| The "Doubt" question (thread below) raises one about the end of "Suddenly, Last Summer." | |
| Last Edit: Delvino 10:48 am EDT 07/03/17 | |
| Posted by: Delvino 10:38 am EDT 07/03/17 | |
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| I just this week read playwright Martin Sherman's intro to "Orpheus..." and "Suddenly, Last Summer" in the New Directions paperback. Sherman dissects "Suddenly" better than anyone, finding fascinating correlations between the offstage Sebastian Venable and dying Nonno in "Iguana...", both poets, both parts of Williams that he grappled with. Much to chew on there. But the biggest revelation to me was Sherman's suggestion that Catherine's iconic monologue about Sebastian's death in Cabeza de Lobo. Is the distraught and maybe deeply disturbed Catherine's story about how her cousin died true or not? Isn't it possible that it's entirely untrue? Sherman talks extensively about how the play was first performed by Anne Meacham, a Catherine that was nothing like the well-known take on film, Elizabeth Taylor's -- which as also punctuated by (to my thinking, still, brilliant) flashback footage. Footage that plays like uncovered memory, not projection or psychosis. Though Taylor was hysterical, she was played as a reliable narrator. Her sanity was our "root for." The Meacham, apparently, not so much. The story's credibility, Sherman argues, is one of the points of the play. Is this possibly how Catherine dealt with her cousin's sexuality and addictive sexual appetites? This was the late 50s, and Williams was in therapy with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, an infamously homophobic shrink who had great disdain for his promiscuity. You really cannot distance where he was in his life with that creepy "treatment" from what he was writing at the time, or so argues Sherman (and persuasively). Williams wrote in the morning, and went to gay de-programing style therapy with Kubie in the afternoon. It raises absolutely fascinating ideas bout the artist's cathartic purposes in storytelling. If Catherine's story is a lie -- even one from her unconscious -- the whole play is about something much bigger than reconstructed memory of cannibalism. It probably deepens -- finding more meaning in the admittedly purple melodrama -- rather than damages the play's artistry. At the very least, it invites a damn good discussion, certainly on par with one about "Doubt." It's posed by Martin Sherman, not some marginalized Williams scholar. A playwright who knows from wrestling with the whys in (especially LGBTQ) plot and theme. Any takers? |
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