The enduring voltage of Tennessee Williams isn’t mere nostalgia. It’s the way his plays wire the body and the soul to the same circuit … and then overload it. Summer and Smoke—directed by Paolo Santalucia in a Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre co‑production, in association with Birdland Theatre—hums on that current: it’s striking, beautiful, and electric work that overcharges the senses and leaves plenty to ponder when the lights come up.
Williams, the mid‑century poet of desire and damage, wrote this infrequently performed 1948 play in the wake of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Long overshadowed, it has flickered back into regard thanks to revivals that recognize its singular, elliptical ache. Set in 1916 in the steamy southern town of Glorious Hill, it stages a curious dissonance by writing large the most deeply elemental themes of body vs. soul, and expression vs. suppression of desire … within the faded pages of a bygone moral era. The stakes are both intimate and existential: the push‑pull between Alma Winemiller, the proper rector’s daughter; and John Buchanan Jr., the doctor’s profligate son—two gravitational forces whose separate orbits keep tugging one another off course.
bahia watson as Alma (the Spanish word for “spirit”) delivers an outstanding performance of tensile delicacy and iron will, her nervous refinements charged with hungry intellection and tremors of desire. She draws us in by revealing the cost of constraint: how a life of curated spirit can sear the flesh beneath. Dan Mousseau as John is equally immersive: he channels confident, dangerous physicality fuelled by appetite, but lets curiosity and momentary self-consciousness leak through the swagger. Together, these twin planets’ competing gravities bend the ensemble and the staging into an elliptical dance.
That dance becomes the staging’s organizing principle: Santalucia’s direction fuses performance, design and movement with clarity and pulse. Staged in the round, the actors glide in and out from four corners of the stage. We open and close in a park around a simple fountain—the hanging statue of a lady, a shallow bowl, four benches—in a park that lies between Alma’s home in the rectory, and the corporeal domain of the home office of John and his doctor father (Stuart Hughes).
Lorenzo Savoini’s representational set and spare lighting design turn the space from park to home interiors to casino, using little more than simple tables and chairs and benches — reconfigured through low‑light, movement‑based transitions. Thomas Ryder Payne’s sharp and functional sound design abets these shifts and punctuates key moments. The Blue Moon Casino arrives mostly via subtraction and lighting: morality dimmed, appetite lit. And a piano anchors and partly blocks one corner: music, beginning with Alma’s Fourth of July song at the play’s start, and recurring in striking cast-played, cast-sung moments — gives this dance a backbeat that straddles this story’s twin realms of spirit and flesh.
The supple supporting cast doubles roles in ways that cleverly sharpen the play‘s body/soul dialectic: Beau Dixon’s gentle cleric Mr. Winemiller versus his loud, violent Papa Gonzales; Amy Rutherford’s prim and moralizing Mrs. Bassett versus her delirious, unrestrained Mrs. Winemiller; Bella Reyes’ giggling, childish Nellie Ewell vs her smouldering, sexual Rosa Gonzalez; and Kaleb Horn’s smarmy suitor Roger Doremus versus his footloose travelling salesman. At a meta level, this mirroring makes potent thematic sense, although sometimes, the doubling momentarily confuses, given the combination of recognizable faces and near-neighbour costumes designed by Ming Wong.
It’s not a spoiler to say the core relationship between Alma and John doesn’t work out (the director’s note unpacks this eloquently). But in 2026, what this means feels unsettled. Is it a less‑fatal Romeo and Juliet: an exquisite and elegiac lament for two meant‑to‑be’s doomed to be cosmically out of sync? Or beneath the elegant dance and diction, is this the more human tale of two average young people pursuing what they think they want … until life’s inevitable counterweight redirects their desires into pragmatic new channels?
In other words, should we savour Summer and Smoke’s seductive, exquisite and fascinating pas de deux and mourn its tragic outcome … or simply nod in resigned recognition?
Summer and Smoke runs through March 8, 2026. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
