Riot King’s “Suddenly Last Summer” is an atmospheric and resonant slow burn that grabs hold . . . and won’t let go  

Suddenly Last Summer, a one-act play by Tennessee Williams presented by Riot King at Sorry Studios, is enjoying a sold-out run. There are many reasons for its not-so-sudden success. 

Considered one of Williams’ most poetic plays, Suddenly Last Summer is an unsettling, slow-burning southern Gothic exploration of topics like power, wealth, status, mental health, repression – and their consequences. 

The play opens with Violet Venable (a stately, yet steely Elaine Lindo) giving a tour of her late son Sebastian’s garden (the “well-groomed jungle”) to young neurosurgeon Dr John Cukrowicz, aka “Dr Sugar” (Ryan Iwanicki). Director Kathleen Welch makes ingenious use of the venue to depict the play’s setting, which is the garden and veranda of a palatial home in the garden district of New Orleans. Blurring the lines between the natural and the artificial, the stage is a windowed plant-filled room opening onto an actual garden, so the actors can enter and exit through real patio doors. The stage garden is the domain of Lindo’s Violet, where she holds court with understated, simmering menace. As she reminisces about how she and her son made a “famous couple” who travelled the world together, she reveals her devotion to her son Sebastian, a handsome and sensitive poet who died abroad the previous summer under mysterious circumstances. Like a practiced tour guide, Violet lingers over items of interest: her detailed description of a Venus Fly Trap that traps and devours live insects hints at the presence of dangerous realities within the seemingly beautiful. 

We learn that wealthy “Aunt Violet” has promised the doctor a large donation to fund his research at the state mental hospital – on the condition that he lobotomize her ostensibly insane niece Catharine Holly (a spellbinding and shocking Lindsay Middleton). Catharine was with Sebastien when he died, and to prevent her discussing  his death (Catharine’s “obscene babble” is “a hideous attack on [her] son’s moral character”),  Violet is keeping Catherine locked away. So insistent is Violet on controlling Catharine and the narrative around her son’s death that her skittish maid Miss Foxhill (Shadan Rahbari) and Catharine’s guardian Sister Mary (Jobina Sitoh) must do as they are told – or bear the repercussions. Catharine’s mother, the solicitous and put-upon Mrs Holly (Carling Tedesco) and her self-interested brother George (played with deliciously laconic narcissism by Brendon Kinnon) are the poor relations who stand to inherit a portion of Sebastien’s will. Since it is in their financial interest to acquiesce with Aunt Violet’s demands, they also try to keep Catharine quiet or risk losing the inheritance they are desperately counting on. 

In Middleton’s tour-de-force performance of tortured recollection, reflection and resistance, we learn just how much Catharine’s image of Sebastian differs from his mother’s idealized ramblings. “Sebastian used people,” Catharine tells the doctor. “Isn’t that what love is? Using people?” And sure enough, like variations on that carnivorous Venus Fly Trap, the play delves deeply into the ways that all living things – whether parent, physician, human, animal, or plant – devour one another in order to survive. For at the heart of Suddenly Last Summer is a spiraling, accelerating, and increasingly uncomfortable examination of appearances vs realities, the ways we use people for our own ends and the stories we tell about them. In our brave new world – where AI spits out real-seeming stories and images, and individuals and entities everywhere use social media for deceptive self-glamorization and misinformation, – the line between true and false is near-indiscernible. So the play’s commentary not only holds up – but strikes a resonant, even urgent chord. 

So it is little wonder that the play’s run is sold out. If you are lucky enough to secure a ticket, do go see this thought-provoking inaugural production by Riot King, an experimental arts hub producing theatre and community events with a commitment to sustainability. And if possible, sit in the front to get an unobstructed view of the immersive space (designed by Kinnon) and to enhance the feeling of sitting inside the action. 

But be warned: the experience will prove atmospheric and more than a little claustrophobic. It will grab hold of you and not let go – reverberating even after the doctor’s chilling show-closing pronouncement. Based on this terrific show, we keenly await what this independent company has next in store.

© Arpita Ghosal, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023