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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Among modern playwrights, Tennessee Williams is unique in his fascination with the botanical world. Serafina, the heroine of his 1951 play "The Rose Tattoo," thinks of her love as "a rose of the world." And in his 1961 play "The Night of the Iguana," reptiles and similarly scaly humans slither in and out of the hot, wet flora of coastal Mexico, looking for love or denying it. Between those two plays, Williams wrote a number of others, but none was so full of chlorophyll as his 1958 one-act "Suddenly Last Summer," now in a strong revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company (at the Laura Pels).
The play takes place a few years before America entered the Second World War (and Williams's beloved older sister, Rose, underwent one of the country's first lobotomies), in New Orleans's Garden District, in an elaborate garden, which Williams describes as "a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests." Who is tending this mannered plot now that its owner, the poet Sebastian Venable, is dead? Why, his mother, Violet (Blythe Danner), naturally, who treats it as something of a shrine--or a lair. Resting lightly on her cane (she recently had a stroke, which she will not acknowledge as such), with...
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