Summer and Smoke

Summer and Smoke is a two-part, thirteen-scene play by Tennessee Williams, completed in 1948. He began working on the play in 1945 as Chart of Anatomy, derived from his short stories "Oriflamme" and the then-work-in-progress "Yellow Bird." The phrase "summer and smoke" probably comes from the Hart Crane poem "Emblems of Conduct" in the 1926 collection White Buildings. After a disappointing Broadway run in 1948, the play was a hit Off-Broadway in 1952. Williams continued to revise Summer and Smoke in the 1950s, and in 1964 he rewrote the play as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Synopsis Summer and Smoke is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the "turn of the century through 1916", and centers on Alma Winemiller, a highly strung, unmarried minister's daughter, and the spiritual/sexual romance that nearly blossoms between her and John Buchanan Jr., a wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door. She, ineffably refined, identifies with the Gothic cathedral, "reaching up to something beyond attainment"; her name, as Williams makes clear during the play, means "soul" in Spanish; whereas Buchanan, doctor and sensualist, defies her with the soulless anatomy chart. By the play's end, however, Buchanan and Alma have traded places philosophically. She has been transformed beyond modesty. She throws herself at him, saying "now I have changed my mind, or the girl who said 'no', — she doesn't exist any more, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her." But he has changed, he is engaged to settle down with a respectable, younger girl, and as he tries to convince Alma that what they had between them was indeed a "spiritual bond", she realizes, in any event, that it is too late. In the final scene, Alma accosts a young traveling salesman at dusk in the town park, and as the curtain falls, she follows him to enjoy the "after-dark entertainment" at Moon Lake Casino, where she had resisted Buchanan's attempt to seduce her the previous summer. Production history On 6 October 1948, after an opening run in Dallas, Texas, Summer and Smoke received its first Broadway performance at the Music Box Theatre in New York City in a production staged by Margo Jones and designed by Jo Mielziner with Tod Andrews, Margaret Phillips, Monica Boyar and Anne Jackson. The play ran for 102 performances, and at the time, represented a downturn in popularity for Williams following his successful A Streetcar Named Desire.