Review: Summer and Smoke by Filigree Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Matters of the physical heart and the emotional heart—Tennessee Williams conflates them and then parses them out on the way to his love song to humanity, Summer and Smoke. Welcome to the first offering in Filigree Theatre’s seventh season. Like last year’s Suddenly Last Summer, director Elizabeth V. Newman and Filigree Theatre Tennessee Williams with great respect and crystalline clarity.
Anyone who has seen or read even one of Wiliams’ plays knows that Summer and Smoke isn’t his only embrace of the flower growing out of concrete. He created a career leitmotif of the grown wastrel child who returns to the parent, usually the father, and finds or is impelled to a new pathway, not always to success. Those thinking of the parable of the prodigal son must think again; there’s no fatted calf, no feast and rarely any forgiveness. Sometimes hope is hidden in the forest of stories and dialogues. Look for it through your tears.
Williams doubled his task in Summer and Smoke. Two of his main characters fit the model of children struggling in their dyadic relations. That gives the play strong bilateral symmetry, reflected in the set, house left in the office/home of Dr. Buchanan (Beau Paul), house right in the home of the Rev. Winemiller (Michael Stuart) and family. Stage center is mysterious, but clearly a dividing line between the two sides and their philosophies. A statue of a Greek goddess or an angel, whichever is not clear, stands in front of a pooled spring (a dry stage prop but one about which characters talk). In front of the statue is a bench where characters meet.
John Buchanan, Jr. (Brennan Patrick) has returned from med school at Johns Hopkins, a licensed MD and confirmed roué. He is not much interested in life as a doctor; fwine and women attract him more. Alma Winemiller (Kate Glasheen) has not traveled away from home but is just now finding some success as a virtuoso church singer. She was brought up in the Protestant “no box” of all things romantic and physical and has made no explorations of that side of life. The restrictions and constrictions chafe, and she must find a resolution. The two families live across a backyard fence from each other, and John and Alma grew up together.
There are few better sources for emotional conflict than this. Filigree Theatre knits the rich fabric (spiderweb, some might counter) of the story together with color and intricacy, as always. Patrick Anthony performed ably as the lighting and scenic designer on the wide, deep stage. His day to night lighting sets for outdoor scenes are subtle and nuanced. Johann Solo's sound design has the sharpness required of fireworks on and above the stage.The gunshot offstage was weak and anemic by contrast, very unsatisfying. It was rather like a cap pistol misfiring. Costume designeer Jennifer Rose Davis excelled, especially by dressing the women in the Deep South elegance of sumptuous period gowns for 1900-1916 Mississippi. Similarly, the properties design by Liz Tyson gave us the look and feel of the South. Stage Manager Kit Brooks and House Manager Tori Rose kept it all together.
The cast is larger than is typical for a Filigree Theatre show, thirteen in all, and all competent and well-rehearsed. Glasheen and Patrick commanded the show, as the leads must. Williams’ characters offered unexpected comic standouts in the Filigree production. Shannon Grounds as Mrs. Bassett created an amazing character who gave a loud, forceful, mistaken, and ultimately daffy critique of poet William Blake, against attempts to shush her, ending with her description of him dying with a bottle in a ditch (totally wrong). Her function was to create a fearsome and careening gossip front the townspeople would do anything to avoid. No telling what she’ll say next . . .
Meredith O’Brien as Alma’s severely mentally ill mother Mrs. Winemuller embodied a character unlike any other in her career. How did she do that thing with her eyes? O’Brien transformed her physical self to become a monument to the fragility and absurdity of human existence, just as Tennessee Williams would have had it.
Williams had problems with God as well as with the existence and nature of the soul. Both Summer and Smoke and Suddenly Last Summer present medical doctor characters who consider the body as a vehicle for the soul or interpret the corporal self's complexities as conveyances of the spirit (the original working title of Summer and Smoke was Anatomy Chart). This high-flown dialogue is the entire contest between the religiously and socially conventional Alma and the skeptical young Dr. Buchanan as they waver back and forth, tempted to enter a love relationship. Alma’s first point of telling impact was her mangling of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: “We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Perhaps that nugget gleams as one of the shreds of hope in the forest, even as we learn that love, strong as it is, can also be inefficacious.
The dialogues from that point on grow too dense and delightful to reveal; they must be heard. The play proceeds to a double plot twist, astounding as perhaps only Tennessee Williams in his mastery could write it.
The supporting cast deserves great credit. They are Allison Paranka, Michael Morse, Idelisse Collazo, Michael C. Costilla, Devon Ragsdale, Chase Bolnick, and Bryan Headrick.
Summer and Smoke premiered in 1948 and had disappointing runs until the mid-1950s. It was thought to be overshadowed by Streetcar Named Desire. Surfeit of riches. It is now considered one of Williams’ most powerful plays, as if we needed to be told.
Summer and Smoke runs September 26-October 12, 2025, at the Linc, next door to the Austin Film Society theatre.
EXTRA
Summer and Smoke
by Tennessee Williams
Filigree Theatre
September 26 - October 12, 2025
September 26 - October 12, 2025
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m.
The Linc, 6406 North Interstate Highway 35 2150, Austin, TX 78752
Tickets $27.78 – $43.83, available online HERE
