Suddenly Last Summer

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In the hands of avant garde director Daniel Fish, the world premiere of Courtney Bryan’s first opera Suddenly Last Summer derived from the one-act play by Tennessee Williams is more a performance piece than anything else. In the libretto created by artistic director Gideon Lester and Fish, only the role of Catherine Holly is sung while all the rest are spoken. Catherine does not have any sustained music until the last 23 minutes of the opera which are almost entirely hers. However, as staged at the LUMA Theater of the Fisher Center at Bard College you are most likely to remember the visual aspect of the production which overpowers the musical portions.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set for Williams’ Gothic horror story which takes place in the Garden District of New Orleans is partly literal and partly artistic: a projection on the far side of the back wall shows the corner of Mrs. Venable’s Victorian parlor with a door, a fireplace and a chair. On the stage right wall are a row of black stacking chairs (later used in other ways) and some potted plants. The lights go from blue to white to black. Stacey Derosier’s lighting is also very startling at one point having a huge circular spotlight manipulated by one of the actors make a circuit of the stage catching the main characters in its eye.

However, the most effective part of the production are the painted watercolors created by artist Lucy Tarquinio while we watch her create them which are projected by Joshua Thorson on the back wall. The Venable’s jungle garden is depicted by green dripping tendrils which eventually are replaced by grim blue/ black and white designs and ultimately frightening red zigzags which resemble blood. Not only does one watch as the paintings are created one by one, but the pictures create the most atmosphere in this graphic tale which ends in cannibalism on a Spanish resort island. The lesser characters of Mrs. Holly and her son George appear in a pre-recorded black and white segment which suggests the 1959 film version which starred Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. This is projected large enough to dwarf everything on stage.

The opera’s libretto was required to remain faithful to the original Williams play but cuts 20 minutes lowering the running time to one hour. However, although the play is set in 1937, the opera appears to take place in the 1950s, the period in which both the play and the film version were first released. Two characters have been eliminated though one of them is impersonated briefly by someone else on stage.

Wealthy New Orleans widow Mrs. Violet Venable has invited to her Garden District mansion Dr. Cukrowicz, chief surgeon at the state asylum of Lion’s View where he has just performed his first lobotomy. She wants him to diagnose her niece Catherine Holly who she has been paying to be kept at a private asylum St. Mary’s for almost a year. Catherine accompanied her poet son Sebastian to Europe last summer, a trip from which he never came home alive. Since that time Catherine has been telling a shocking story about his death on the Spanish resort island of Cabeza de Lobo and Mrs. Venable wants the lurid stories to stop. Until last summer, Mrs. Venable had accompanied her son on his annual trips to Europe where he wrote one poem every summer, but none was found for the most recent year when she did not join him.

Catherine’s mother and brother George have been invited to join them (we see them only on pre-recorded black and white video). He is furious with Catherine as the late Sebastian left them a much needed $50,000 each (as he has no job) but Mrs. Venable is holding up the probate due to Catherine’s supposed lies about Sebastian’s death. Catherine who wants the truth told agrees to be given a truth serum by Dr. Cukrowicz and tells her story. If she is to be believed, both she and previously Mrs. Venable were used by Sebastian as decoys to attract young underage men. According to Catherine his brutal death was pay back for this pederasty and abuse. Mrs. Venable is furious at the story but the doctor tends to believe it. Suddenly Last Summer must have been extremely shocking when it was first performed in 1958, while the 1959 Hollywood movie was somewhat bowdlerized to hide Sebastian’s homosexuality.

With the 11-member orchestra under the direction of Nathan Koci off stage, Byran’s music is only effective in the last scene during Catherine’s monologue when it rises to a crescendo. However, it might have helped in this fourth scene to have had supertitles for clarity. Throughout the score there are bird calls which are referenced in Williams’ text. Male singers from the Young People’s Chorus of New York are used first in drag as the nuns from St. Mary’s, next as the voice of Sebastian, and later as the young men on Cabeza de Lobo who attract Sebastian in the flashback scene and finally are his undoing.

Tina Benko is a tower of strength – and delusion – as Mrs. Venable wanting to twist the truth to her own ends. At one point she appears as Catherine’s nurse, the strict Sister Felicity, a nun from the asylum who has accompanied her to Mrs. Venable’s mansion. As was Clift and Rob Lowe in the two film versions, Branden Lindsay as Dr. Cukrowicz is very bland, a listener more than a questioner. Nick Westrate makes George extremely greedy while Miriam Silverman as Mrs. Holly, George and Catherine’s mother, is easily manipulated, but also trying to pacify her daughter into telling Mrs. Venable what she wants to hear.

Famed soprano Mikaela Bennett who created important roles in several world premieres in recent years is excellent as Catherine, building with confidence and energy as her story of last summer pours out of her. This all the more impressive as in Fish’s direction she never gets up from her chair once she has appeared on stage halfway through the opera after singing snatches of words and lines off stage until then. Painter Tarquinio remains on stage throughout quietly and diligently turning out paintings that become the décor of the opera.

Daniel Fish’s production of the new opera Suddenly Last Summer is a little too busy to feature the music (at one point the child singers run around the stage in circles, at another the stage gets so dark one can make out only what is in the eye of the spotlight.) However, this is certainly an interesting attempt to make Tennessee Williams’ poetic language sing. A further production may do more justice to the musical aspects of Courtney Bryan’s new work.

Suddenly Last Summer (June 25 – July 19, 2026)

Bard College

Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission, co-produced by Opera Philadelphia

Luma Theater at Fisher Center, 60 Manor Avenue, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

For tickets, call 845-758-7900 or visit http://www.fishercenter.bard.edu

Running time: one hour without an intermission