A brilliant Tennessee Williams play receives a patchy revival at Crow's Theatre in Toronto

Habemus directorem artisticum.

In 2019, Weyni Mengesha announced her arrival as Soulpepper’s new artistic director with a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Now Paolo Santalucia is doing the same with the lesser-known Williams drama “Summer and Smoke.”

Sure, the circumstances surrounding the two productions aren’t exactly identical. Though Mengesha’s inaugural show as artistic director was presented at Soulpepper’s home in the Distillery District, Santalucia’s “Summer and Smoke” was programmed before his appointment — which is why it’s running at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production between both companies and in association with Birdland Theatre.

But it’s easy to see why Williams’ works are catnip for any director wanting to make a statement.

His plays are much like wrought iron, strong yet malleable to the touch. The prose is textured and symbolic. The characters, fragile and buckling under the weight of repressed desire, are star vehicles that reward a host of different interpretations, like the best roles do. And the themes remain timeless and accessible.

“Summer and Smoke,” so rarely performed, may be less well known than Williams’ other dramas, like “Streetcar” and “The Glass Menagerie.” Make no mistake, though: this 1948 work is every bit as affecting and brilliantly constructed as those other titles.

Though we certainly get to see glimpses of Williams’ genius in Santalucia’s new revival, rarely does this production rise to that level, hampered instead by a slippery grasp of the material and an in-the-round staging that strips away the play’s inherent intensity. 

While “Summer and Smoke” features a seven-person cast, it really feels more like a two-hander — an intimate pas de deux of missed connections and unrequited yearning, set in the turn-of-the-century South.

Its central couple are like a pair of celestial objects, moons locked briefly in an unstable orbit, trying in vain to join together, before eventually floating further apart. 

Alma Winemiller (bahia watson) grew up too quickly. John Buchanan Jr. (Dan Mousseau) can’t grow up fast enough. 

She, a preacher’s (Beau Dixon) daughter, spends much of her time tending to her mother (Amy Rutherford), whose faculties have started to deteriorate, leaving her in a state of perpetual childishness. But though Alma is more or less the second adult in her household, there’s an innocence to her, as well. 

John, meanwhile, Alma’s next-door neighbour and the son of the town’s doctor, is expected to take over his father’s practice. But he wastes most of his days away picking up women, playing craps or getting into brawls. 

“Summer and Smoke,” as Santalucia writes in the program, is a play about time and evolution, how it presses on relentlessly and alters us indelibly, both for better and for worse. 

Williams’ drama is a romantic tragedy. But its tragedy lies not in physical death rather in a death of a far more painful kind: that of the soul. 

“The girl who said ‘no’ — she doesn’t exist anymore, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her,” says Alma, late in the play.

The tragedy lies in how she and John could perhaps have been right for each other. But they’re never right for each other at the right moment.

Watson is strong as Alma, particularly at the beginning and at the end of the play. When we first meet her character, there’s great vulnerability to her. Words fall easily out of her mouth, interspersed with fits of giggles and with her hands playfully gesticulating about. Later, by the play’s conclusion, watson’s Alma is soulless, unmoored, popping sleeping pills to dull her warped reality. But watson struggles somewhat in the middle of the play, to show Alma’s slide between these two selves. 

Mousseau, as well, is fantastic by the play’s final scenes, after John has pulled himself up by the bootstraps. But there’s an initial stiffness to his performance that makes it hard to believe his John is a playboy when the show begins. 

Overall, many of the line readings in this production feel too shouty or declarative. This is especially a problem for a play like “Summer and Smoke,” whose language is filled with rich metaphors and symbolism. Here, they’re spoken like throwaway lines or with such force that they crumble underneath the weight of their delivery. 

These issues all stem from Santalucia’s in-the-round staging. In some scenes, his blocking comes across as far too busy, with the actors trying to play to the audiences on all four sides of the stage simultaneously. In other moments, watson and Mousseau are frustratingly static, with their backs turned to sections of the audience for long stretches of time.

A lack of attention to detail in this revival is also a problem. Lorenzo Savoini’s murky and dim lighting makes it difficult to distinguish between the play’s various settings. In several scenes, Mousseau wears his stethoscope the wrong way. 

This may seem like nitpicking. But the thing with Williams’ plays is that they’re works of fine details, inhabiting a space in between pure naturalism and expressionism. In his writing, every stretch and fold in that fabric of realism is done with purpose. And any unintentional rip in that fabric made by a production only detracts from Williams’ magic.

Unfortunately, that happens much too often in Santalucia’s production. Much like Alma, the smoke in production quickly gets too thick. And it starts to suffocate both the play’s soul and its heart.