Tennessee calling Trinity tackles Williams’s Summer BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The plays of Tennessee Williams are the exotic hothouse flowers of the theater world and sometimes don’t travel well. With their florid Southern language and Gothic sensibilities, they can die on the stage when transplanted, with Williams’s oversized archetypes clutching and writhing on the boards in the throes of oversensitivity.

Trinity Repertory Company hasn’t done Williams for 14 years, and Suddenly Last Summer (September 30 through November 6) offers challenges that their prior successes with such straightforward classics such as Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie don’t share. It’s an especially talky play, even for Williams, with monologues going on for pages.

In the play, something terrible happened the summer before, when poetical, problematical Sebastian went on a European vacation not, as usual, with his mother, Mrs. Venable (Barbara Meek), but with his cousin Catherine Holly (Miriam Silverman). Is she to be believed when she describes his decadent life there, not to mention his horror-movie death itself? Not if Sebastian’s mother has her way. The family doctor (Fred Sullivan Jr.) is brought in to make her stop telling these obscene tales — is a lobotomy in order?

Obviously the success of the play, and the progress of Trinity Rep’s 41st season, falls squarely on the shoulders of the actor playing Catherine. But Silverman, freshly graduated from the Trinity/Brown Consortium acting conservatory, has had plenty of experience being tapped for a role as soon as she stepped forward.

Directing this play is Mark Sutch, who was quick to recognize her abilities in the summer of 2001, when he was casting Trinity’s summer Shakespeare troupe. Silverman had just graduated from Brown.

"She was already incredibly mature in her choice-making as an actress," he recalled. "Just the depth of her textual understanding of Shakespeare, as well as her ability to make really strong, vibrant theatrical choices. It really paid off — she was great in those shows."

Four years before, Silverman had a similar experience. There she was, a Brown University freshman, not a theater major but nevertheless cast prominently in a mainstage production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. And last May, in Drew Haden Taylor’s The Buz’Gem Blues, she was invaluable as a fast-talking emotional dynamo in the role of a 1/64th Ojibway in identity crisis. Silverman has been one of those actors who gets you curious about their take on a performance before you see it.

Although her concentration at Brown was East Asian studies and she maintained a dedicated interest in those classes, once she hit the stage in Arcadia she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Nowadays, her Mandarin is for menus.

"It was just a gut feeling that I had when I was performing," she said. "There is the thrill, there’s the fun, there’s the excitement of it. But having moments with our performance where everything just seemed to come together, I felt that I was doing the right thing and that I could do it really well. It felt like a path that if I pursued and went down I could improve and get better. There was just a lot of passion in it for me."

Silverman hadn’t read Suddenly Last Summer before she was offered the part. She quickly did so and also took a look at the film version, in which Elizabeth Taylor plays Catherine. She wasn’t intimidated or feel she’d be overly influenced because she knew that the film took liberties with the play.

About the experience on the page, she said, "What immediately struck me was the lyrical and heightened aspect of it. How it kind of is like a piece of music. The amount of poetry in it is stunning. The characters speak in metaphors and use such poetic language all the way through."

About playing Catherine, Silverman says that both the opportunities and challenges are immense. "There is something so wonderful about her in the variety of colors and emotions and thoughts that she has. It’s incredibly challenging because she jumps from one thing to the next all the time. The way in for me as an actress is not to say, ‘Hello, I’m playing a crazy person’ — because that doesn’t really mean anything to me," she said. "Constantly making those jumps is hard but really fun when I find a way to do it."

There will be a lot of us in the audience hanging onto Catherine’s every word as Silverman finds those ways and, hopefully, rescues drama from potential melodrama.