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Summer And Smoke

Tennessee Williams wrote Summer and Smoke in 1948. It has two parts and thirteen scenes. He started writing the play in 1945 under the name Chart of Anatomy.

It was based on his short stories "Oriflamme" and "Yellow Bird," which he was still writing at the time. "Summer and smoke" probably comes from the poem "Emblems of Conduct" by Hart Crane, which was published in the collection White Buildings in 1926.

In 1948, the play didn't do well on Broadway, but in 1952, it was an extensive hit off-Broadway. In the 1950s, Williams kept making changes to Summer and Smoke. In 1964, he reworked the play and called it The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.

Synopsis

Summer and Smoke is one of Tennessee Williams' most fine and warm works. It looks at how the body and the spirit are at odds with each other.

Alma Winemiller, the girl of a minister, has always loved John Buchanan, the son of a doctor who lives next door. John is a wild, adventurous, and mischievous pleasure seeker.

The story takes place in Mississippi. He drinks, gambles, and dates during the hot Mississippi summers. His only cult is the anatomy chart on his wall, which tells him that people need food, truth, and love. Alma, on the other hand, is shy, strange, and nervous.

Her name, which is Spanish, means "soul." She has high spiritual goals and strong moral standards. Even though John and Alma are different, they are pulled to each other like magnets.

One of Williams' most intriguing, romantic, and heartbreaking love stories is the spiritual and physical romance that almost develops between them.

Concerning the Play

After "The Glass Menagerie" (1948) and "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), the third play of Williams' unofficial Southern trilogy was met with criticism upon its Broadway debut as a "weaker retread of ideas."

It didn't get many good reviews until the 1952 Off-Broadway revival with Geraldine Page. Page then played Alma again in Peter Glenville's perfect 1961 movie version.

People have always thought that the play was too simple. They thought that Alma Winemiller, the preacher's daughter and an old spinster in a small town, and John Buchanan Jr., the son of a hedonistic doctor, were too good examples of the struggle between soul and body, spirituality and sensuality, and purity and pleasure.

Alma and John are like the play's main symbols, which Williams describes in detail in his production notes: a stone angel fountain with the word "Eternity" and a doctor's anatomical chart.