Long hot Summer Trinity’s Suddenly transcends melodrama BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

We live in an age of instantly televised vicarious sensations, with our threshold for gasps just short of public disembowelment. So a drama like Suddenly Last Summer, certainly a shocker in its day, is going to play quite differently to modern audiences than it did in 1958. The danger is that Tennessee Williams’s overwrought Gothic contrivances are going to reek of the writing desk instead of flesh and blood.

In their current production (through November 6), directed by Mark Sutch, Trinity Repertory Company does a solid job, keeping the outsized symbolic elements in proportion to the characters, who have all been emotionally enlarged by circumstances.

And such outlandish circumstances unfold. A reluctant conspiracy forms to keep a young woman in a mental institution, and do worse to her. Catharine Holly (Miriam Silverman) has been saying terrible things about her cousin Sebastian Venable and how he grotesquely died last summer in Mexican. The tale Williams gives her involves not just the self-destructive drifts through decadence of a failed poet — leave that to timid Yankee writers — but no less than predatory pederasty and even cannibalism.

Understandably not wanting to hear any of that about her 40-year-old little boy is the wealthy matriarch of the New Orleans family, Mrs. Violet Venable (Barbara Meek). "Cut this hideous story out of her brain!" is her most succinct suggestion.

Meek’s Mrs. Venable wields her imperious wiles as purposefully as, on a couple of occasions, she uses her golden-headed cane as a cudgel. She grudgingly exercises her charm (spiced with an implicit threat of withdrawal) on Dr. Cukrowicz (Fred Sullivan Jr.). He needs money to expand his mental hospital, where he practices a controversial procedure, pre-frontal lobotomy. (The playwright’s sister Rose had the procedure done, which disconnects personality along with unruly emotions.) Sullivan gives this production what limited psychological movement it has, as we see the tug of self-interest and conscience within him; unlike in Williams’s stronger plays, here the characterizations we initially see are all we eventually get.

But for the surgical procedure, Mrs. Venable needs the permission of Catharine’s mother, whom she has kept financially beholden. Cynthia Strickland has a lark playing the fluttery, faded belle Mrs. Holly, lightening proceedings with some badly needed humor. (The only overt joke in this play is when Catharine says to the doctor that she’s had so many injections she’d make a good garden sprinkler.) For dour contrast is her son George, played by Matt Robinson angrily as much as impatiently, as he implores his mother to do what their patron demands.

This troupe makes Suddenly Last Summer work the old-fashioned way, by finely tuning their performances. Shock won’t shake us into empathy with these characters, but fascination will do nicely. As with used car salesmen, it’s all in the eyes. These actors sell their characters, make us believe them, by making us believe in them first. We’re appalled at Mrs. Venable, but Meek must have humanized her along the way if our heart goes out by the end. Sullivan’s doctor naïvely registers his reactions on his face like an emotional barometer.

Silverman is limited to the parameters of madness, but she can wander or bolt within the confines and makes good choices as to when to do which. Catharine is a female example of the unsuccessful repression of dark desires that led to her cousin’s demise down in Cabeza de Lobo.

Williams was clever enough to leave the horror show off-stage, to magnify the Grand Guignol spatter by having us imagination it through Catharine’s descriptions. And such descriptions, such as "those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths" of the naked and starving street urchins. Sebastian used his cousin that summer as he had used his mother before, as vivacious bait to lure attractive people that the shy man could not on his own.

A silent character in this play is the semi-tropical garden setting, designed by Fritz Szabo. Vines choke columns, blossom colors run to blood red, of course, and we all but mop our brows at the oppressive heat. Cracks bolt up a stucco wall and across the slate courtyard like fractures in the House of Usher. Sound design by Peter Sasha Hurowitz, soft chamber music or dreamed echoes of sinister music in a Mexican street, guide us along.

Trinity Rep couldn’t avoid the melodrama and tabloid sensationalism of Suddenly Last Summer, but they certainly transcended both. As artists like Williams are constantly reminding us, nothing is off bounds for worthwhile discussion.