Summer and Smoke (1948) Tennessee Williams Scene 11. The office of Dr John Buchanan, Jr. Five o'lock on a winter evening in a year shorly before the First World War. Alma Winemillr isthe daughter of a minister and his unstable wife. ‘She ‘had am adult quality as a child and now in her middle twenties, there is something prematurely spinstersh about her... . People her cum age regard her as quaintly and humorously affected.” After several _years absence, Dr John Buchanan, Jr. retums to town and takes over his father’s practice. He is a wild, charming and disipated character; the complete opposite of Alma who tries to persuade him to be more responsible. During the summer Jokn invites Alma to Moon Lake Casino, suggesting that they rent a private room. Her reaction isto flee. Several months later Alma comes to John’s office 1 offer hese tw him. ‘Bu he has scen the eror of his former ways in favour of the spiritual ‘commioment that she had advocated. He has just rejeced Alma’s ‘Proposition and this is her response. ALMA. Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak and 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. I have that now. You needn't uy to deceive me. (JOHN. I wasn't.) You needn't try to comfort me. I haven’t come here on any but equal terms. You said, let’s talk truthfully, even shamelessly, then! It’s no longer a secret that I love you. It never was. loved you as long ago as the time I asked you to read the stone angel's name with your fingers. Yes, I ‘remember the long afternoons of our childhood, when Thad to stay indoors to practise my music ~ and heard your 136 playmates calling you, ‘Johnny, Johnny!" How it went through me, just to hear your name called! And how I ~ rushed to the window to watch you jump the porch railing! I stood at a distance, halfway down the block, only to keep in sight of your torn red sweater, racing about the vacant lot you played in. Yes, it had begun that early, this affliction of love, and has never let go of me since, but kept on growing. T've lived next door to you all the days of my life, a weak and divided person who stood in adoring awe of your singleness, of your strength. And that is my story! Now I wish you ‘would tell me- why didn’t it happen beween us? Why did I fail? Why did you come almost close enough ~ and no closer? COMMENTARY: In Summer and Smoke Tennessee Williams gener- ‘ates conflict as prim rectitude clashes with passionate desire. Most ‘of Williams’ modern gothic tragedies are set between these two ‘competing viewpoints. His plays are inhabited by a type of character who, in his own words in this play, is “faded and frightened and difficult and odd and lonely.” All these traits must emerge in the ating. ‘Alma teaches the performer an essential fact about acting a Williams character: they emerge at their strongest and most powerful when they are at their weakest. Alma finds strength in defeat, She actually seems like a towering character amidst her pathetic loneliness. When a Williams character portrays her isolation in speeches like this (see also Blanche in A Streetcar ‘Named Desire, page 133 and Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, page 441) they take on luminescent stature. The childhood self that Alma ‘remembers must seem to us grand and long-suffering. She is the ‘Quintessential outsider who has become expert at dramatising her plight. The audience is drawn to her precisely because her sorrow fs so exquisitely portrayed in both word and image. Williams offers the actor a useful performance note: ‘In Alma’s voice and manner there is a delicacy and elegance, a kind of “sairiness", which is really natural to her as i is, in a less marked degree, to many Southern girls, Her gestures and mannerisms are a it exagge?~ ated, but in a graceful way. It is understandable that she might be aTaccused of “putting on airs” and of being “affected” by the other young people of the town. She seems to belong to a more elegant age, such asthe eighteenth century in France. Out of nervousness and self-consciousness she has a habit of prefacing and concluding. hher remarks with a litle breathless laugh .. . the characterization ‘must never be stressed to the point of making her a al ludicrous in less than sympathetic way.”