Coming to Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre this October, Tennessee Williams’ savagely poetic and provocative Suddenly, Last Summer is a nightmarish contemporary masterpiece.
Welcome to the eerie Garden District, filled with Venus flytraps, subversive secrets, and broken hearts. This is Sebastian’s garden, a place where the line between truth and lies, sanity and insanity are blurred. The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable, Sebastian has died while on vacation with his rebellious cousin Catharine.
What the girl saw that day last summer was so horrible that she is presumed mad and locked away in an asylum to keep her mouth shut. As time goes on, Catharine’s ravings about Sebastian’s sexuality and fate become so transgressive that his dear mother Violet decides that locking her away isn’t enough. She calls in an aspirational young doctor to have the girl lobotomised and cut out her hideous story for good.
A thrilling examination of legacy, sanity, and sexuality, this Southern gothic melodrama will cut straight through the heart with its visceral imagery and erotically charged symbolism, and about how we, as humans, use people for our own ends.
From the director of Red Stitch’s multiple award nominated The Moors, Stephen Nicolazzo (Little Ones Theatre), and featuring the astounding Jennifer Vuletic and Kate Cole, this production marks the company’s first foray into the iconic and beloved playwright, Tennessee Williams’ beautiful and theatrical mind.
Tennessee Williams was a master playwright of the twentieth century, and his plays A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof are considered among the finest of the American stage. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays combined lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness, and hypnotic violence. Williams is widely considered the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama.
“Most people’s lives—what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death.”
Director: Stephen Nicolazzo Featuring: Kate Cole, Caroline Lee, Harvey Zielinski, Charles Purcell, Zoe Boesen, Chanella Macri, Jennifer Vuletic Set & Costume Design: Eugyeene Teh Sound Design & Composition: Dan Nixon Lighting Design: Katie Sfetkidis Assistant Designer: James Lew Stage Manager: Liberty Gilbert Assistant Stage Manager: Hayden Collins
Suddenly, Last Summer
Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel St, St Kilda
Season: 10 October – 4 November 2018
Information and Bookings: www.redstitch.net
Image: Jennifer Vuletic and Kate Cole feature in Suddenly, Last Summer – photo by Work Art Life Studios and Black Photography