After six years of producing plays with non-traditional casting (which, in this case, means all African-American casts), UPROOTED Theater bids farewell with its stinging production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer. Although the company hadn’t planned on staging a Williams trilogy during its brief duration, co-founder Dennis Johnson notes that “it seems to have worked out that way.” In any case, the theater is definitely going out with a bang, not a whimper.
The 1958 one-act play, which appeared Off-Broadway in conjunction with another of Williams’s one-acts, created quite a stir when it debuted. The issue of homosexuality was prominent, not to mention the subjects of cannibalism and lobotomies. It was made into a film the following year with a starry cast, including Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn. Taylor won a Golden Globe Award as Best Actress for her portrayal of a young girl who is swept along by fate and circumstance into the world of her cousin Sebastian.
In the Milwaukee production, it’s clear that Catherine, played by Sola Thompson, is quite lucid about her relationship to Sebastian and why she was chosen to accompany him on his world travels. Catherine was the last person to see Sebastian alive, which infuriates her aunt Violet (producing artistic director Marti Gobel). The elderly woman, who is Sebastian’s mother, is convinced that had she been around, instead of Catherine, he would be alive today. She informs a young, visiting doctor (Marques Causey) that she believes it was Catherine who murdered her son.
Catherine is also immediately aware that the presence of this doctor signals a new home for her. She realizes that she is going to leave her former home, a sanitarium for women, and wind up in far-less-comfortable surroundings. “Are you going to drill a hole into my brain?” she asks the doctor in a taunting way. She seems certain that the only reason he was summoned to Aunt Violet’s home was to authorize her lobotomy. This is her aunt’s wish, in order to stop the “wild tales” Catherine has been telling about the circumstances leading to Sebastian’s violent death.
Although the entire play takes place in a sumptuous, Southern garden, Violet and Catherine both drift dreamily into other places. They both speak eloquently about Sebastian (who is never seen in the play).
Although one may take issue with some acting choices made by the cast, under the direction of co-founder Dennis Johnson, the production makes its overall point: that black actors, as well as white ones, should be entitled to perform in plays such as this one. Unfortunately, once this production concludes, a vital part of Milwaukee’s theatrical community will be lost.
