Philly Fringe 2024: Die-Cast Ensemble presents Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer

Beschler does not play a specific figure in this revival of Williams’s Southern gothic melodrama from 1958. Instead, he recites the stage directions, which are as florid and evocative as any of the dialogue that emerges from the mouths of the actual characters. With words, he creates vivid scenic grounding from thin air: as the audience looks out onto the empty expanse of the Plays & Players auditorium from seats onstage, he conjures a verdant solarium in the Garden District in New Orleans, where terror subsumes beauty on a sultry summer afternoon.

Still shocking

Sixty-six years after it first appeared, Suddenly Last Summer still shocks. After flirting with the darker elements of life in works like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams addressed the venal nature of life head-on with unrelenting depictions of homosexuality, pederasty, cannibalism, and suggested incest. The soapy plot concerns the death of Sebastian Venable, a foppish poet who met his end while on a tortured vacation with his vivacious cousin, Catherine Holly. Sebastian’s formidable mother, Violet, wishes to have Catherine lobotomized after she begins spreading the details of Sebastian’s demise.

The action of the play centers on a tense meeting between Violet, Catherine, and Dr. Cukrowicz, a specialist from the local mental hospital who’s skeptical of Violet’s aims. Using movement as a driving force for her staging, director Brenna Geffers creates a tense triangle between Colleen Corcoran, Han Van Sciver, and Griffin Stanton-Ameisen in these roles. The three performers seem in perpetual motion, circling each other and sussing out motives. The result is thrilling and immediate in a work that, for all its forward-leaning thematic material, can sometimes appear sudsy and bathetic.

A few slight issues

Van Sciver brings an intensity and clarity to Catherine’s perspective that makes her graphic tale all the more chilling. Stanton-Ameisen, a force of quiet contemplation, serves as an ideal foil. Although Corcoran has some gripping moments—especially when she’s lost in the reverie of remembering her too-close relationship with her son—her Violet comes across as campy and overwrought rather than formidable and intimidating.

In the ensemble, Anthony Crosby remains eminently watchable as Catherine’s minder, Sister Felicity, his movements sleek and balletic. Geffers casts several roles across genders, although without much apparent thought as to the purpose of such a choice. It leads to some performances that feel like parodies of masculine and feminine characteristics—this is especially evident in Steven Wright’s arch take on Mrs. Holly, Catherine’s gauche mother.

There are other slight issues that should be corrected before this production moves to Massachusetts. No two cast members pronounce “Cabeza de Lobo,” the fictional Spanish town where Sebastian meets his end, in the same way. Van Sciver also has trouble pronouncing “Patou” and “Schiaparelli” in Catherine’s long monologue about her and Sebastian’s ill-fated escapade.

Williams reborn

Still, the Die-Cast Ensemble makes Williams’s shocker throb with an unsettling, perpetual beat—one that is also realized through excellent live musical accompaniment by Chris Sannino and, occasionally, Van Sciver. And in the form of Beschler, you feel as if Williams has returned to life to guide you by the hand through this disturbing tale.

Know before you go: Suddenly Last Summer includes full-frontal nudity and graphic depictions of violence that may be disturbing to some viewers.