Theater Review—

Late Summer ‘Last Summer’ Well Done

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Once when I was growing up I accompanied my country-doctor uncle on a house call to a farm family whose adult son, a navy veteran, sat silently in a chair the whole time we were there. My mother explained to me later that “Bob” had been lobotomized, because he was homosexual.

Pre-frontal lobotomy, an operation in which the part of the brain that controls emotional impulses is surgically removed, is probably most familiar to modern audiences from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which the evil Nurse Ratched gets her ultimate revenge on the rebellious patient Randle MacMurphy by having one performed on him.

The procedure was performed thousands of times in the 1930s and 40s, before the advent of modern drugs, and sometimes it was actually requested by parents as a way of controlling their unmanageable children. Thus JFK’s sister, Rosemary, was lobotomized (and reduced to an infantile state) to stop her from sneaking out of her convent school to meet boys.

Another was Rose Williams, sister of the playwright Tennessee Williams, whose mother authorized the surgery as a way of treating her schizophrenia.  The results were equally disastrous, and Williams, who was very close to his sister, resented it all his life. The topic was the subject of Suddenly Last Summer, which was recently given a fine production at Westport Country Playhouse.

Originally half of a pair of one acts set in 1930s New Orleans, entitled Garden District, the play derives its dramatic tension from the struggle between two strong women — one who is desperate to tell the truth of what happened on a Spanish beach the previous summer, and the other equally determined to suppress it.

Wealthy widow, and semi-invalid, Violet Venable is anxious to preserve the memory of her beloved son Sebastian, a charming, elegant poet who was murdered by a band of Spanish street kids. To this end, she is pressuring a young neurologist to perform a lobotomy on her niece, Catherine Holly, who was with him at the time. As she explains to the doctor,  Catherine is delusional, and her horrific account of her cousin’s death is both damaging to Sebastian’s reputation, and also painful to Violet.

Professing a serious interest in the doctor’s research, Violet dangles the promise of a substantial endowment for his clinic… if he goes through with the operation. In addition, she engages the support of Catherine’s venal mother and brother, by threatening to hold up the money Sebastian left them in his will if they don’t cooperate in keeping her quiet.

Because the doctor insists on hearing the girl’s story before he makes his decision, Catherine gets the chance to confront Violet in the garden of the Venable home. Violet has made a point of stressing the fact that her unmarried son was chaste (as opposed to the ironic homonym chased). Catherine, who loved Sebastian, reveals that he was a pedophile who used the women he traveled with — first his mother, and then after she suffered a stroke and became unattractive, his young cousin — as a ruse to attract young boys.

After twenty years of vacationing with Violet, it was suddenly last summer that eternally youthful Sebastian began to look too old to fit into the elegant nightspots he favored. Instead, he was forced to turn to a public beach in the daytime, where he became entangled with a rougher crowd than he was used to.  Before Catherine’s horrified eyes, he is pursued, attacked, mutilated and killed by a band of homeless boys.

The really forceful performance in the Westport production came from Liv Rooth as Catherine, who needed to engage the reluctant sympathies of everyone in the room, from the doctor and her brother to the bullying nun who is there to guard the “mental patient,” as she relives her experience under the influence of the sodium pentothal.

As the monstrously manipulative Violet Venable, Annalee Jefferies was definitely strong, but to my mind a little too much of a caricature of an evil old witch. With the chalk-white makeup she brings to mind Baby Jane, and seems to lack the human dimension that Williams gave to even his most twisted characters.

The rest of the actors performed very well: Lee Aaron Rosen as the handsome doctor, Charlotte Maier as Catherine’s foolish mother, Ryan Garbayo as her loutish brother,  plus Tina Stafford as the implacable Sister Felicity, and Susan Bennett as Violet’s personal assistant.

Narelle Sissons’ set was strangely asceptic. The lush botanicals of the New Orleans garden district was represented by a single menacing pitcher plant overshadowing an ugly wheelchair, with the rest of the stage and ceiling framed in mirrors.