Summer and Smoke: Rebecca Frecknall’s take on Tennessee Williams

Is the rarely performed Summer and Smoke first rate Tennessee Williams? I don’t know, but I’ve never seen a more powerful production of any of Williams’s plays.

The script is perhaps a bit schematic: Alma is the minister’s hypersensitive daughter, a young woman who never tires of reminding us that her name means “soul” in Spanish. She is infatuated with John, the young doctor who sees everything in physical terms. In case we miss the contrast, two major props feature in the script: an angel fountain inscribed with the word “eternity” and John’s anatomy chart that shows our fundamentally corporeal nature.

John and Alma change places in the end, with Alma acknowledging her sensuality, while John turns to a more spiritual life. Too late for them: John becomes engaged to one of Alma’s young music students and Alma picks up a traveling salesmen in the closing moments.

But the production works, perhaps because director Rebecca Frecknall has gone straight to the emotional heart of the play and dropped all of Williams’s set instructions. We never see the anatomy chart or the statue. Instead, we have a smoky set framed by a semi-circle of seven upright pianos, their outside panels removed to expose their inner workings. The director met with us this morning and confirmed my intuition: the music of the pianos suggests the spiritual world of the fountain, while their exposed workings provide us with a kind of anatomy chart.

The supporting cast members, always on stage as a kind of chorus, play these pianos throughout, usually on keyboard but occasionally plucking the strings or even bowing them. Frecknall told us that a stage manager backstage will also occasionally release the sustain pedals to create a subtle reverberation to the sounds on stage. The result is an unsettling soundscape suggestive of Alma’s troubled inner life.

The supporting cast members all double roles in the play, a choice Frecknall thinks works with Williams’s more underwritten, archetypal roles such as the two patriarchs, fathers of the two principal characters. This casting choice then led her during the rehearsal process to create a heart stopping moment. John’s father is shot, the scene immediately followed by a vigil over the dying man, a vigil conducted by Alma’s father. How to move an actor seamlessly from being shot dead to presiding over his own death? The actor, Forbes Masson, happens to be a beautiful singer. (He should have been Orpheus in Hadestown!) Frecknall freezes the moment of the shot and floods the back wall in white light while the dying man, utterly still, sings in an ethereal countertenor a hymn, “The Day is Gently Sinking to a Close.” As the light becomes smoky again, Masson disappears into the darkness and reappears as the minister. An unforgettable moment.

Patsy Ferran as Alma is also unforgettable, as highly strung as any of the pianos. She begins the play in the midst of an anxiety attack, gasping for breath, and we see her changing breath track the development of her character, from John’s reminders to breathe deeply as he listens to her heart to the final moment.

Williams’s stage direction tells her to salute the angel of the fountain before following the traveling salesman to the local casino. Frecknall related to us that she hadn’t yet worked out the ending when she just told Ferran to “do something” at a rehearsal late in the process. Ferran, downstage, slowly turns to look at each piano in turn, then faces us and breathes her first deep breath of the play. Blackout. The ending is open, ambiguous perhaps, but for me it was remarkably optimistic. We don’t know just what will happen, but this woman has opened up her life.

And talk about openings. Ferran is only 28, already a major actress on the London stage; Frecknall is just 33. The future of theater looks bright.