Marin Ireland—when initially seen in the first-rate, top-drawer, A-number-one revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke—is looking at a poster on an easel. It’s the black-and-white picture of an angel. Actually, Ireland—as unmarried minister’s daughter Alma Winemiller and viewed only from the back with long hair streaming—is meant to be in a Glorious Hill, Mississippi public park scrutinizing a statue of winged Eternity.
(Is it symbolic? This is Tennessee William, so you better bet it is. The man never shied away from symbols, which is one of his eminently forgivable sins.)
When Alma turns around in the modest turn-of-the-century off-white dress costume designer Kathryn Rohe has selected, she leaves the easel behind and steps down from the long rectangular off-white riser (with long rectangular cover hanging maybe nine feet above) that serves as the only set Dane Laffrey has put permanently in place.
Ireland begins walking around the riser clearly deep in thought until Nathan Darrow as doctor and doctor’s son John Buchanan has entered and calls to Alma from the other side of the riser. As John engages Alma in conversation, they continue walking counter-clockwise in such a way that director Jack Cummings III immediately establishes the connection and the distance between them—a connected distance that’s the unsettled basis of a relationship enduring since they were children together.
Also instantly established is the brazen subtlety of their intertwined performances. The teamwork in this look back at a play—set in the early 20th-century and first presented (briefly) in Broadway in 1948—is nothing less than the best tandem performance currently available on a New York City stage.
It’s been several years that Ireland has—through a series of performances, usually in new plays—quietly announced herself as one of the City’s most astonishing players—maybe the best. As the nervous, uncertain, giddy to the verge of frequent hysteria Alma, she gives her best performance yet.
And now a short digression to note that Summer and Smoke is what put not only off-Broadway but also Geraldine Page on the theater map when on April 24, 1952 she took on the Alma Winemiller role in a Sheridan Square theater now the site of a high-rise apartment building. (This was the original location of the Circle in the Square and accounts for the name.)
Though others have taken on an at-first skittish Alma—who transforms herself perhaps too late in her deprived life with John—it’s Page who’s the actor most associated with the poetic, of course, Summer and Smoke. (Alma claims the smoke from an inner fire is what changed her).
So perhaps the highest praise that can be given Ireland is to state that she’s performing at Page’s level. Distinguished by an inner glow, she inhabits Alma—Spanish for soul, as Alma insists more than once. Her face constantly signals Alma’s forever rapidly changing troubled thoughts; her wracked body does the same.
Just as astonishing is Darrow as Alma’s counterpart John, a young doctor with scientific accomplishments driven by physical desires that compromise his medical acumen. (Williams knows about desires, it’s needless to say.) Making certain no one misses the point about John’s bodily needs, Williams has the physician prominently place an anatomical chart diagonally opposite the relocated poster of the angel. Regularly pointing at the chart, he insists there’s nowhere in the body where a soul resides. With painful beauty, Darrow interprets John’s adherence to that conviction. This is particularly the case in the almost-love scenes he has with Alma.
John’s torment, thanks to Darrow, is equal is Alma’s. It could even be said that the heart-breaking Summer and Smoke asks a 64-dollar question for which no answer is offered: Which is worse—being a minister’s daughter or a doctor’s son?
In this revival, a Classic Stage Company/Transport Group co-production with filmily original music by Michael John LaChiusa, Cummings does something slightly unusual for him. He works within a much more traditional theater venue, and, like Ireland and Darrow, he works within it at the height of his substantial powers.
Segueing from last year’s dual look at William Inge’s Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba, Cummings takes his time and his red pencil to Inge’s major influence, Williams. Eliminating characters like the young Alma and John, he delivers a well-nigh perfect piece. (Incidentally, if William Inge had married Tennessee Williams—something the very good friends probably never considered—he might have become William Williams.)
Cummings achievement is also due to a cast in which Barbara Walsh assuming a non-singing role as Alma’s addled, perceptive mother, Tina Johnson as a gossipy neighbor with a mean streak, Philip Clark as Dr. John Buchanan Sr., T. Ryder Smith as Reverend Winemiller, Elena Hurst as Alma rival Rosa Gonzalez, Hannah Elless as Alma’s vocal student Nellie Ewell—along with Glenna Brucken, Gerardo Rodriguez, Ryan Spahn, and Jonathan Spivey—all pull their substantial weight.
Apart from eliciting the courageous performances, Cummings’s notable achievement here is to argue silently that Summer and Smoke—which Williams might just as persuasively have called Body and Soul—is easily comparable to The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened the year after Summer and Smoke and was much more enthusiastically received.
Surely, the different-in-many-ways battle waged between Alma and John is as emotionally wrenching as the campaign fought between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. If it isn’t, Cummings convincingly makes it seem so.
Summer and Smoke opened May 3, 2018, a the Classic Stage Company and runs until May 25. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
