores themes of The Cost of Sexual Repression, Art Versus Life, Family Dynamics and Manipulation, societal hypocrisy, religious fanaticism, and psychological trauma.

Suddenly Last Summer has often been revived, usually as a single play rather than as part of the original double bill. In 1959, it was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift, and in 1993 into a BBC teleplay starring Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson.

This guide refers to the 1991 New Directions paperback edition of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Volume 3.

Content Warning: Suddenly Last Summer features brief descriptions of murder, mutilation, and cannibalism. An unseen character is also implied to be both gay and a pedophile, playing into stereotypes about gay men. The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment. The guide also references suicide.

Plot Summary

In a mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District in the mid-1930s, the wealthy Violet Venable tells Dr. Cukrowicz, a handsome young doctor, about her son Sebastian, who has recently died. She shows the doctor a gilt-edged volume of her son’s poems (Poem of Summer), which he hand-pressed himself and shared only with a small circle of friends. His poems were so carefully composed, she says, that he managed only one poem each summer—and only with her devoted assistance. She claims that the proof of her own importance to both his art and his life is that this past summer he went abroad without her for the first time and wrote no poem at all. Instead, he died.

Violet tells the doctor of a trip she and her son made to South America’s Galápagos Islands many years before. Inspired by a passage from Herman Melville, Sebastian wanted to witness the hatching of the islands’ famous sea turtles. Sebastian also hoped to find God in the Galápagos’s remote, dramatic landscapes. However, both she and her son were horrified to see thousands of sea birds preying on the baby turtles. Afterward, Sebastian told her that he had seen “Him.”

The doctor seems skeptical of Violet’s claim that her son was still a virgin when he died at age 40, but she maintains that he was perfectly “chaste.” He insisted on being surrounded by “beautiful, talented” people, but only those with the purest intentions. She turns the conversation to the young woman she holds responsible for her son’s death, whom he took abroad in Violet’s “place” that past summer. Though this young woman has been confined to a mental institution for months, she continues to spread a defamatory story about how Sebastian died. As the sole protector of Sebastian’s posthumous reputation, Violet plans to confront the woman. For this reason, she has arranged for the woman to be brought to her this evening. It now emerges that Dr. Cukrowicz is a lobotomist whom Violet has summoned to listen to the woman’s story, to determine her mental health, and to gauge her suitability for a lobotomy. To this end, Violet offers to fund his struggling hospital.

Meanwhile, the woman, whose name is Catharine Holly, has arrived at Violet’s house, chaperoned by a nun from St. Mary’s, the mental hospital where she has been receiving electric and insulin shock therapy. It turns out that she is Violet’s niece and that she is still haunted by her failure to “save” her cousin Sebastian at a place called Cabeza de Lobo. Her mother and younger brother arrive, and both try to badger her into retracting her story about her cousin’s death; they want the generous sums of money Sebastian left them in his will, which Violet has tied up in probate. However, Catharine refuses to recant her story.

Confronting Catharine, Violet accuses her of “taking” her son from her, which led to his death. Catharine counters that Sebastian asked her to be his travel companion that summer because Violet had experienced a stroke that made her unable to travel. Violet scoffs at this and tells of how Catharine disgraced herself with a married man the previous winter after Violet had paid for her lavish debut.

Dr. Cukrowicz draws Catharine aside to talk to her alone, and she tells him that she loved Sebastian, partly because he showed her kindness after her public scandal. At a Mardi Gras ball, she says, a man offered her a ride home and then seduced her. Finding out that the man was married, she pursued him back to the ball and confronted him angrily on the dancefloor. After that, she felt as if she had “died” until Sebastian invited her abroad that summer. However, Sebastian was obsessed with the idea of sacrificing himself to a “cruel” god. She tried to save him but failed.

Dr. Cukrowicz injects her with truth serum so she can tell her story as frankly as possible to the whole group. She tells them that when she went abroad with Sebastian that summer, he seemed older. He was restless and could no longer write: The notebook he used to compose drafts of his yearly poem remained blank through the summer. At Cabeza de Lobo, Sebastian stopped going to the elegant nightclubs he had always frequented, instead spending his days at a public beach called La Playa San Sebastian.

At this beach, which was separated from the “free beach” by a fence, Sebastian’s behavior became increasingly erratic. Forcing her to wear a white bathing suit that became see-through when wet, he violently shoved her into the water in front of the other bathers. Catharine claims, to Violet’s horror, that she was being forced to “procure” for him. Violet, she says, did the same thing without knowing it in nightclubs and elegant hotels on her previous travels with Sebastian. At the beach, poor, starved-looked youths and boys, many of them unhoused, would climb over the fence from the free beach to follow Sebastian around, and he would hand out “tips.” One day, as she and Sebastian were having lunch at an open-air restaurant by the beach, a rabble of “naked” children gathered noisily on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Sebastian, who seemed to recognize some of them, fled the restaurant, horrified by their shouts and wild behavior. The boys pursued them, playing raucous music on makeshift instruments they had fashioned from tin cans and paper bags. Catharine tried to lead her cousin down to the safety of the waterfront, but he tore away from her and ran uphill, where he was quickly overwhelmed by the mob of children, who used their sharp-edged instruments to carve away pieces of his flesh, which they stuffed into their mouths.

When Catharine finishes her story, her aunt gasps to the doctor to lobotomize her, but Cukrowicz thinks she may be describing real events.