✭✭✭✭✩

by Tennessee Williams, directed by Paolo Santalucia

Crow’s Theatre & Soulpepper Theatre Company with BirdLand Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

February 11–March 8, 2026

Alma: “Sometimes out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own”

Soulpepper and Crow’s Theatre together with BirdLand Theatre are giving audiences a rare opportunity to see Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams. Summer and Smoke (1948) is the play Williams wrote directly after A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a play much better known and frequently performed. Seeing the vibrant current production of Summer and Smoke makes me wonder all over again why the play is not more often staged since, unlike Williams’s best-known plays, it follows a relationship between two people not over a period of days or months, but from childhood to middle-age. It is a fascinating work on its own but is also a key to understanding Williams’s plays in general.

I last saw a professional production of Summer and Smoke at the Shaw Festival in 2007. I gave reasons then why the play is not often revived: “One reason is that the play moves towards paradox rather than tragedy. Another is that the play requires a complex set capable of depicting at least three major playing areas. Yet another is that Williams adds eleven minor characters to what is essentially a two-character struggle. Despite this, the work is a must for all Williams fans since it presents his favourite characters, the Southern belle and the ne’er-do-well male, in their most archetypical form”.

I summarized the plot and symbolism like this: “The central character is shy, overly self-conscious Alma Winemiller, who has always loved the boy next door, John Buchanan, Jr., the son of a doctor now training to follow in his father’s footsteps. His return to Glorious Hill, Mississippi, in 1913 reawakens a desire that years of propriety as a reverend’s daughter and shame in caring for a mentally disturbed mother have locked away. John respects Alma but seems intent on throwing away his life in gambling, whoring and liquor. As her allegorical name suggests Alma is the soul, spirituality and moral purpose, while John is the body, sensuality and practical skill. As symbols each needs the other. As people, both must overcome mental constraints to realize this need”.

For some, the characters and the plot of Summer and Smoke may see too allegorical. Yet we should remember that allegory and symbolism are part of Williams’s mode of writing. In Orpheus Descending (1957) the main female role is Lady and the young ladies’ man is Valentine while the play, as the title indicates, references ancient Greek myth. Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) has the older woman Princess Kosmonopolis (“world city”), the younger woman Heavenly and the young gigolo Chance Wayne, whose chances are definitely waning.

Summer and Smoke may be allegorical but Williams ensures that his main characters are complex, rich creations. Director Paolo Santalucia has drawn best-ever performances from both bahia watson [sic] as Alma Winemiller and Dan Mousseau as John Buchanan, Jr. Both characters undertake such transformative journeys that each becomes the opposite of what they were at the start of the action. watson is especially good at capturing Alma’s initial silliness – giggling, talking too much, expressing herself so elaborately. watson makes obvious that Alma is so flustered because she is speaking to the man she has loved since childhood. As the action continues, watson gradually allows the most saliant of these habits to fall away, while towards the end passion has taken her over entirely and her voice is darker and her once childish demeanour severe.

Mousseau is a master of conveying multiple emotions simultaneously. He can portray John as drunk and brusque and still let us know how much he cares for Alma. Through all his deliberately off-putting talk to Alma, Mousseau lets us know that John takes this attitude to turn Alma’s love away because he thinks himself too lowly an object of her affection. By the end when John’s wildness and playfulness are gone, Mousseau gives us the sense that a major part of who John is gone too. Even though Santalucia has omitted the Prologue to the play depicting Alma and John when they were ten, Watson and Mousseau from the start give us the feeling that these two people have long observed and cared for each other.

The other five cast member all play multiple roles. This is necessary in staging the play with only seven actors, but it does lead to confusion. This is most noticeable in Part 1, Scene 4, depicting the meeting of Alma’s literary society. Three of the actors are playing characters we’ve never seen before and we may wonder what Dr. Buchanan, Alma’s mother and her voice student are doing at the meeting because there are not enough visual cues to indicate they are different characters.

Nevertheless, all five excel in their main roles. Stuart Hughes makes a dour Dr. Buchanan, who clearly suffers from the pain of having such a defiantly dissolute son. Beau Dixon is a care-ridden Reverend Winemiller, who tries sometimes in vain to quell his anger at his wife’s descent into dementia. Amy Rutherford well plays Mrs. Winemiller, who, though aged, behaves like a naughty child, behaviour that Rutherford ensures comes across as disturbing rather than amusing.

Among the young cast members Kaleb Horn ably distinguishes the nerdy Roger Doremus, who is clearly smitten with Alma, from the young Travelling Salesman looking for a good time in a small town. Bella Reyes makes each of her three roles quite distinct. As Nellie Ewell, Alma’s voice student, she is loud and unrestrained as a teenager in love. As the literary group’s Rosemary, she is shy and easily quashed. As Rosa Gonzales, John’s secret lover, she is passionate and imperious.

Santalucia has staged the play in the round, an excellent choice for play that changes location twelve time in the course of the action. Santalucia has choreographed these changes efficiently and smoothly. In his Author’s Note, Williams says that any staging must pay particular attention to the sky because “the entire action of the play takes place against it”. Here lighting and set designer Lorenzo Savoini creates a sky that enhances the changing moods of the paly from sunny innocence to bloody tragedy.

The previous three times I have seen Summer and Smoke, I assumed that the play is to be viewed as a tragedy because of the isolation of Alma, alienated from her former self and turning herself into an outcast in the town. The current version suggests that there is another way to view the play – that the ending is ironic but not necessarily tragic. Williams give Alma these important lines near the end: “Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak but divided people who slip like shadows among you solid strong ones. But sometimes out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own”. Were the play intended as a tragedy, then only the first of these two sentences would be true. In this production, Santalucia has leaned on the second of the sentences. What some productions have portrayed as a descent into the abyss, in this production appears as a conscious choice by Alma to live in a way her upbringing had previously forbidden.

To see Summer and Smoke at all is reason enough for theatre-lovers to see it. To see the play given a valid new interpretation makes it a must-see. Santalucia makes us understand that Summer and Smoke may be a more complex play than is generally believed. Let’s hope Toronto does not have to wait 19 years for another production.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Dan Mousseau as John (background) and bahia watson as Alma (foreground); bahia watson as Alma and Dan Mousseau as John; Amy Rutherford as Mrs. Winemiller. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.